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my name is Alexis, and I'm a hygienist and the creator and founder of Freshies Co, an online Dental Care shop that I launched on July 23. I've been a hygienist for eight years, and I know burnout well. I still experience burnout now and then, but I've learned ways to manage it. I think it comes in waves and flows depending on how we take care of ourselves physically and mentally. But yeah, I felt burnout very early on in my career, even in school.
It started with a lot of pain. I always felt pain, even when working on my ergonomics. I've never talked to a hygienist who feels as much pain as I do. Maybe my body isn't cut out for this job, but I love it, so here we are. Right out of school, I got a job at a laid-back office. I had subbed there a couple of times, and it seemed very laid back. I thought, "This is great. I'll just come in here, coast, I don't need to impress anybody, I can learn." I didn't feel very comfortable as a hygienist yet, so I thought I'd just kind of slide in here under the radar, learn, and do my thing as I go. Not a good idea.
"Laidback" meant a ship with no captain. There was no captain. The doctor was so busy, just packing his schedule as full as he could, and the office manager was also busy with her own fires to fight. Nobody was giving any guidance. None of us were on the same page. When we tried to all get on the same page in meetings and whatnot and talk to the doctor and say, "Hey, we really need some protocols for this and this, so we can all get a little more organized," his response, as well as the office manager's, was, "Everything's good. You guys are doing good. Everything is smooth sailing. Do it how you want to do it."
That didn't work well for me. It was very stressful when you didn't have any guidance, and each patient was like, "What do I do now?" So that was hard mentally. It was very frustrating and caused a lot of animosity towards every employee. Everyone was doing their own thing and thinking that they had the right way to do it. It was a mess. It caused a lot of stress and animosity and anger towards everyone in the office. It was like a dark cloud of toxicity.
When your office is that unorganized, your patients know, and they're unhappy. I'm a firm believer in energy, so I feel it. When I have an angry patient in my chair, I feel it. I'm feeling the stress, and I don't enjoy that. It was really hard. We were always running behind, so ergonomics were forgotten. I would hunch over and try to clean as much plaque out of there as fast as I could. It was a mess.
I remember coming home in so much pain and just melting in my husband's arms, feeling hopeless. This is my career. I went to school, I paid all this money. I can't bounce around. I was 27, I already had a three-year-old child, and I had bills. I couldn't just go to school and find another job. This was my job. But I was in so much pain, I couldn't even hold my head up at the end of the day. Headaches, all of it. The physical plus the mental was just... I felt hopeless. I hated it.
Despite all that, I stuck around there for about four years for many reasons. For all the same reasons most hygienists stick to messy offices. As much as my coworkers and I had our animosity about everything, I liked my coworkers. We were friends. It was like that survivors' bond. We're all struggling, but we're going to get through this together. We're going to moan and groan with each other and come back and do it again tomorrow.
I didn't want to leave them, and I didn't want to leave my patients. I had met all these people over four years, and I'm watching their kids grow up. They're telling me, "Don't ever leave. I love the way you take care of my teeth. Please don't ever leave." So I had that stress, and I just thought, "Well, this office lets me if I need time off, they give me time off. If my kid is sick, they let me know. They give me time off for that." But that's just normal human being courtesy. Any office will do that. It took me a long time to realize that.
It wasn't until I was on maternity leave with my second child that I thought, "I don't want to go back there. I can't. It's too much stress mentally and physically. I need something different and something better for my mind and my body." So I hopped around a little bit. I hated the thought of jumping around to different offices, but this was my life, my future. I couldn't live that way anymore.
I did find my unicorn office, though. I'm so happy at my office right now. Since hygiene school, I remember people coming in and telling us, "You might need an alternate career option. Don't forget, this is a lot on your body. Keep in the back of your mind that you might want to explore some things." I knew I was going to be one of those people that couldn't do this forever. I knew I wanted another job besides hygiene. I just didn't know what that was going to be yet. But I knew I didn't want to leave the dental field. I love the dental field. What we get to do is amazing.
Meeting different people every day, hearing their stories, just giving them care... A lot of these people don't get genuine care from a human standpoint. I enjoy that. I like to teach people little tips or tricks that maybe they never knew that are game-changers for their oral health. Once I had time to actually educate my patients, it became my favorite thing to do. I love educating in a way that maybe they've never heard before. Instead of just saying, "You gotta floss more," actually showing them what the floss can do and how it can help. I love that aspect of it.
And I didn't want to leave that side of dental hygiene. That's how I got to Freshies Co. When patients are just constantly full of plaque, it leads to burnout, and it's hard. I was racking my brain, thinking, "How can I get you people to be excited to brush your teeth?" You're supposed to do it, but you don't do it because it's boring. That's what I hear all the time. So I was on a mission to find some products that were not boring. I found so many great things, and nobody had heard of them. I got to get these things out there and show these people how fun it can be to take care of your mouth.
That was Freshies. That's how I started that. I hope one day I will be just doing Freshies only. It will be a sad day when I leave the clinic, but I'm not that sad about it. It'll be good. I still deal with a little bit of burnout. It's hard mentally dealing with patients and their struggles. I hate telling patients bad news. It's something that I have to get over, but it really weighs on me. The pain is just never going to go away. Some days it's worse than others, but my hope is that Freshies will become successful, and then I can one day just do that.
Maybe I'll sub, you know. I can't just leave my people, my patients. I love caring for patients, but man, it hurts sometimes.
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