3 down....4 to go

I wish I was talking about my Class 3's and 4's, but I'm just talking about my VA days!! Almost halfway done....YAY!!! I always seem to get the patients that have SO much dang plaque and then I get that written in my evaluation that I missed all the plaque. They should have seen what was there at the first!! Plaque is frustrating to me, to say the least! I can never seem to get all of it. Even if I scale it off, polish it off, floss it off....it just doesn't all come off. I don't know what the deal is!

My patients were both really nice today. I only had a 9:30 patient this morning and that turned out to be really nice. I think he talked about Hawaii for about half the appointment, so there wasn't much time for actually scaling, but it was VERY relaxing!! He had crowns and bridges on all of his anterior teeth and I guess I was under the impression that calculus doesn't build up on them, but that's wrong. I didn't even bother scaling those teeth and so when my instructor came over she said I missed those areas. Oops! Guess I'll be scaling EVERYWHERE now. I should have been doing that before but I've never seen calculus on a crown. WHO KNEW?!?! My afternoon patient was really good too. I got 2 quads of a 3 and 2 quads of a 5 so I'm pretty excited about that. He comes in every 3 months, but he really builds up that calculus fast!! There was major recession going on and it was nice that it wasn't sensitive to him. Usually I start to scale on recessed areas and the patients about fly out of the chair.

I also got to place Arestin on both of my patients today so that was really good practice. Too bad we don't have a few PE's for that one. I was pretty happy with my scaling abilities on the second patient. They've been down the toilet lately and I felt like I actually knew what I was doing today.