How’s your green level??? Can you take looking after a patient, when you never had a patient, unless you count your kids???

While in basic, I had the opportunity to change my assignment out of basic and I requested my husband’s base, which really was a arm pit assignment, but I didn’t know that, so, the Air Force agreed and sent me DDA to my base… Vance AFB…

I show up at the dental clinic and I have zero training, nada, zip, and oh boy was I in for a fun experience and now imagine, you have amnesia, you have multiple brain bleeds and you have over 20 concusions and a moderate TBI and you are going to learn….

So, I sit with my first patient and we start and I ask to be excused and head for the nearest toilet… nada happens, I go back to my patient and that was the end of the green with patients…

You really see some narly stuff in people’s mouths’…

I learn the job and really pick up on all of it pretty fast and my favorite was working in surgery…

By the time I got out of the Air Force, I was qualified to do x-ray, hygenist, surgical assistant and regular dental assistant as well as push the paperwork…

I never did the job again, nor have I worked with patients since my discharge…

I learned on the job and I learned about regulations and procedures and laws, all on the job…

But when I went to test for E5… I hit a roadblock on learning and really didn’t understand why reading the material was harder for me to learn than doing the job and learning from it…

That was my first real clue about issue’s I had with my brain, and it would take from 1977 when I entered the military till 2019 to get the answer…

MRI showed all the damage…

What the MRI can’t show is if the brain is in a fog and my fog lasted longer, because of a screw up on the operating table at the El Paso VA in 2011… That finally cleared this year…

From what neurology tells me, my brain will be healing till I die, because of all the trauma it suffered before I made it to 18… Not what I want to hear, but, you can’t change what is….

I don’t have a degree like Homer does, I have been tested on my IQ and I won’t do any more…

It’s a number and has no value, except to those keeping score…

For me, the IQ tells me the brain was very healthy up till my mother and father abusing a child and yet some how, I thrived anyway, only because of my brain…

What little training I got in the military can never compare to what I taught myself and how I took a broken system and made it work for me to get my answers… It took decades, but I got them and here we are…

My next DDA…

Write the book…

I remember…

copyright protecte 2026 all rights reserved©️