Humor

Dental Sitcom for “The Office” fans

March 20, 2015 By Trish Walraven 2 Comments

Our almost-18-year-old son has seen every episode of “The Office” and “Parks & Recreation.” While I haven’t watched either show with any sort of faithfulness, one film that I’ve personally learned a thing or two from is “A Clockwork Orange.” Suffice it to say, our son has ~~had his eyes propped open~~ seen all the available episodes of this Web series and exhibits the appropriate Pavlovian response now to the dental version of this sort of comedy.

Welcome to Episode 1 of Word of Mouth: Hiring a Practice Management Consultant

You have seven minutes to watch an episode, right? Sure, the writers aren’t blazing new comedy contrails, but the acting is decent and the shticks, while predictable, are even funny. Come on, it’s dental humor – there’s not too much of it around so take what you can get.

If you want more, there are four additional episodes of Word Of Mouth available here in the coming weeks. Who wins as Mascot? Toothy or Flossy?

Toothy, probably, because at least he’s less likely to kill you.

A hygienist’s answer to “what do you do?”

March 11, 2015 By DentalBuzz Staff 8 Comments

If you read Dentaltown Magazine, you may have received the edited, paper version of this article today in your snail mail box. But because I don’t have to make room for saliva ejector advertisements in the sidebar (seriously, this article helps sell SALIVA EJECTORS!) you can enjoy the original here in its more raw form.

A hygienist’s answer to “What do you do?”

by Trish Walraven RDH, BS

You’re at a gathering of acquaintances, a general hob-nobbery of casual conversing, one of those social obligations that you love/hate because you’re really more of an outgoing introvert, someone who plays well with others but enjoys their quiet, navel-gazing world too. Sooner or later you know that the question will be asked.

“So, what do you do?”

No hesitation here. You know what your profession is. You have a title, a position, a calling.

Then that inner part of your thinking begins to twitch.

You weren’t asked about your job title, actually. You were asked a direct question: What do you do?

The typical reaction of hearing that you’re a dentist or hygienist involves a full disregard of the art and compassion that you put into your profession. People want to tell you about their bad experiences as a child, or how much they hate you (but don’t take it personally!). They just nod, warily, quietly, at your response and quickly think of a way to change the subject.

Instead of giving away the conversation and letting it slide into other people’s thought bubbles, then, you can steer the dialogue back to the original question, and the feel-good answer you’ve prepared instead.

“I take care of people’s teeth.”

You’re a regular Mother Theresa now, aren’t you? The way you dedicate your life’s work to helping others, it’s so freaking noble. This response elicits a smile of comfort and familiarity from your obligatory small-talk partner. The conversation can move forward now that your profession has been deemed socially acceptable.

An hour later, driving home, you’re blissfully alone with your thoughts, rewinding your earlier social interactivity, musing over the highlights, and you really, deeply, ask yourself in hindsight, “what do I do?”

I can’t speak for dentists, but if you’re a dental hygienist, you do some pretty strange things, actually.

First of all, perfection to you is wave-shaped. It’s the curve of a thin scallop of attached pinkness that anoints each interproximal space with a coral-tipped point of the healthiest gingiva imaginable. Anything less than this in your patients’ mouths is limbo. Chaos is the reason your job exists, but you always hunger for order and balance. To achieve this imagined perfection in a mouth that is not optimal, then, means that you often resort to some diversions along the way. It’s about the journey, not the destination, right?

How do you handle the patient whose lower anterior linguals are piled with a couple of grams of Grade A calcium phosphate? Sure, you could just chunk the calculus off. But sometimes, when you’re feeling a little dastardly, you carve out the top and the bottom of the tartar evenly, so that you’ve left a neat chalky white mustache, complete with curlicues. With artistic satisfaction, you turn your attention back to your duty and politely erase the Banksy-esque dental graffiti from your patient’s teeth.

This is not something you tell people that you do.

You also tell no one that your deepest fear is running into anything artificial while you’re cleaning someone’s teeth. Your ultrasonic scaler turns into a fierce lead pencil in those situations, which means not only that you are wearing down your precious metal antennae into useless nubs, but also that you’re leaving dark lines where there was once only whiteness. Every last bit of old orthodontic cement has now been revealed like a charcoal rubbing, thanks to you. And you would never admit to leaving a grey streak on a brand new porcelain crown. How could you slip like that? You hope like heck that the prophy paste will get that scary line off before anyone notices.

