My favorite thing about being a dentist is the people I get to work for – my patients.
I feel their pain and stress when someone loses someone close to them, loses a job or has been out of work for a number of years. I feel their joy and excitement when they welcome a new baby, get married, or start their own business.
I bet no many of my patients realize that I think about the conversations we have days or weeks after we have them. So although I’m supposed to be the one educating my patients, it often seems like more often they educate me.
I have several patients (fathers and mothers) that I seem to lean on to help me with child rearing. When my son seemed to digress in his sleeping patterns, I had a mom that introduced me to the pick up/put down method. Another mom was going through that at the same time and it was so nice to know I wasn’t the only one awake at 2 am.
When I was trying to learn to breastfeed after going back to work, one particularly stressful day, I had a patient just say “hang in there, it sucks right now but just give it a few more weeks.” She was totally right and her simple kindness was huge for me that day.
I have several patients who are stay at home moms or home school their children and give me so many good ideas about ways to make managing my home life easier. I also talk with all my working moms about things that have worked for them and the guilt we all seem to feel when we aren’t home with our kids.
We have some serious fashionistas in our practice who come in looking amazing and it inspires me to wear something more fun then my typical black scrubs. You know what? I always feel better when I switch it up!
Another patient is an infectious disease physician and he helped me understand a lot about this whole Ebloa outbreak and truths about when to be concerned and how to protect my staff and my patients.
I have a patient who is a CRNA and spends a lot of time teaching, speaking and writing books. They regularly keep me in the know regarding advances in that area. We also have a lot of attorneys in the practice who work in all kinds of specialties and are always open to having us bounce questions off of them.
We have so many veterans, former military, and many who are current military. Some of them frequently deploy to help defend our freedoms and keep us safe and their perspectives on foreign policies are eye-opening. We are grateful for their service!
I always look forward to seeing retirees that have so much experience in their respective fields. When they come in, I often ask them about something I saw in the news that I know they will know a ton about. Some of them are former business owners and their business acumen is invaluable to me while I navigate through the ups and downs of owning a business.
