1 Year Later

I saw my first patient out of my AEGD on September 21, 2015.  So now that we are in October 2016, I've been an official "non-resident" dentist for a whole year.  Here are my thoughts so far:

Easier than I expected:

--- Getting faster - I expected to slowly get faster but my speed was much better very soon.  Having a good assistant goes a long way, and not having someone check every little thing really speeds things up!

--- Additional duties - In the Air Force, you have "additional duties" which are programs or tasks assigned to you to take care of.  I got assigned a few but since our base is small, they are easy to manage.  Our AEGD faculty kind of scared everyone into thinking that small bases were a big extra workload but I haven't found that to be true.

--- Work - This is broad, but I do like my job a lot.  I don't love it every day, but I'm learning and I do really enjoy doing what I do.  It's fun!  Finally!  Isn't dentistry supposed to be fun?  You get to manage your schedule without the stress of producing so it allows you to book harder cases out a little if you need to.

--- Working with co-workers - At my last base, we had a ton of staff because there were so many dentists.  Here there is really just a small group of people doing everything.  But everyone pulls their weight and we have a lot of fun together.

--- Winter in Alaska - It's not even windy!  Come on!  Easy :)

Harder than I expected:

--- Not much else - So... most things really are easier, smoother, and more fun than I anticipated.  There are hiccups now and then and I don't mean to sound like things are easy... but most things are not as hard as some of the people at my AEGD made it sound.  I guess it depends a lot on your expectations.


So that's an overview, and here's a glimpse into a very typical day in my actual-real-life-...life.

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday
-Get to work around 0700
-First patient at 0730
-Do some fillings, maybe endo or a crown prep
-1 hour for lunch!
-4 more hours of a seeing patients!
-1 hour of PT time on Monday
-Some days we have a doctor assigned to ONLY do exams, recently we have been just squeezing them into the schedule when we can because of staffing issues.

Wednesday
-Get to work around 0700
-Do a 3rd molar sedation/surgery case at 0730
-See a couple more patients
-1 hour for lunch!
-Training day in the afternoon or catch up on things (usually no patients)
-1 hour of PT time

Here's how I would breakdown how I spend my time when I'm actually seeing patients:

Operative (fillings): 55%
Endo: 5%
Pros: 10%
Evals/Exams/etc: 20%
Surgery: 5%
Other admin stuff: 5%

You get to work your own schedule a bit and put things were you like them.  I prefer to do "big" cases right after lunch or leading into the end of the day (endo and pros).

Each base is different, and if you're at a large base you may not do any endo or oral surgery and very little pros.  Depends on the specialists and the need at your base (AND your desire to do whatever it is).

Hope this was helpful!  A little "day in the life" for you guys.