Most embarrassing dental appointment

Tell us all about your most embarrassing or painful dental appointment. spare no detail, we want to hear it all!

About 3 years ago I was getting a cavity filled on tooth #31. my dentist would stop drilling every so often to ask me to relax my tongue. until he asked a 2nd assistant for help holding my tongue down. two assistants walked into the room, one helped retract my tongue with a mirror, while the other watched the procedure. I had my mouth spread open for every person in the room to watch. I felt so embarrassed and submissive with my mouth full of metal while getting my cavity removed. 🥰

Once the decay was removed, the 2 assistants left the room and the amalgam filling began 🫶🏼

I think it was about 6 or 7 years ago now. I had just started with a new dentist, it was a very unique practice where her office was an extension of her home. It was just a dentist and assistant in a two chair set up and the dentist did everything soup to nuts. At our first appointment she did my initial exam and cleaning and found that both of my lower wisdom teeth needed to have the fillings re-done. One had a fracture and the other had a tiny bit of decay starting under the filling. She told me she could do both in the same appointment as she didn't think I'd need to be to numbed for the filling that just needed to be fixed so I agreed.

A week later I'm back in her chair. The plan is to fix the filling on the lower right wisdom tooth without numbing, and to handle the one on the lower left with anesthesia because there's decay present. All sounds good. She gives me two shots on the left but it feels like one of them missed. I figure, whatever, no big deal. I can always ask for more later. She starts to drill out the lower right, everything is fine initially. Except I had forgotten how big that filling is and she didn't realize that about half of that tooth was just a big chunk of composite resin. The drilling gets pretty uncomfortable, but nothing I can't handle. She finally drills out the rest of that filling and moves over to the left. I'm feeling numb-er now but not fully numb. I decide to ride it out. Turns out the decay was pretty deep and that the old filling had a ledge that was trapping all kinds of junk back there. She ends up drilling really deep with a low speed and it's agonizing. My eyes are watering as she continues to dig deeper into the tooth. I just want it to be over and she keeps assuring me she's almost done so I just grip the arm rests and try to hold on. She finally finishes drilling and goes to rinse/dry the freshly prepared crater. I nearly jumped out of the chair when she blasted the raw dentin with cold water and air, easily the most intense spike of pain I've ever felt.

I will say she did a great job on the filling. Two other dentists had tried to tackle the monster in my lower left wisdom teeth and arguably made it worse. Her fix has been the most effective and easy to clean. She may not have been the best with pain relief, but I would definitely trust her to place a good filling.

Couple of them. I have really bad teeths. Probably Albright syndrome and some medicaments used on time when teeths grows up and they was damaged. Today I had removed caries from the 7th teeth which grown up into gum. So without analgesia (painkillers) I had removed small part of gum by laser and drilled it.

Beyond the ones when I was little and my gag reflex was super strong and the dentist unwilling to accommodate that in any way . . .

This past year I responded to a post in a local Facebook group from a student at a community college who was practicing to be a hygienist and needed patients. I had seen similar posts in years prior but had never worked up the courage to go. Turns out I was the first ever person in her chair, so the appointments were very long and detailed. She had told me to expect multiple appointments lasting about three hours each but at the end of each one she was generally like "can you stay a few minutes longer?" which would stretch to another 30-60 minutes (not that I minded).

She mostly did great. Had a few mishaps but there was always someone coming by to watch and check in, and often they were talking to the student in a more teacherly manner about me. "Have you showed him how to improve his flossing?" kind of stuff. Sometimes a few people would come by and ask to see her technique and then one of them would take the tool and show her how to better do it. It was just one of those "I'm there but not there" experiences.