Category Archives: Dental

Today seems as if it is a big day – in the sense of potentially important.

The building appraiser came by this morning.  We’ll have a report from him in by the end of the month on the value of our building and land. 

Tonight we sit and talk with a couple of young guys that are interested in our practice.

And we want so much for this to go through.  Sure it means a few more years of work as a transition happens.  It seems hopeful.  But we’ve been hopeful before and it is hard to let oneself hope too hard for something that is uncertain still.  As if, in such intense hoping we somehow act against our hopes.

Update

Well, Marc and Toni and anyone else that reads this I guess,

I am getting tot he age when I would like to retire.  Retiring is not just a matter of one day saying, "I quit" and walking out the door when one owns the practice and the building.  So, Roger and I have been looking for someone to buy the practice for the last couple of years, having our practice evaluated, etc. 

And we have a couple of young guys who are sort of interested.  They are not finished school yet but if they commit to purchase, we’d be able to retire in about three years or so.

So, that’s what is happening.  I guess I have been living with this so much on my mind that, although I haven’t blogged about it, it seems as if I have.

This morning – my first day back at work after vacation – I got a rather desperate call from another dentist in town.  He had been called by one of the pediatricians to see a baby with “natal” teeth.  That is what teeth are called when a baby is born with them.  These teeth are usually really loose.  The roots haven’t developed yet so there is only a bit of skin holding them in and they wiggle all around.  It makes nursing difficult and the doctors are always afraid that the baby will aspirate on of them and get into real trouble.

So this dentist is on call and the doctor calls him.

I could hear shades of panic in his voice as he talked.

This seems to have been the first time he had ever heard of babies being born with teeth.  Wonder where he was during that lesson in school!

He had all sorts of concerns:

• that if he tried to take the teeth out at the hospital without all his equipment that he might be putting the baby at risk.
• that he might be putting himself at risk legally
• that this was not something which an ordinary dentist should be doing
• that he didn’t know if he could give a baby local anesthetic
• that he had never done this before and had never heard of it (this was repeated a few times)

Well, we just happen to have a student in the office this summer who I am sure will love to see a case of natal teeth.  The parents will bring this tiny little newborn to our office, I will inject a couple drops of freezing and pop the little tiny teeth out.  Very, very simple really.  It is not as if this child will run away!  In fact, when a baby is so small, they are pretty easy to get to sit still.  We just wrap them up tightly like a little papoose.  They don’t actually know what is coming till it is pretty much over.

And I have done this before.  Pretty easy really.

This is too common an occurrence.  Two guys, doubt they care much about the state of their dental health although they have underlying medical conditions that should make them more prudent, come in with lost fillings.  the most common reason for a lost filling is decay around an old filling so that the structure of the tooth around the filling breaks and it falls out.  Kind of like saying the windows fell out of the house when the house has rotten timber.  New windows won’t fix the problem any more than a new filling plopped into the hole in the tooth.  It requires a major overhaul of the tooth most of the time and sometimes the tooth is just too far gone to save. 

The other option is me doing what is commonly termed "herodontics"  where I try heroically to save a tooth that has hardly a hope in hell to survive.

So, here I go.  Wonder what I will attempt this time.

Today the little blighters all cried or screamed.  They fought and bit and spit. 
Some work got done and some not.

One of those days when I end up exhausted and wondering about the sanity of trying to sedate kids.

Kids sedated with oral versed still cry.  They cry for the freezing, for the bite block, for putting on the rubber dam, for the fillings and for the extractions.  They lie there all wrapped up tight and cry for that.  But we get the work done and mostly they are still.

It was a loud morning this morning but we got everyone done.  It is hard to believe that such a loud morning actually went well. 

Except for this small pain inside my head – upper left brain.  Coffee and ibuprofen should fix that.