A Day at the Office

Starting this week, I have been working full time to save money for my big New Jersey move this April. I love my job. I get to meet a new person every 40 minutes. The office is small and the people I work with are fun to work with. The dentist is the funniest nerd I've ever met. He was a chemist but didn't like it and went to Tuft's University for dentistry.

Today, I had an older gentleman patient who was about 65 You could tell he had been a football player at one time. He was BIG BONED. He used to be a cop. The kind that thinks women belong in the kitchen and that telling crude jokes isn't offensive. During the appointment, he points to his face in a Chrisfarleyesque way to a massive bloody scratch on his face. He told me that he raises show pigeons and one attacked him today. Actually, it "attacked like a derranged woman." Whatever that means. So extremely bizarre, but I was thoroughly amused.

After lunch wasn't as much fun. One of my patients was a man in his late 40's early 50's. He hadn't been in for a cleaning for 2 years. (The hygienist who worked there before wasn't so up on educating her patients on periodontal disease.) I asked him if he was having any problems and he showed me two loose teeth. I checked those teeth and sure enough, they were loose. So were all the rest of his bottom teeth-8 in all. I checked pocket depths all around and I looked at the xrays I had just taken. I almost cried. This man had just proudly told me that he was the only one in his family who still had his teeth. This man had only about 3 mm of bone holding his teeth in, and I had to be the one to tell him that he needed all of his teeth pulled. I felt so bad because my job is to promote dental health, and I was stuck dispensing the bad news. I've never seen a guy shake so much.

My next patient was a normal healthy lady. The final patient made me cry after I was all done. He was 20, not even 5' tall, and had REALLY thin hair-he was practically bald. I checked his medical history, and he had been diagnosed with cancer at 5 and then again at 12 yrs. I tear up just thinking about how frail he looked in my chair. He was so polite and nice. It breaks my heart. I think sometimes I can be sympathetic to a fault. I was thinking about how hard his illness must have been on his family, I wondered if he got teased in grade school. He worked 70 hours/week. I wondered if he had many friends now. And while I was trying SO hard to be super gentle, I gave him an overabundance of dental advice-I didn't want him to have to worry about teeth problems, he had dealt with enough problems at the young age of 20.

Anyhow, my day made me thankful for being healthy and having a pretty easy life. It also made me look forward to a time when none of us will say we are sick.