God is Good!

For the past two month now I have been interviewing for an amazing job and I found out on January 28 that I got!! Talk about the best news of the year! I am working for ODS (Oregon dental services) working on what is called the Smile Taxi. It is a mobile dental unit that travels around the state of Oregon providing free dental care to underprivileged children. We go to elementary schools around the state and spend a week in each place. They look for schools where 80% of children are on the free lunch program and also towns that are far away from dentists. This week was my first week on the job and we were in Cloverdale. It is a small town outside of Pacific City towards the coast. The first day we are in a town we screen the kids which means that the doctor does a basic oral evaluation to see how much decay is in a patient’s mouth and classifies them from 0-4. Zero meaning they just need a cleaning and four meaning they have extreme decay on multiple teeth. We treat the students that are classified at a 3 or 4. We saw a lot of extreme cases this week. Some kids were in 7th grade and had never seen a dentist before. Most kid’s treatments include extractions, crowns, and a few fillings. We unfortunately had to pull some permanent teeth this week which we do not like to do because it is crucial for people to hang onto their teeth as long as possible. But most of the teeth we pulled there was nothing left of it. Just roots and no crown. The kids are so thankful to us for helping them even when we do pull their teeth because it’s teeth that have been hurting them for years and they finally won’t be in pain any more. We had one kid this week that had to get a silver crown on a primary tooth and he thought it was so cool! He wanted to get more and gold ones too!  It is true kids say the funniest things. We almost made it all week without a kid throwing up on us but of course that last patient did! Oh so gross! The little disadvantages of the job...good thing the advantages outweigh it! Everyone in the community is so thankful for us being there and helping out children in the community. I was nervous about this job because as most of you know I’m not a huge kid person but I’ve been loving it. It is such a rewarding job and I feel so blessed to be doing it. I love my career and I love going to work every day. I also get to travel every week with this job which you all know that I love! I have a hard time staying in one place too long so this is kind of perfect for me I get to travel Monday through Friday and still be home on the weekends. It’s great to have a job and I see now why God had me wait so long for a job because this job fits me perfectly and for me is so much more than just a job! God once again proves that I just need to trust Him and His plan for my life. I never would have thought I would be able to find a traveling dental job or that I would have worked in Alaska last summer. Both have been such amazing experiences and I’m so thrilled for this new chapter in my life. I’m going to update my blog weekly so you can hear all the fun experiences I have on the road. Thank you everyone for your support over the years!