I salute you, Sir!

"Arrr..arr....." my patient moaned with her face scrunched up.
A 6 month pregnant lady who speaks very limited English

"still hurting?" i repeated that probably just a little less than a zillion times

"It's infection!" Helen said in a certain tone of voice.

i know but i can't just leave it, can i?

After 4 cartridges of Lignocaine and her buccal mucosa going from red to white due to local anaesthetic pooling she still complained of pain. It has to be infection!

Like a deflating balloon, our patience was slowly wearing thin and we had to summon Dr. Wotherspoon to save the day.

One thing about clinical tutors, they have the magic of making what seems to be grueling to us a lot easier.
And, he did it!He managed to numb the patient with only one cartridge of LA(damn!).
Oh well,what's new?

"Here you go!" Dr. Wotherspoon,chipper and laid-back as always, handed me over the forcep.

So,i took out the tooth, leaving the last one to Helen.It was a badly decayed premolar with merely one standing cusp, I call it a survivor

5 minutes later, I changed my mind.

It was a friggin plague!

Crack!!

We both stared at the tooth in horror.

Oh no, one bit of the root was broken inside!!

The next 20 minutes was like a strenuous battle between 2 exasperating dental students and a teeny weeny root
and apparently, size doesn't matter at all coz the little root won
*ouch* *ouch*

Once again, we had to succumb to the mindset of ''admit it, you suck in oral surgery!"

Dr. Lalli came around, listened to our problem and then dropped a bomb

"Top up the LA.We are gonna raise the flap!"

Huh, surgical removal???? You can't be serious!

Thank goodness that Dr Lalli was held up in another bay so we got Dr. Wotherspoon to help us instead. Sure enough, he flipped the remaining root out like flicking a bug off shoulder. Actually i didn't witness how he did it. I was too busy looking for a missing tooth that I missed the classic moment.

"How did he do it?" I asked when Helen was holding the gory suction tip with the damn root that got us into the bloody game of hide-and-seek for a good 20 minutes

"Dunno" she shrugged

A sudden furious relief struck me.You know that kind of relief that you are spared the trouble but at the same time you are mad at yourself for being incapable.

I wanted Dr. Wotherspoon to be my brother(he's only 27, too young to be my father). I wanted him to teach me how to play games with those wilily stubborn teeth. I wanted him to inspire me to be a competent dentist along with a devil-may-care attitude.

Dream on!