Holy Halitosis!

This morning my patient showed up and I had an interesting dilemma from the start, he couldn't read, nor did he know what was going on with his health. Luckily his son was there to help me out but it made it a very awkward appointment trying to communicate with a spanish speaking patient that didn't seem to be 100% there. To make things better, even right after the pre-procedural rinse he had some pretty powerful halitosis due to his class III status of Periodontitis. Probing was miserable with the smell and then x-rays were really frustrating because at first he didn't want to pay for them but since he was going to be my mockboard patient I needed certain images of the teeth I'm planning on submitting. To add to it, he had a very small vault making PA's pretty difficult. I only had a little bit of time for scaling and since he had never had a cleaning, his calculus was so tenacious I didn't even get to finish a quad (holy first-year flashback!!!) Oh well, at least for mockboards I will have a patient in the chair for now.

My afternoon patient went much smoother. She's an amazingly sweet woman who was very helpful and had gone from being a classII with active infection and lots of bleeding to a class V with no bleeding and everything perfectly maintained. Her tissues looked so good! I got her all done with BWX and a PA, very nice!!!