Drilling by Fire (part 1)

Forty years ago, I graduated from dental school. To commemorate that, the next few blog posts are accounts from that time with fictionalized names and some filled-in details.

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In one dental school interview, an orthodontist gave me a six-inch piece of wire, a pair of round nose pliers and said, “Make a paper clip.” I could feel him watching me struggle. Trying to turn straight into round, I forced the wire into submission.

My wire looked like bad modern art.

“Let me,” he said, hand outstretched. In seconds, he adapted a new wire onto the curve of the pliers. Voilà, a perfect paper clip.

“I’m good at sewing,” I mumbled.

Was this an early indicator that dentistry might not be right for me? Did I have the fine motor skills necessary to succeed in millimeters? The best dentists have “good hands.” The best dental school applicants were usually young men, accustomed to building model airplanes of a thousand parts, who when asked why they wanted to be a dentist, replied, “I’ve always liked working with my hands.” I could create a ruffle, a puffed sleeve, or match a plaid, but would that be enough?

Although the professors were mostly older men, I was pleasantly surprised to see some women in my class of over one hundred. In an affirmation of sisterhood, we nodded to each other across the lecture hall. Our first year was spent in basic science courses like histology and gross anatomy. Under a glass slide, the microscopic bladder captivated me with its pink watercolor beauty, its tall Greek columnar cells flattening as it filled with urine during sleep. I learned in pharmacology that a purple foxglove could be harvested for heart medicine – or be used to kill. What astonished me most was our invisible army of cells whose sole purpose was to fight equally minute pathogens.

The boys who built model airplanes couldn’t wait to “get their hands wet.”

I wanted to stay in the classroom forever.

My least favorite course was dental morphology, the study of teeth, numbered one through thirty-two, and their shapes and functions. We learned special words – mesial, marginal ridge, mamelon – so we could talk about teeth. We made them, over and over, in my least favorite shade of green wax. I accumulated a battalion of teeth and displayed them, like trophies, in my apartment.

By the second year, we had advanced to working on mannequins. Mostly we learned and practiced on manufactured ivorine teeth – and saved the real, extracted ones for exams. I had a stash, collected from cold calling dental offices. We all did – and traded them like prison contraband.

Our mannequin lab was divided into two rooms, dubbed Beverly Hills and Watts by previous classes. Since my name began with “Y,” I was assigned a seat in Watts, spending most of my waking hours there. We learned how to carve fillings, set up dentures, all the procedures we would soon have to do on real people. Although occasionally jocular, the atmosphere in the lab was usually tense with the threat of unmet expectations or outright failure. To relieve the stress, Watts and Beverly Hills competed and talked trash about each other.

Sometimes we commiserated over our nemesis: the gold foil, a dainty, pure gold jewel of a filling that was supposed to last forever. Layer upon layer of gold leaf, first purified through an alcohol flame, was then pounded in with an electromallet to create the filling. When our mini hammers operated in unison, they drummed like a forest of woodpeckers. It was tedious, time consuming work. When grading our foil, the first thing the instructor did was try to yank it out. I lived in fear of such an outcome because I, too, wanted my filling to last forever.

Watts was blessed to have the class “hand god.” We joked that everything he did was pure gold; without even trying, he produced beautiful work. His father was a dentist and I wondered if the “hand god” had inherited this ability. Mostly I was envious.

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Watts also had Harold. Older than the class average of twenty-seven, Harold Wright had been a middle school teacher. Like wives in a polygamous marriage, our W-Z bench knew how everyone was performing, even if we feigned ignorance.

I heard the instructor say to Harold’s bench mate, “Good job, Wendy. Keep it up.” Then, heads together, for fifteen minutes, the instructor, Harold, and the mannequin quietly conferred. After that Harold stood, eyes darting around and said to no one, “I need a smoke.”

Once he was out of the room, Wendy said, “I feel bad for him.”

Our first three-hour gold foil exam was eerily silent. We selected our best tooth, filled our torches, and organized our instruments precisely. Halfway in I heard Harold mutter, “Oh crap” and looked up. Maybe he had exhaled too hard, but Harold’s torch had gone out. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harold grab one of his Fatburger matches.

Distracted by the idea of a cheeseburger, I put my head down and tried to refocus on my filling. Then Wendy screamed. Blanketing the Watts floor, one row away, flames shot up and advanced like orange waves. I jumped up and headed for the door, wondering if I had enough time to unscrew my mannequin. But it was too late. Our instructor, red extinguisher in hand, was already spraying a foam of white contaminating our gold foils.

Afterwards Wendy picked up a blackened and melted wax cup from the floor. “See this?” she yelled. “He put alcohol in it and forgot and thought it was water. So duh, of course it caught on fire when he threw his match in. Then he went and threw the whole thing on the floor!”

She rolled her eyes and added, “Fucking pyromaniac. I want to change seats.”

Harold was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was outside having a cigarette to calm his nerves.

Beverly Hills quietly gloated.

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Harold didn’t last long after that. He was proof that dentistry wasn’t for everyone. Others in our class wouldn’t realize this until a year or two later. Like a losing poker hand, do you fold and walk away from your pile of chips? Or do you double down and fake it? One man went to medical school after finishing the four years of dental school and became a pathologist. Most refused to quit and signed up for more training to specialize, becoming orthodontists or periodontists.

I wasn’t sure how I felt. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. Most days I was just trying to survive, hoping my gold foil wouldn’t fall out and wishing it would last forever.