Having completed my first week of work should qualify me as bilingual. After working for a week as a dental assistant, I am convinced that dentists speak a whole other language. And now I speak it too. I can tell you what a perio chart is, the different surfaces of the teeth (lingual, facial, buccal, occlusal, mesial, and distal), where the midline is (and what it is), what calculus means (and I'm not talking about the math subject), what a cord packer is for, and even what Doctor Atkinson wants me to hand him when he rapidly pinches his fingers together (though it doesn't always mean the same thing, and so sometimes I get confused, but understandably so).
Now let's back up for a minute. I am the daughter of a nurse in the pediatric ICU. Blood makes me squeamish, and everything else makes me cringe, tense up, want to puke, or empathetically hurt. So, understandably, I was just a little bit nervous about working in a dental office. But amazingly, the procedures are so interesting that sometimes I forget all about that salty red saliva. I like to call it Red Saliva because it sounds so much better than Blood, don't you think?
After a week of on the job training, I've helped with crowns, root canals, fillings, extractions, and more.
Root canals and implants I can handle. Crowns and fillings - no problem. Extractions: I think it's short for Exit This Attraction, because that's pretty much what I want to do when that tooth is coming out. Seriously, it is nasty. And it's not just the blood, it's the noise as it rips out - that ripping, girgly, crunchy sound much like that which a live fish makes when you hit it with a bat (and thanks to my brothers who love to fish, yes, I know what that sounds like).
Along with learning the language of dentistry, I, in a way have added some of my own unique vocabulary to the mix. I was talking to one of the hygienists, Mary, about nicknames and told her that when a friend of mine and I were in middle school we had the brilliant of idea of assigning objects or animals to all our teachers, that way we could talk about them in a discrete manner. We never said anything bad about them; it was really just for the fun of it. Mary, of course wanted to know what I would name the people working in the office. After some thought, I named them as follows: guardrail, capri salad, magic eight ball, and Remy (the adorable little blue rat from Ratatouille).
What do guardrails, capri salads, magic eight balls, and Remy all have in common? They are all my wonderfully kind coworkers and friends, whom I feel incredibly blessed to know and work with.
Candidly,
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