Anaesthetise my anxiety

It has come to that part of the course where we practice administering local anaesthetics on one another, and my goodness, did I hate it.

I had a really unpleasant experience during the extraction of my wisdom teeth one year ago. It would be the first dental surgery I would undergo. My mum had booked this appointment with the public healthcare system months in advance, when I was still acheing from the pains of its eruption. But by the time of the extraction, there hadn’t been any pain for a long time, and it made me question the operations necessity. Nonetheless, I decided to get it over and done with, to preserve my somewhat naturally aligned teeth.

During that appointment, the dentist really glossed over all the risks and I didn’t really process much of what he had said. As he injected me, I was trying to imagine how long that needle was, and by my projection, it would have gone through the back of my neck 😂 I even felt like my throat was closing up and regurgitated my breakfast into the sink for the dental team to assess my not-so-balanced diet of cereal and milk. Post-operation, the frustrating numbness caused me to pool and drool like a baby all the way home.

And here we were, filling each other up with carpules of Scandonest 3% for practice. Cailu, my clinic partner, did an amazing job. My friend, Hidetoshi who worked at Dunder Mifflin would describe her skills as similar to “in Japan, heart surgeon, number 1, steady hand.” (If you know, you know 😉)

Amazing as she was, it didn’t stop the horrors of my extractions from rushing back to me. The panic of being alone in the chair, the disabling of my jaw from opening, that one evening where I started bleeding and almost made my mum and I collapse in the toilet upon sighting of the blood. Oh what fun.

When it was my turn to be the operator, Cailu and I had difficulty stifling our laughs from my inability to enunciate properly. But in the end, I managed to do my 3 buccal infiltrations and we ended clinic before the sun had gone down.

May my experience with LA and extractions ever fuel my empathy for my patients in time to come.

The only spontaneity that I frown upon is spontaneous bleeding