Hygienists Get Cavities Too

A crazily insane day I had today.

The other day I was inspecting my teeth and I discovered what I thought might be a teensy little cavity on the cheek side of one of my molars (a buccal pit on #31, to be exact). So I find one of my trusty dental tools and stick it in the spot...sure enough, I gave myself a zinger and I knew that could only mean one thing. It was a cavity, sho'nuf.

Fast forward to this morning. I finished my 8:00 patient with a few minutes to spare. I reviewed the schedule for the day, decided that Dr. Bowers would have time to fill my tooth at 12:00, and went to tell him just that (or boss around the boss, a particular talent of mine).

*tangent alert* It was 90 degrees today. The schedule for the day was fairly light. So everyone agreed that we should rearrange the patients, and have the later afternoon ones all come in early/during our lunch hour, so we could all get off early to enjoy the fabulous weather. It sounded like a great idea.

Well, when I told Dr. Bowers that I put myself in the schedule at noon, he said "Let's just get it done right now. Room 4 is open." Mind you, it's 8:50 and I have a 9:00 patient, and I reminded Dr. of this, but it didn't phase him in the slightest. "Don't worry", he says "I'll get it done quick."

So he gets in there and pokes around my tooth and sure enough, there was a tiny cavity. Then he says that the existing chewing surface (occlusal, for all of you in the know) filling of that tooth has seen better days, and since we are already filling the buccal pit, why not redo the whole thing? Sounded good to me, since that old filling always seemed kind of blob-like anyway. So he numbs me up and starts drilling away. And drills and drills and finally when he's done it's 9:20. Remember, I have a 9:00 patient patiently waiting to have her teeth cleaned and since I HATE running behind, I told Dr. Bowers not to fill my tooth, that it was good and numb and we could just fill it after I was done with my patient.

Well since I started on my 9:00 patient late, I ran late staring my 10:00 patient. Oh, and remember that in the mean time they called in all the afternoon patients early? The day quickly went from manageable to complete craziness. We have 5 rooms (operatories) and all 5 were scheduled back to back, which meant no where to squeeze me in to have my tooth filled. When I was finishing my 10:00 patient, my poor, drilled out, exposed tooth was waking up and aching big time. But again, there was no chair open for me, so I called Dr. Bowers into the sterilization room and told him to re-numb my tooth so I could have some pain relief. So he gave me a shot, literally as we stood there.

It worked and calmed my tooth down for another hour. We kept trying to find a time to finish my filling but it was a day of total chaos. Over and over I had to call him on the radio to meet me in the sterilization room to re-numb my tooth. The strange thing was that each time he injected it, the faster it wore off. (I actually learned about this in school, it's a condition called tachyphylaxis where you quickly become tolerant to the anesthetic when it's administered over and over. Oddly enough, I have never had a patient have it...yet it happens to ME!

Finally, 6 hours and 7 shots later, I received my new filling. Dr. Bowers felt terrible that I had to go through that and kept apologizing, even though I kept saying it was no big deal.

Oh, and remember how we were supposed to get off early since it was Friday and a hot day? Well, I not only worked through lunch, and saw all my patients and was myself a patient, I then had a stack of charts a mile high to catch up on at the end of the day...and didn't clock out until 5:15. Man...

But my day ended great. I rode my bike home (by the way, it was National Ride Your Bike to Work Day) and Dale had the kids ready to go and said he wanted to pick up something good for dinner and go somewhere fun to eat it. So we got all kinds of good stuff (sandwiches, sushi, edamame, eclairs, a Ritter Sport...) and headed out to Priest Point Park. Here are some pics: