“We have arrived!” we murmured to ourselves, when we graduated Oral Hygiene, after two long years at university.
I should have smelled a rat, the first time I was called into the office to hear that wearing a bit of glitter around the eyes is considered unprofessional “around here”.
Most of us wanted to do what we studied, which entails consulting our own patients, teaching them about teeth and life and how the two interact, but it seemed like someone lied to us when we first started asking questions about this course.
“It’s the ideal profession for a lady”, they said.
“You can book your patients at convenient times”, they said.
Ja right.
This is how it works: orthodontists study for eons. First they study dentistry, then they work for a few years, then they go back and specialise in orthodontics.
As they finish, they murmur to themselves: “We have arrived!”
And in this case, it’s true.
They then set forth to conquer the world of money, I mean skew teeth.
Working on the patients themselves doesn’t make much sense since they’ll only be able to treat about fifteen a day, if they’re fast.
So, they came up with an ingenious plan of action: hire twelve oral hygienists (all female) to do the patients in their stead.
That way they can book 200 patients a day, glancing briefly into each one’s mouth, shouting orders to the bewildered girl, hovering next to them.
Great tip for orthodontists:
Tell the hygienists that they’re totally unemployable, when they come in for interviews, that way they’ll accept the pittance you’d call their monthly salary, once you’ve so generously hired them.
Continue insulting them throughout their employ, so they don’t wander off into the world of other, better professions.
Be strict on certain rules, e.g. “It is prohibited to sob helplessly while working on patients.”
“Crying will be confined strictly to the oral hygiene bathroom (separate from normal people bathrooms) and when emerging, eyes must look nice.”
“No ugly, smelly or rebellious oral hygienists will be tolerated.”
This kind of attitude spawned a new species at my workplace of the time:
The Mad Oral Hygienists of Moreleta Park.
These women almost invariably had some kind of substance problem, low self-esteem and would teeter on the edge of suicide if they weren’t drunk...which they were...all the time.
Interestingly enough, there was always a Dros across the road, no matter where I worked.
Some of us, working for Dr X, we’ll call him, found this to be wonderfully convenient and made a point of spilling into the pub at every spare moment, abusing the waiters, falling over old couples at corner-tables and systematically getting tremendously inebriated.
We’d then proceed to gossip wildly about all the girls that didn’t join us at that particular injunction.
Those other girls were off somewhere, drinking Earl Gray tea, calling us “drunken whores”, no doubt.
The hygienists at Dr X’s practise, where I worked for three years, split into two clearly-defined groups: “Die A-Span” (mommies with kiddies) and “Die Kring van die Spotters” (lesbians, smokers, druggies and drunks).
Naturally I fell into the latter (I was 23 years old, okay...don’t you judge me).
We had so much fun, almost taking ourselves out, all the time.
We laughed in the face of...well, other people quite frankly.
But, unfortunately when we weren’t out getting into trouble, we had to work our butts off for our elderly, increasingly demented boss in order to pay for our nasty habits...and the bills.
This work basically entailed wrestling little kids into dental chairs, forcing lip-retractors into their mouths and then mumbling threats at them, throughout the procedure to keep them from biting.
You’d think these (rabid) children would be the biggest obstacle in this field.
But you’d be wrong about that.
Ladies and gentleman, please welcome onto the stage...
“The Mad Mothers of Moreleta Park”.
While working for Dr X, we travelled to different cities every day to fork in more patients (money) so our senile employer can treat his family to gourmet holidays in Vegas every two weeks.
And every practise had its very own, special flavour of crazy mothers.
In Sandton, for instance, some came in looking like Barbie, laden down with 18-carate gold jewellery, dragged in by freckled little boys who would cause the most respectable of healthcare workers to gaze longingly at their boss’s cognac (mandatory in snob offices).
And if these “sweet” little things didn’t participate (they didn’t) their mothers would try and bribe them with ice-cream, toys and skiing-holidays in Switzerland.
They’d croon phrases like: “Is the nasty lady hurting you, schweetie?” and “Aw, now honey, stop gnawing on her hands or mommy won’t buy you that R1000 Transformer toy you wanted...”
In the beginning I was hard-pressed to be patient with the patients (the children) but as I got older and more experienced, I had more trouble being patient with their parents, who sometimes came in as a couple, clutching at each other as if their offspring was about to be executed.
But then sometimes, you’d be lucky enough to actually have an adult as a patient.
This, I felt, was like the psychological version of being on The Rack.
These adult patients cried more than all the kids I’ve ever treated, combined.
Screaming, kicking, biting little children are one thing...
Sobbing, hissing and threatening prosecution, adult patients take the cake.
And if they didn’t do those things, they talked.
They start seeing you as a strange kind of sadistic therapist. They’ll tell you about dresses they made when they were tweens, to sell to matriculants (for booze money, I suspect). They’ll elaborate on (all) their pregnancies (I lost a tooth with every child). They’ll jabber on about how fattening everything in South Africa is (can’t they manufacture mustard without adding sugar?!)
On and on and on, until finally you stuff their mouths with cotton rolls in a desperate attempt to stop the noise.
The thing I’ve gotten best at as an oral hygienist, however, was dodging things.
Bodily fluids become a part of life in this industry and hygienists will often find themselves in the unlucky position of being drooled over, peed on, bled at, and frequently having lunch-chunks blown their way (kids don’t hold back and boy can they aim well).
All of this sandwiched by the minibus-ride to and from the various destinations of work.
The twelve of us fought compulsively about everything we could think of.
Perhaps this was because half of us were hung-over and the other half pregnant.
The bus’s air conditioning was a favourite to bicker about. It seemed like all the cold air migrated to the back of the bus, causing those girls to freeze their asses off, while the front ones mopped the perspiration off their brows with leftover gauze patches.
Everyday someone would cry.
Everyday someone would physically attack someone else.
And everyday someone would stop the bus to hurl next to the road.
And to top everything off, our bus driver, Dick, scared the living shit out of us on a daily basis.
He drove like he had bought his licence on EBay.
One fateful day, he stopped the bus on a busy street, to take a nice long leak next to it, in full sight.
This didn’t go down too well with any of us.
At the time I was too horrified to consider the fact that he might have been taking a dig at us. We were, after all, complete bitches to the poor guy.
Our next driver was called Origin, which supplied us with endless hours of witty remarks.
Whenever something smelled funny on the bus, we’d loudly debate what “the origin” of the smell might be.
In hindsight, I’m surprised he didn’t kill us all.
Of course he tried, at some point after I had resigned, by wrapping the bus neatly around a tree.
As Murphy would have it, the girl who was engaged to be married in two weeks’ time was the only one who got hurt, and as a result had to spend her wedding on crutches.
The others just had hilarious carpet-burns on their foreheads from diving into the seats in front of them.
I guess my point to this whole piece is:
Don't allow anyone you care for to study oral hygiene.
Street Sweeiping would be a safer and more lucrative profession.
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