I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of jobs in my brief tenure in the working world: paperboy, dish washer, accounting clerk, pizza cook, janitor, help line technician, lawn mower, computer tech, office assistant, legal aide, caterer, developer, graphic designer, and online marketer.  Since I’ve married a prosthodontist, I can add a new role to that list: dental assistant.

Call it what you want – nurse, assistant, suctioneer.  Apparently, there is no training, certification, or oversight required to participate and assist a dentist in their procedures.  And to make matters worse, my wife is not just a general dentist, she’s a specialist in prosthodontics … as she’ll tell you with no small sense of indignation.  That means that we’re (I say we like I have anything to do with it) drilling into people’s gums to place implants, cutting out third molars, forming crowns and bridges, and more.

I’m not the full-time dental nurse thankfully, I only fill in when the others are booked elsewhere. Now when you need labor, its the Asian way to bring in family, put them to work, and either pay them nothing or next to nothing.  My wife’s sister had her 70-year old dad working as her receptionist at her chiropractor clinic for years and years.  I’m happy to continue my Vietnamization.

My job, for which I’m not paid in any form, basically falls down into three responsibilities.  First, suck spit.  Second, act as the gopher for the dentist as they progress through the procedure.  And third, comfort the patient as necessary.  Those seem pretty easy and for the most part my wife has confirmed that I’m the best assistant that she has in her stable.  Call me the closer.

I have to admit that when I’m holding the suction, my mind wanders.  I’m not a medicine or science person, so for me this is almost like exciting venture into play acting or role playing.  In today’s episode, Dr. Lucky fights to save the life of a mother of three.  There are times when she asks for gauze, forceps, and other tools and I have to fight the urge to repeat her request in confirmation in a grave and business-like tone.

“Scalpel.”

“Scalpel.”

Or to respond with doctor added to every statement.

“Yes, doctor.  Of course, doctor.  Excellent work, doctor.”

When you’re hunched over a dental chair and some poor bastard caught in the grip, I was surprised at how detached I was to the gore and blood I was witnessing.  If I were to watch this in a movie such as Marathon Man, I’d cringe, coil in my chair, and curl my toes.  But when I’m seeing it in person and far more graphically, such as needle injections into the palette, drilling into pink gums, sucking blood out of a socket, or carving down teeth with a drill, I’m sitting there calmly with the theme from Quincy rampaging through my head.

Here are the best of my screw ups:

• One guy had a tongue that was similar in size to what you’d expect to find in a fully grown cow.  It was huge.  Part of running suction is blocking the tongue from the drill for obvious reasons.  I had the suction turned against his tongue and after 30 minutes I noticed that a huge blood blister had risen on the side of his tongue underneath suction, probably the size of a marble.  It was so big that the patient asked for us to stop the procedure so that he could finger it with a nasty look on his face.  Oopsy!

• When people get anesthetized, two things happen.  First, their saliva gets viscous.  Second, without the feeling in their lips they can’t spit.  I’m sitting on the side with the spitting bowl and the very first procedure, my wife stopped so the woman could rinse.  She leans over, swish swish swish, and spits into the bowl.  Well, that was what was supposed to happen.  I was casually sitting there without a concern in the world when a mouthful of bloody spit splashes on my leg.  My inner thigh.  I nearly passed out.

• The worst of the worst.  There are controls for the chair (up, down, back, forward) on both sides – dentist side and nurse side.  My controls are on the same arm as the suction, air, and water.  When I first started, my arm would get tired from holding the suction.  So I started to look for places to rest it while Cathy was drilling.  Well, I ended up resting it on the down control.  I lowered the poor woman in the middle of getting her upper molar drilled into.  She nearly jumped out of the chair with fright and I received a very nasty look from my wife behind her safety goggles.

While my visits to chair side dental assistancy are rare, I look forward to them.  Not enough to get any training or certifications mind you, which is why being a suctioneer is just right for me.