When it comes to things that you enjoy, then, there’s a bit of hesitation about sharing those stories as well. Like hovering around the periapical abcess that’s begging to be relieved? Or when you’re spraying baking soda slurry under a bridge and the patient becomes aware that its odor speaks more than the thousand words that you could ever say about superfloss? To you the stink is like scoring a point. Or why your trophy at the end of a particularly difficult appointment is a 2×2 gauze loaded with something that looks like buckshot, but is really your patient’s carefully extracted calculus? Fun times.

Probably the most difficult part of your career, though, has to do with patient management. Unless you’re regularly disengaging people from their mouths via nitrous oxide, there are forceful tongues, and lip pulls, and saliva ropes, and people who forget that it’s safe to swallow their own spit. Suck. Suck. Suck. Ten times a minute. At least this way they’re remembering to breathe. When they forget to breathe they feel like they are drowning. It’s not the water; they’re just suffocating because you’re blocking any chance of mouth breathing. Never mind that noses are much more optimal for breathing but whatever. Not everyone has learned how to snorkel either. And how do you convince patients that unless they just ate a handful of almonds, brushing immediately before their dental appointment won’t make your task any easier?

Then there are the patients themselves. Not just their mouths, but the whole person. Patients whose embarrassment about their teeth are the reason they haven’t been to a dentist in a while. People who not only open their mouths but open up to you, tell you their secrets, their fears, their wishes and hopes. People who trust you to take care of them, to love them, to nurture them towards health. They see something special in your eyes, and they open wide.

So go ahead and make it known out there in the big world that you’re hygienist. Or a dentist. You scale teeth. You drill teeth. No biggie. That’s what you do.

What really matters, though, are the reasons why.

Trish Walraven RDH, BSDH is a mom and practicing dental hygienist in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. She is a bit of an an introvert when she’s writing dental articles, but you get her together with her best friend from high school and Irish festival beer and she begins to make faces like this. She also makes faces like this under her mask if her patients aren’t paying attention to her flossing instructions.

Stand-up dentistry

October 15, 2014 By Trish Walraven 6 Comments

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that being a dental hygienist is easy compared to comedy. Every time I imagine that I’ve got the spotlight, that it’s just me and a microphone, and I’m telling dumb jokes about cleaning teeth, I get this intense knot in my stomach that makes me realize it’s really not my calling. Ask me to write something funny; well, I have days to think about it, time to play with the words, rewrite them when they’re not working right. But delivery? Only to your screen, kid. Punchlines, storytelling, pacing, all that in real time? It’s a surefire way to see me transform into Space-Out Girl, whose super power is to make everyone feel extremely sorry for how badly it’s going onstage so that the audience members turn to each other in embarrassment, averting their gaze just long enough for her to slink back into a fetal position behind the curtain.

So it is with extreme admiration that I present to you these comedic clips about going to the dentist. Some are classics, some are rising comedians that have less than 100 views on their YouTube videos. But I think all of them are worthy of being here in their own way.

Never leave a comic in a room with a little sucky thingie.

Totally funny. No, it’s not Jamie Foxx, but even his dentist thinks he might be. This is what happens when he’s left alone with a saliva ejector.

Guessing your flossing habits is a power trip for dentists.

Mildly amusing, but it misses the whole “of course you’re not flossing, your gums look like raw meat” point of it and goes straight to “your dentist is an a-hole.”

The dentist has a case of tongue-us.

You’ll definitely smile about this one, and probably lick the back of your forearm, let it dry, and then smell it to see if maybe you’re doing this to your patients. I like the way he gets all educational at the end.

Seinfeld vs. Walter White

Probably my favorite laugh-out-loud clip, proof that classics just get better with time. While this isn’t a comedy routine per se, Jerry Seinfeld did start as a stand-up comedian. Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston is a dentist to Seinfeld’s Anti-Dentite. This Seinfeld episode mashup is little longer than the other clips but totally worth your time.

She had to use Yelp to find a dental referral.

