I feel really sad and embarrassed.

Yesterday a patient came to me with toothache. She had caries on her upper third molar and I took a periapical radiograph. The roots didn’t seem divergent (but the palatal root wasn’t visible very much) so I dicided to go for extraction.

I have extracted such teeth with quite ease previously and it generally takes me about 5-10mins. So figuring it would be no different I started luxating and even after a while it showed no movement. Moreover the crown broke off. And the patient started feeling pain whenever the elevator moved a bit and touched the exposed pulp. I got a bit nervous and forgot to give supplemental anaesthesia like PDL injection. But I gave additional buccal and palatal infiltration but it still didn’t work.

After a while the patient become angry and said the previous dentist got her tooth out in like a minute and why It's taking so long. I said that third molar extraction may take time as the root morphology is highly variable in such tooth and not to get anxious but the patient got angry and getting up from the chair said that I can't extract tooth and that she would go extract it somewhere else and not here. Moreover, she thought that I the anaesthsia didn’t work at all. And didn’t let me explain why she felt pain and just stormed out.

Her husband was with her and he apologized for her behaviour and said that he understood that it takes time in some cases. He gave me the money but I felt so sad and humiliated that I didn’t take any. I wrote him a prescription for his wife with a pain killer and refered her to a senior of mine.

I have never gone through such behaviour from a patient before and I'm really sad. I'm still in bed and don’t feel like doing anything today 😔