If you're looking for a compassionate and skillful oral surgeon, keep looking. I was limited in my selection of oral surgeons by my insurance policy and based on this one experience, I'm changing my health plan immediately: this is calloused warehouse medicine at its worst.
Last summer, I had a consultation about my one remaining wisdom tooth and booked an appointment for a date in October. During that evaluation, I made it absolutely clear that I have difficulty keeping my blood pressure up when required to fast in the morning and that I'd had two fainting episodes for standard cholesterol testing.
This was passingly acknowledged, and I was told *not* to have anything to eat the morning of my surgery. When I arrived there yesterday, having fasted, my blood pressure was indeed too low for the prescribed "twilight" cocktail of intravenous drugs that might have made the procedure tolerable. The doctor suggested that I reschedule for another date, and eat a full breakfast. I explained that I couldn't readily schedule another day off of work due to this mistake, and that my insurance authorization would run out in two days' time. Had the doctor listened to me during the initial consultation, what ensued might have been avoided.
I was given a soda to drink in the recovery room, which I was given to bring my blood pressure back in line. It did, but I was forced to wait within blow-by-blow earshot of another surgery on a 19 year-old whose yelps, screams, and plaints I could hear very audibly alongside the loud buzzing of the surgical saw. Honestly, I think it was sheer terror that brought my blood pressure back up. At some point, I heard one nurse say to another "be sure that door is completely closed." Hearing another patient's distress was horrifying.
Having endured that episode, I was not willing to reschedule and relive this event a second time, so the doctor attempted to complete my procedure with laughing gas and novocaine, which were, in the end, grossly insufficient. When I cried out in pain, the doctor told me I was being a "nervous nelly" and covered my mouth so that I would not, in his words, "scare everyone out of the clinic." Was I stuck in a horror film or a Moscow medical clinic in 1970?
I ended up having the extrication done in the most primitive way possible-- with a nurse holding me in the chair and far too little anesthetic. I was faint after wards, but they would not let my mother into the recovery area until she asked, pointedly, a fourth time. I was cold and trembling, but there were no blankets offered. It seemed that the nurses just wanted to keep me quiet and clean me up before I went back to the waiting room, where all the other patients awaiting procedures were seated.
The recovery area, by the way, is one that all patients, in route to surgery, must pass and see before their own procedure, which is as poorly designed as the non sound-proof surgical rooms. Don't want to hear cries of pain while you're waiting for your procedure? Look elsewhere. There is nothing like seeing bloody, drugged, weeping patients lying in self-protective fetal positions in route to your own surgery.
It seemed that there were several patients scheduled for the same time, and the nurses seemed wearily perfunctory and jaded. This practice is not run with the modicum of kindness and compassion one would expect, and I would not recommend it to anyone under any circumstance. Look elsewhere; I certainly will. read more