Moving,
like two bishops.
Close in proximity.
Apart infinitely.
Come,
a bit closer.
Breathe a little slower.
Look a little harder,
and see.
Losing (a) heart
but won't lose the soul.
Sometimes, want to follow.
The path is too narrow,
and falling.
"Kids cry easily but they smile and laugh just as quickly", someone told me a few days before my paedodontic clinics started but that said little about what to expect over the next 8 weeks. Some kids are breath-takingly sweet and some are self-absorbed annoying little dynamites.
I made kids cry by giving an injection. I made kids cry without giving an injection. I made a kid cry while giving oral hygiene instruction which struck me with the reality of kid's sensitivity. I had a flashback to 10 years ago when I felt the same way that kid felt. It saddened me that as I grew up, my thinking changed and I forgot to consider how I used to feel as a kid. Anyway, I'm happy that I'm able to sort out my feeling and do LA on kids without hesitation.
In paedodontic clinics, we've seen it all. We saw award-winning parents. We saw bad parenting. We saw a 6 yrs old acting like a 15 yrs old. We saw a 15 yrs old acting like a 4 yrs old. We saw Fuji 7 being used. We saw conseal and clamps running out. We saw a dentist "probed" fissure sealant out of the window. We saw all the Nguyens in Melbourne. We saw little angels and demons.
I've yet to extract a baby tooth. My only potential extraction patient didn't show up which means that I've never successfully extracted a primary tooth given that the only primary tooth I attempted earlier this year was a failure and I went home with a cramped forearm.
I've yet to do pulpotomy even though I came across many large decay cavities. Unfortunately for me but fortunately for those kids, they remained as filled cavities, as opposed to root canal treated and crowned. After expressing disappointment to a friend, he casually whispered the devil's words, "you can just slip".
At times, I didn't have much sympathy for patients who failed to turn up to appointments. Within these last few weeks, a simple truth finally came to me that human are human. We have good days and we have bad days. Sometimes (most of the time), patients don't want to see a dentist, just like sometimes, dentists don't want to see patients (especially when we are down physically). My demonstrator once told me "As much as they love you, they don't want to see you if they can help it".
After 8 weeks, not only did I learnt about kids, I learnt much about our friends. Some people hate kids. Some people are good with kids but still hate kids. Some people like young asian girls. Some people like young boys, specifically 9-10 yrs old. Some people ARE like kids. Some people like to steal other people's patients. Some people's mood fluctuated according to the nurse they had or had not.
So after nine exams, nine fissure sealants, eight preventives/scaling, six fillings, one stainless steel crown and popping rubber dam clamps out of the mouth twice, what else can I say? Prescribe TLC.
It's been a nice ride kiddo.
"well u should have just called me to hang out. I was pretty lonely last year..."
Sometimes you wish you could've taken things back and do it all over again but that's just a fantasy.
"Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free." was the famous quote from Shawshank redemption which reminded me that fear is our biggest obstacle in achieving anything. We fear a lot of things: fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of rejection, fear of failure. We let opportunities fly by without knowing what could've been or how it may have turned out. And on rare occasions, things happened that made you realised what you've lost and made you regreted not taking chances. Like the movie 'Sliding doors' starring Gwyneth Paltrow, a seemingly insignificant event can split your life down different paths and the lives you could've had became parallel universes. So when the next fork on the road comes, which path would you go on? Where do you want to be?
Time to stop being afraid.
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