Precious Dental Care

I’m doing my internship and volunteer hours at a dental office. The thing that made me feel better was that I wasn’t the only one doing my internship there. I go there every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday after school from 3-6 and on Saturdays from 8-5. It’s a good experience I’ve learned new things. The first time I went in I was at the put at the front desk, pulling out, and filing back patients charts. They also made me look at the whole weeks schedule and look at every single patient that came in for an appointment that week. By doing that I had to figure out if we “build” [made money] of that patient. As the days went on my experience became better because every day I learned and did something different. I swear I don’t think I ever put on so many gloves in my life, I felt bad because I felt that I was just wasting the gloves. But it was okay because the staff members told me that it was to be done, that for every patient new gloves had to be worn. Soon I was in the back: cleaning and setting up the trays, sterilizing [cleaning] the instruments, transmitting the x-rays into the computer, and finally assisting the dentist with cleaning [suction]. The first time I was going to assist I was nervous because I didn’t have any experience with that. Now I’m use to it, and it’s what I like to do the most. This is an opportunity I didn’t think would happen, but I’m glad that I’m helping in some way or another in making people’s teeth better.