Skip the intro to about 1:20 and watch as this open mike diva talks about her latest visit to the dentist. She says her husband finds that going to the dentist relaxes him. That’s not so much the case for Gisele Gerry. She’s a talent, though, as she takes us through her flossing discoveries and complains about the hygienist with judgmental eyes.

Robin Williams and the lead apron joke.

If you don’t mind a few F-bombs you’ll enjoy the first minute of this clip where Robin discusses anthrax, Congress, and gonads at the dental office.

Robin Williams before he was famous, under an extracted tooth sign.

I had to add one more of him, from a terrible film made in 1977. The joke is lame and doesn’t quite make sense, but the slide whistle saves the day. Plus, hey, it’s Robin Williams in suspenders, which makes me sad and happy all at the same time.

Mybuh libip ibis obon thebuh fluhboor.

The most classic of classics in dental humor. Bill Cosby explains what he’s like at the dentist like only he can do. And if it’s been a while since you’ve seen this clip, it might be time for a refresher. Just make sure you wipe up your slobber afterwards.

______

Knowing how Google can be so literal sometimes (!), you might have come to this post to figure out how to do dentistry standing up and are now pretty PO’ed that all you got was a bunch of stand-up comedy videos instead. Hey, I’ve done the Crazy Bendy Straw routine with my back all spazzing out in the stand up position, and while it hurt like a lover clucker, we should all be thankful that wasn’t you, me, and a microphone. I might have just shoved that in your cheek for a laugh.
Badumm ching.

Aaand…Slide whistle out.

A blogger since 1997, Trish Walraven, RDH, BSDH is a practicing dental hygienist and marketing manager for an indie dental software development company. She likes writing about herself in third person and wasting time watching videos online because she can excuse it as “researching for a post on DentalBuzz.”

Only God can explain the ACA to dentists

January 21, 2014 By Trish Walraven 4 Comments

Why I was chosen for such a task? I didn’t ask for this. Okay, so maybe I did.

Years ago I swore off direct petitioning prayer; you know, the kind where you ask God directly to intervene in the course of human events. Like, please help me to lose weight (that’s just BEGGING for a tapeworm there!) or any other sort of prayer that you ask God to help you in a specific way.

Except this time I forgot to not be so direct.

A few weeks ago I must have quietly asked God if He could help me make sense of Obamacare and how the Affordable Care Act is going to end up affecting dentistry in the next few years. And I had a dream that I would find the answer, only that it was buried and that I would get a signal when it was time to dig.

Dig? As in Joseph Smith, dig? Dude, angels aren’t my thing. Not that I have anything against angels pointing their fingers to the ground and making me do all the hard work.

Fortunately no angel came to me. Instead it was a cricket, chirping in the middle of winter like no cricket should. There’s this closet in a corner of one of my operatories, it’s the hidden closet, it’s where we cram in the Christmas tree every January above the forgotten manual x-ray film developer and all the manila patient files from twenty years ago. All day I was tormented by the shrillness of that annoying survivor. Even after the last patient was gone the cricket continued its unwavering tone. Was that my sign? I began digging in the closet, searching for the little critter.

When I pulled out the second box of files, there it was, No, not the cricket, but three unassuming sheets of stationery, triple-folded and clinging to each other. The weird part, though, was that there was not actually any writing ON the pages, per se. Instead, the words were like cutout stencils, as if a brood of silverfish had only eaten away the paper where the ink had been. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really, but I figured that Someone had gone through all the trouble to stash the revelation in our dental closet; the least I could do was to transcribe the contents of the document here at DentalBuzz.

This, then, is:

The Fresh Testament for the Everlasting Dentition

Chapter 1

1. In the beginning, there were gingiva, and they were good. 2. As suckling begat the need to chew, the eruption of the primary teeth ensured proper consistency for bodily nourishment. 3. But childish things must be put away, as youth becomes adulthood, the shedding of the smaller allows for the growth of that which is more permanent. 4. The gift of teeth is therefore given to all freely, to last until the final breath of life.

Chapter 2

1. Know your enemies; otherwise they will be your undoing. 2. Beware of acid, and biofilm, and parafunction, for they may cause destruction. 3. Combined, they will hasten the evacuation of teeth from your mouth. 4. Seek refuge in the wisdom of those who are learned about the enemies of the dentition, for they will give you comfort and aid, and you will forever be guided towards pearly dental glory.

