Give kids a smile day

Today wasn't a clinic day, but I was technically in clinic and it was an interesting day so I am going to blog anyways. When I woke up this morning I was thinking that I didn't want to go, but once I got here it turned out okay. When I first walked in the building it was nuts. There were families everywhere. I wan't sure what I was going to be doing and Costley said to go and take x-rays. I'm sure that everyone knows that x-rays aren't really my favorite part, but when you are volunteering you really can't say "I don't really want to do that" It turned out fine. We were using phosphorus films (i don't know the real name for them) and they were put in these sleves and processed and cleared and reused. It was kind of interesting and kind of stressful because at first I didn't know what I was doing and Cosley had to leave, so no one else really knew how to work everything. After we got finished taken x-rays there were still a lot of patients to be seen, so we started seeing patients. I only seen 3 patents and none of them were able to have sealants, which is what I really wanted to get practice on. I started helping everyone clean up and Joanie had a pt. that needed 12 sealants and she let me do 7 of them. It went good. It was nice to get some practice and not be graded and not have to find the patient they just came to you whne you were ready for another one.

Professor Alexander was telling me that an 11 block radius in ogden has some of the people with the biggest need for dental care in the U.S. Even more than some cities like new york and such. It was soo sad seeing the x-rays of some of these kids that had totally bombed out teeth. Hopefully we were really able to do some good and if nothing else they at least had a good experience of going to the dentist. Being in this program it is easy to think about how stressed out I am or how broke I am, but I have a lot of thing to be grateful for and it feels good to do something for someone that has less than I do. This week has been realy long and I am glad it is over. I am going to go to bed early tonight.