–By Ernest Hargett, HTI Dental Care Center Manager:
One of our patients had the last appointment of the day and her dental need involved one of her front upper teeth, which was broken off pretty bad.
As soon as she smiled that was the first thing you saw, so this patient didn’t like to smile due to the embarrassment she felt from smiling. The dentist and assistant volunteering sat her in one of our dental chairs and comforted her by saying that we would do the best we could to help her and bring back her confidence. The decay in the tooth was removed, which ran deep and then a material that is a tooth colored material was placed to match her surrounding teeth.
When done, the patient expressed her gratefulness to all of us with watery eyes, but the patient had not yet seen the newly finished restoration. The patient asked where the restroom was so she could take a look at the new filling on her front tooth.
5 minutes passed and the patient walked back into the room with tears streaming down her face then she said, “it’s been so long since I could smile, if you only knew how long it’s been. Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart!”.
She then proceeded to walk out, but not before she blew each of us a kiss as tears rolled down her face and gave a strong hug to the doctor.