Chapter 3

1. The ways of the world take the unaware down the pathways of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. 2. The earlier generations of servants saw their wages frozen so that all would not perish from the earth after the second great war. 3. Thus the idea of a dental benefit was created. 4. The dental benefit is a substitute for actual earnings. 5. The first days of the dental benefit helped many people fight the enemies of their teeth, by sending earnings directly to the physicians of the mouth. 6. The physicians saved teeth with those dental benefits that were given to them instead of directly to those who had served their masters, and all was well. 7. A vast outpouring flooded all the land with a large booming of babies, and as they ripened they began their search for work. 8. No longer were dental benefits under the rein of the masters themselves; instead, they were passed to those who promised to look after the servants’ best interest as an insurance against the loss of teeth. 9. Verily, a seed was planted in the minds of many: if a servant does not have an insurance policy, one cannot attend the services of a dental physician. 10. And God wept when He saw that His children first began to believe they could no longer care for themselves with their own earnings.

Chapter 4

1. Those that promised to look after the servants and insure them against harm wanted to control dental physicians, and for many years the physicians resisted. 2. Three tribes arose in the struggle to attend to the care of the Children of God: the Fee For Service, the Preferred Provider, and the Single Payer. 3. While the lands where the three tribes practiced were not the same, as some were less hospitable than others, all tribes found that they could attend to those who were able to seek their services.

Chapter 5

1. Then in all the lands a clamor of discontent from the servants and their lords created a large cloud that poured out from the District of Columbia. 2. When the dust settled from the cloud it revealed that the tribes were not disbanded, and that those they served would continue to attend to their care to perpetuate the saving of teeth. 3. But with the servants, they felt a fear growing even larger in their hearts that made them feel helpless about affording the ability of themselves and their kin to smile and chew and not feel dental pain, and the care of the dental physician seemed even more unreachable.

Chapter 6

1. A revelation is near: know that the purpose of this Cloud of Obamacare is to assure the Everlasting Dentition for all. 2. But it will not be without struggle, because the Cloud itself is not the answer. 3. More care will be mandated, but the cost to the servants will cause a great frustration. 4. The dutiful will pay excessive amounts for their allotments yet they will not be blessed with their choice of caregivers. 5. Blessed are the children, for they will be adults some day and if every one of them for many years is required to visit a dental physician, then the proof of those efforts will be rewarded. 6. And it will be known that it is the act of visiting the dental care provider that saves teeth, not the insurance itself, and the eyes of all the people of the lands will be opened, and their hearts will be changed. 7. And the people will no longer look to their masters to care for them, for they themselves will know that they are partners in maintaining the gift of teeth that was given to all freely.

_____

Yeah, so see? God just wants to stay out of Obamacare. He has no place in it, or in politics at all for that matter.

I probably don’t either, but from the new dental health plans that are available here in Texas I can comfortably say that the dental “insurance” you receive from any of the Obamacare coverage ends up costing more than just paying a dentist directly. It is too much of a hassle to give your money to a third party and then ask for some of it back, which is, in essence, what you are doing.

In the meantime, though, I’ll try to stay out of that closet.

Chairside sign language?

November 10, 2013 By Trish Walraven 4 Comments

DentiSign is a sign-language system designed to help patients deal with the loss of control they may feel when they can’t verbalize their concerns and fears. If you’re a sympathetic dental professional who values the trust in a dentist-patient relationship, feel free to click over to the original DentiSign website and share these hand signals with your patients, because gosh darn it, you care.

On the other hand, if you prefer to GET REAL, have no soul, a thick skin, or just have a sense of humor, you may enjoy this updated, DentalBuzz-ified version of DentiSign instead:

Problem is that it looks like Captain Obvious put the DentiSign Inc. company out of business a few years ago so you can’t order any products from them. But the website lives on, so go visit, in case you’re so inclined.

Or at least come up with some better signals than I did.

Share your sign language ideas by adding a Comment; the best will make it into the Best Hand Gestures of DentiSigns to be shared here at DentalBuzz.