Worst Case Scenario

Sometimes in life, you just get tired. You get tired of saying the same things over and over again at your job (PLEASE FLOSS!), you get tired of saying the same things at home (PLEASE FLOSS!), and you get tired of saying the same things in your sleep (Just pretend you an orphan...actual sentence I told Jeffrey in my sleep one time).

When this general tiredness strikes me, I start to look for new, more exciting ways to communicate the same old information. Sometimes this is good, and sometimes this is bad. The following is a bad example...

Last week I was on Dental Emergency Clinic duty when a guy came in with a bad toothache. When I did my exam, I found that he had one tooth that was badly broken and infected that was causing his pain, but he had two other teeth that were similarly broken and badly infected, but weren't causing him any pain. When I informed him of these findings, he said, "I just want to get the tooth pulled that's hurting." I told him that I understood and that we would certainly extract that tooth to get him out of pain, but that he really should seek comprehensive dental care for the other two. (This is one of those speeches I repeat a LOT at school.)

I went to go get the extraction forceps and consent forms, and when I got back the patient was ready with a question.

"So, what's the worst that could happen if I don't get those other two teeth taken care of?"

Filtered through my mind, this question sounded more like this: "So, teeth aren't really that important are they, person who's spent 4 years studying them?"

Fed up with my usual speeches on oral disease being linked to systemic disease and tired of saying my speech about 'if you had an infection on your skin you wouldn't just leave it there, would you?' I decided to change it up a little.

I asked him, just to make sure, "Do you really want to know the worst thing that can happen?"

He nodded.

I said, "The infection could go to your brain and you could die."

In my defense, this is the worst case scenario and also a realistic outcome of untreated dental disease. In my offense(?), this almost never happens in generally healthy patients. Again, in my defense, why would you ever ask a medical/dental professional the worst thing that could happen? It's always death. Death is always the worst thing that could happen.

As inappropriate and probably unprofessional as my comment was, I wonder if that patient is frantically looking up dentists in the yellow pages right now to get those other two teeth taken care of...whatever works, right?