Brushing and flossing that is!!
I don't think I'll ever forget my first 7 weeks of hygiene school. Never had I felt so lost or overwhelmed in my whole life. I'm in an accelerated program and they began throwing it at us right away. The first time I looked in my instrument cassette and gazed upon the 14-16 instruments in there (each one for a different area of the mouth or surface of a tooth) my only thought was "Yeah right!" It's amazing how far I've come in those 9 months.
Now I know most of you think that what I've chosen for a career is absolutely
DISGUSTING! (And Karin is very verbal about that LOL). I totally love it! I love working with my patients and it's really cool seeing what stuff you pull out of teeth! It's a treasure hunt of sorts. The program itself is very stressful. Not only because of its accelerated rate, but several of the instructors are very hard to deal with. They get off on making you feel about an inch high and parading around high and mighty. The stuff they cram into us in lecture is mostly useless beyond passing the National Boards Exam (next March). Though I will say I had no idea how much information there was to learn about teeth and the oral cavity in general. If it weren't for a few of our adjunct instructors, it would be damn near intolerable. That and the group of girls (and one guy) that I am with are gems. We all get on quite well and are very supportive of one another. This is good to see as the class that just graduated didn't get along at all. And it's nice to be with a bunch of other people with anal retentive qualities! OH! And our clinic administrator, Mrs. Thompson, is the absolute best. She schedules our appointments and finds us the types of patients we need for requirements. How she keeps that up for 36 girls (and for one semester a year 70+) is beyond me!
I am one of the oldest in the class. Which is fun. The younger girls are very pleasant and I have formed good friendships with a few of them, but get on well with them all. We go out once or twice a month for drinks and dancing to let off some stress. It's a good time. I am not the only one that came from out of state, but I did move the farthest.
We do a lot of volunteer stuff. The one pic above is of my friend, Kim, and me working the Special Smiles Tent at the Special Olympics at the end of June. It was so much fun and the athletes were great! We also do Sealant Saturdays at a state clinic downtown a few times a year. And next week we do Miles of Smiles where low income kids come to our clinic and we provide our services free of charge. That other pic is just one of me in my operatory area.
My favorite class this semester (besides clinic) is Pain Management. We've just finished learning our anesthetic injections for the maxilla and mandible. Great fun! We practiced on eachother. So every week we're getting numbed up. Kinda scary poking needles in a person's mouth the first few times, but then , it was fine. This week we begin working on Nitrous. WOOOOOOO HOOOOO!!! Up until this point if a patient needed local anesthetic the instructors did it. Next semester we get to do it. With supervision of course!
I find the hardest thing is radiographs. They expect them to be textbook perfect. And even my worst rads are way better than some of the ones my patients have brought from private practice. It's kinda scary. I have an issue being consistent. But gets better with time.
I've been in contact with the University of Minnesota already. They have a Dental Hygiene Bachelor's completion program. I believe that I already have most of the liberal arts requirements for this done and the others I could take online. So well worth that. If I can complete that, I would eventually like to be a rep for Proctor & Gamble or Hu-Friedy.
There are those days where that place just gets to ya and you want to walk out and never come back. Luckily, the good days outweigh the bad ones. Cuz usually those bad ones are pretty bad. I know it's just a bunch of hoop jumping and this part is only temporary. It too, shall pass. I don't regret my decision, but I can't say I would exactly recommend this particular program. A common saying we hear from the instructors is "It'll all work out". It's kind of a running joke among me and my classmates. We insert it in conversation often. We are fed that line nearly every time we have a concern. So now it's our pseudo mantra.
I'm not a Dental Hygienist, but I play one on TV....
"Success is measured through personal satisfaction"
