adventures in hygiene

Tuesday I found myself in the MNSU Dental Clinic. One of the things that I enjoy about the MNSU campus is that it seems pretty boring and then you discover little pockets of shit that remind you, Oh, yes, this is a *real* university. For example, we have a Dental Clinic. It's in the basement of a different building than the one I spend 98% of my time on campus in, but it's there. It's white and everything, including the pens, is covered in Target brand plastic wrap. It's cheap, and I haven't been to the dentist since Before I Moved Out Here, and I kind of dig the whole teaching hospital thing. I pass out if I give blood and I have zero dollars to donate to any real charity, so guinea pigging myself out to dental hygiene majors made me feel a little better about my karma.

I found the whole thing really cool, so I'm presuming that this shit is right up Lizard's alley. The whole place is staffed by hygienists-in-training, which I will hereby refer to as HITs. My student HIT was named Heather and she was a whole foot shorter than me, which was pretty comical when it came time for X-rays and clipping the little green spit bib around my neck. I sort of felt like a seventh-grade girl stuck at the homecoming dance with her way short date. Also, as a precautionary measure, you have to wear safety goggles anytime you're sitting in the chair, so you look cool too.

Heather talked, a lot, and since these appointments run about two and a half hours (due to the fact that the HIT works slowly, then has to have her supervisor look over her work before she's cleared to move on) I found out a lot about Heather, and her Belle Plaine childhood, and the MNSU dental program. For example, while the HITs are in clinic, they have to have a patient in their chair at all times. They must be constantly working on, or expecting patients, or else they don't pass for the day. It turns out that if a patient cancels on them, or it's a slow day and there aren't enough patients to go around the twelve or so HITs, the HIT is responsible for going out and finding a butt to fill their chair. Heather said that she often calls up her friends, or solicits students wandering around the Student Union: Hey! You! Got three hours free today? Want to get your teeth cleaned? The HITs usually end up comping those patients. I can't imagine having to go solicit patients. My jobs have forced me to say some pretty stupid things to total strangers, but asking somebody if they have three hours free so that I can clean their teeth has to rank right up there.

If you think about it's pretty bad ass that there's a whole dental clinic as part of this program. I mean, when I was a junior or senior in undergrad I was writing [dopey] poems and smoking, whereas all the girls downstairs in the dental clinic are working seven hours a day cleaning real people's teeth. I never majored in anything that required me to be a real person while still in college, so I was allowed to wander around freely wearing old man sweaters and stinking of gin. Meanwhile, girls like Heather have to wake up and put on scrubs and ugly white nurse shoes. I'm not jealous, but it's weird.

You'll notice, too, that I keep saying "girls." This is because the entire clinic, including the instructors, was female. (I even asked Heather where all the men were, and she said, Oh, we don't really get very many guys down here. Boys go on to be dentists.) What's even scarier than the fact that gender equality has apparently not hit South Central 'Sota is that the hygienists were all the most Minnesotan females I've ever seen. Every HIT had blonde highlighted hair pulled back into a very clean ponytail, and delicate features, and no one in that entire group had to weigh more than 120 pounds. It was like stepping into the Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield Clone Dental Clinic. No one was brunette. Think about it for a minute.







Creepy, huh.

Anyway, this was the most thorough cleaning I've ever had, and it was fun because Heather talked me through everything. We watched a little video together about the anatomy of a tooth and I learned from my X-rays that I have "pulp stones," which caused quite a commotion. Very few of the HITs had ever seen pulp stones before, so they gathered around my film and looked at my pulp stones. Pulp stones are a calcified mass of dentin within the dental pulp, and would make a great title for a poem.

I am totally comfortable admitting here that I had, in no particular order, a palate expander, headgear, braces, retainers, rubber bands, and something that I don't even know the name of. I rue the day in second grade that I unbent a paper clip and formed it into a C and stuck it across my top teeth, trying to be as badass as the eighth graders with retainers, because the very next year I found myself in the dentist chair getting four teeth pulled, and the dentist told me to get used to fingers in my mouth because my jaw was fucked up* and it would be years until anyone could get it back to normal. Heather and I talked about this, and then she said that my teeth were exceptionally clean for not having been scraped for several years, and she polished them with a paste that tasted like marshmallows. Usually I prefer mint, and my old dentist used to use pineapple, which is revolting, but marshmallow was quite pleasant.

Behind me there was a basketball player who, judging from the conversation, had serious issues with calculus, and who had not been to the dentist in years, and who was also really afraid of the dentist. Heather made fun of that kid for a while, under her breath, while she cleaned my own teeth. Then I sat around with fluoride trays in my mouth for a bit and drooled all over my shirt, then Heather gave me my goody bag with floss and toothbrush, and then I went home. It cost $65 and it was cool.

Moral: GO TO THE DENTAL CLINIC.

*okay, he probably didn't say fucked up to an eight year-old girl.