Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Cindy Johnston about her experience in the dental field. Right now, she is temping with Dental Temps Professional Services and travels around the Northeast Florida area to where she’s needed. She’s most recently been working for practices St. Augustine, Jacksonville and Fernandina Beach.
It’s rare to speak to someone who’s been in the same profession for a few decades, someone who’s seen the ups and downs and the ins and outs and still loves doing her job.
Johnston talked about some of the changes she’s seen in dentistry over the last 30 years she’s been in the business. “Going from using charts and day ledgers to computer systems was a big switch,” she said. She also remarked on the the change of x-ray film development in the digital age. “When I first got into dentistry, you took the x-rays and you had to develop them in the darkroom,” she said. Johnston talked about the development process, which required several chemicals, rinsing the slides in water and hanging them up to dry.
Another big change Johnston talked about was the implementation of safety accessories. “When I first started out, we didn’t even wear masks, gloves or lab coats,” she said. Johnston said he change came about in the mid to late 80’s when people began wearing gloves and masks in response to the AIDS epidemic. “Back then AIDS was more prevalent,” she said. “There was a big scare, but with more education we don’t have as big of a fear of AIDS as we had then.” Though there are and have been scares of hepatitis C and tuberculosis in more recent years, they do not compare to the severity of the scare of AIDS, she said.
When I asked her what she likes most about her job she told me it was her patients. “You get to know them, and if you see them often enough, you become friends,” she said, adding that she’s had loyal patients, one of whom has been following her for ten years. Johnston said it is very gratifying to be part of a team that helps others. Some of the offices she’s worked in specialize in cosmetic dental work, and she said she’s enjoyed helping patients feel better about their appearance. “I’ve seen patients come in with their whole smile line badly decayed, and some patients had teeth that were extremely crowded, and some of them were missing teeth,” she said. “When you restore that, it literally is a life changing event for those patients,” she said. “It is very rewarding when you know you’ve helped with that.”
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