My first patient!!!

Okay, so yesterday is over. I'm slightly relieved. There's just so much you've got to remember. The day started out crazy! I had the send a physicians consult for my patient, MyGREAT DAD!!! I sent one last Thursday and when I got in we hadn't heard anything, so we called and sent it again, and after a while still hadn't heard anything, so called again and still nothing. Finally we realized the fax we listed was for the clinic fax, not ours. So, needless to say, it came in Friday and I had a lot of unnecesary stress! When my dad came in I was really nervous. Luckily I had done his HHX before hand at home and so I didn't have to do it. We jumped right into x-rays. I only had to do one retake so I was glad. I did extra/intra oral, then probed. He ended up being a class 2, so that's good I guess. I was able to get to OHI but wasn't able to scale any. My dad kept telling me to relax, and I'm glad it was him so I could say "I'm not quite sure what to do next" Also, because I don't mind making him wait as much as I would a stranger who was helping me out. So to sum it all up, I survived. That in itself is a great accomplishment! So now, he'll come back on Jan 11 for me to finish up.

Community Health-Public Health

When I started this program the only place I had ever thought of working was in a private practice. I never knew that I had so many options available to me. I remember sitting in class sometime in the first three weeks of class (it was all pretty much a blur to me now) and Prof. Bossenberger told us that we had many options with a bachelors degree to be employed in different areas in the dental hygiene profession. With our community plan and trying to increase awareness in the our profession, I have more and more entertained the idea of working for the state in some way to increase awareness of our profession amongst ourselves. There are so many hygienists who don't know what is happening and they don't feel that if will affect them. I think I would really like to help create some type of media that we could send out with some type of graph or something that would clearly show hygienist what will happen and how it will affect their jobs.