The Adventures of Buzzy and Buckwheat: Stab Lab

Well we finally reached it, the most highly anticipated event of our dental school careers. I had been looking forward to this day for years with fear and trembling. We were going to have to learn how to administer intraoral local anesthetic to each other. AKA get shot in yo mouth. It was not a pleasant thought. Besides the fact that none of us had ever done this, many of us had never even experienced this and didn't know what to expect. When I had my wisdom teeth extracted I was sedated and don't remember anything; other than that the only dental work I've ever had was a stuck baby tooth extracted when I was maybe 7. It had been over 20 years since I experienced a needle in my mouth and I was not looking forward to the next encounter.

Of utmost concern was how we would be paired for this assignment. There are just some people you do not want working in your mouth. Not to spread fear to the general public, but not all dentists are created equal. There are some students in my class who seriously should not be doing anything related to fine motor control on other human beings. You know, spazzes. I had a short list of people in mind that I just absolutely could not let stick a needle in my mouth.

The whole process dragged out for a while, which was both good and bad. Good in that we all got a lot of teaching and guidance before the moment of truth, bad in that the anticipation built. We had several lectures on proper placement and dose as well as adverse reactions and managing emergencies. Then it was time for a real anatomy refresher. They wanted us to be able to view all of the specific nerves that we would be trying to anesthetize, so we were scheduled blocks in the cadaver lab for an up close view. Now we hadn't been up there for probably almost a year and all of us thought those days were safely behind us. It didn't help that this was to be a far longer and more in depth review than what we had typically done in the past. When I arrived for my time slot, I should've known it was gonna be rough when one of my classmates from the group before me was sitting slumped outside in the hallway white as a sheet. Ever obtuse I ignored the warning and waited cheerily as the rest of my group arrived and we traded guard with the previous group. I will spare everyone the details, but needless to say it wasn't the most settling of experiences. In addition, we had the tallest guy in our group and in the middle of our lab, all 6 foot 5 of him wiped out cold on the floor. You know what the faculty did? They stuffed a wadded up jacket under his head and left him laying on the floor in all the dead people drippings until he came around, then had him sit there and drink a bottle of OJ. Now I'm down with the 5 second rule, but heck if I'll lay in dead people pieces and sip happily away. I about guarantee the fear of hitting that floor would have jolted me back to my sense midway down and I'd have popped back up quicker than I'd been going down.

Anyway, we finally made it through all of the instructions and got to the day of group assignments. My fears were quickly assuaged as I was not with anyone I dreaded. They wanted to avoid a cycle of retribution so they put us in groups of 4 and had us go round robin so no one got to stab the person who had stabbed them. All in all, we gave each person 9 injections over 2 periods in the lab. The most worrisome part of this entire experience was passing the group that went before me in the hallway on the way in. Apparently one of the group members had numbed quite a bit out of location and had wound up anesthetizing all of his partner's muscles of facial expression. This meant that on one side of his face he couldn't close his mouth, close his eyelid, or move any muscles. He had a temporary bell's palsy until the anesthetic wore off and passed me in the hallway looking like two face with a patch over one eye.

Our group's injections went far better. It was scary, but not anywhere near as bad as I had anticipated. We were all well prepared and both the giving and receiving went better than I could have possibly imagined. Honestly, the worst part of it was that my group had time slots right before meals both times so I had to try to eat while numb and chewed myself up a bit. The exciting part was that this was the last major hurdle to overcome before we start real patient care. It feels like I have been in dental school forever and have yet to treat a real person at all. That will soon change as my class is set to start doing initial exams on patients by the end of this month and I'm sure it will escalate quickly from there. Patients of Eastern North Carolina here we come!

We weren't allowed to take pictures as we did the procedure on each other (I guess they thought we had enough to concentrate on), but here are some representative pictures of the injections we did from our notes.