Editor's note: Jimmy Earll (not his real name) is a practicing dentist in California and a stand-up comic who performs all over North America. His column, Laughing Gas, appears regularly on the DrBicuspid.com advice and opinion page, Second Opinion.
It was Christmas break of my sophomore year in dental school. My alma mater encouraged externships, and we had a plethora of them to choose from.
The nice thing about these programs was that we could earn clinic points for every hour we spent treating patients. And it was a great clinic experience before we actually hit the school's clinic floor later in the school year. You could do extractions in the jungles of Central America, dental clinic work overseas, or weekend trips to Mexico. That Christmas, I chose the San Bernardino County Hospital Oral Surgery Department in Southern California.
Talk about experience. We saw homeless people with baseball bat injuries, a variety of fractured mandibles, and a slew of teeth that needed to be removed, including difficult third-molar extractions. I think the residents liked us there because we did a lot of the work, although they jumped in if we got into a pickle. We were able to do a ton of extractions and master our local anesthetic technique. The residents were very patient and showed me tricks of the trade that helped me become part of an elite few who could do difficult extractions in my junior and senior year. We were called "special seniors."
Every now and then we would also treat detainees from the county jail. One day during that Christmas break, a busload of female prisoners with toothaches showed up. One of the prisoners -- a woman wearing an orange San Bernardino County Jail jumpsuit and leg shackles -- shuffled over to my dental chair accompanied by two officers. They handcuffed her left arm to the dental light post.
Little did she know she was my very first extraction patient. I reviewed her medical history and saw that she was HIV-positive. This only added to my nervousness, and I began to sweat noticeably.
"You've done this before, right, Doc?"
"Of course," I muttered. I followed the textbooks and lectures to a T, but no one told me that sometimes people are just difficult to anesthetize. After administering the anesthetic, I waited several minutes for it to kick in, then pulled out an instrument to check her level of numbness. As I placed the instrument in her gingival sulcus, she let out a shriek that could be heard throughout the clinic, and her free hand swung around and hit me smack between the eyes.
"I can still feel that!" she yelled.
Like one of Mike Tyson's victims, I staggered around a moment, trying to regain my sight. When I looked up, I saw the two guards chuckling.
"Maybe she needs a little more sleepy juice, Doc," one of them said.
Eventually, I managed to sufficiently numb her and extract her tooth without further fisticuffs.
The moral of the story? (The "punch line," so to speak?) Spending your holidays trying to get that extra point to graduate or that extra day of production isn't worth it. Spend the time with your loved ones instead. You may still get into an altercation, but at least they're family.
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