I miss you ultrasonic!

I passed my clinical DH board!!! I am so happy, I found out yesterday! We were not really supposed to find out until finals week, so I was very surprised to get the e-mail, and even more surprised when I saw the result. I guess I need to have a little more faith in myself :). My morning patient today was my board patient, I was able two finish his last two quadrants. I ran into the exact same problem I had with my board exam, his anterior teeth are SO sensitive to the ultrasonic no matter what I do. I did a pretty good job with his cleaning, but his calculus is just so tenacious and it was difficult not being able to use the Cavitron. He was a good learning experience patient for me. In the afternoon, I saw a new patient from the resource list. She had just had her lingual bar removed so there was tons of lingual calculus on her mandibular anteriors. Again, this patient was pretty sensitive to the ultrasonic on her mandibular anteriors. I used the ultrasonic on low for a minute, and then went to hand scaling. Marilyn taught me to always do a horizontal sweep in the distal of the back molars to smooth any roughness and to not miss those line angles. Also, she taught me to not be afraid to get out my little wimpy Nebraska for tight contacts in the mandibular anteriors. Doing that will help me get the little grainy pieces that the larger anterior scalers cannot get. I realized today how much I love the ultrasonic when I wasn't able to use it much at all. One clinic day left!