Guest

Your day is full

Then your receptionist walks in with that look on her face. Child. Trauma. Front teeth snapped off. When will you see them?

You feel slight tightening of your chest.

Tell them I’ll see them at lunch time.

You continue your crown prep. You couldn’t see it on the radiograph, but the caries goes subgingival. Patient tell you they forgot to tell you they are on xeralto since it’s not a dental drug.

It’s a blood bath. You try haemostasis with all the chemistry and technology at your disposal, but you can’t control it. After half an hour of battling blood, your frustration slowly rising, you abandon attempts to do any of the scheduled work today and place a temporary crown, organise to withdraw the patient from anticoagulants, and schedule them another day. A whole appointment doing something difficult. Fee = $0.

The staff have decided to put the child with trauma in the other chair so you can “slip out during the middle of your clearance”. As if when you book 90 minutes for a procedure, you can magically take 30 minutes out of it, and still finish in 90 minutes.

The chair in room two starts leaking water on the patients crotch. It just had its annual service. They must not have tightened things properly. You can’t move to the other room because the young trauma child is there.

The ortho patient calls. Since you put powerchain on, the wire is poking out the distal tube traumatising their cheek. Can you just squeeze them in today?

You try to anesthetise the child but they have a panic attack and the child’s mum helpfully says “the needle won’t hurt.” The child goes mental.

It’s never one thing that causes stress in the office. It is multiple overlapping pressures. Multiple demands. Each one demanding a little more of your total mental capacity.

Over the years, I’ve dealt with it in many ways.

Longer lunch breaks to accomodate some uncertainty.

Chill weekends where I achieve nothing but a bit of gardening and youtube time.

Driving machinery on a friend’s farm.

Long breakfast with friends.

Walk.

How do you deal with the multiple overlapping stresses of dentistry?

The juggle is real.