A Brush with Love(21)
“It’s Dr. Horowitz,” she said, and Dan pressed his lips in a firm line to hide his smile. “I’m sorry to hear about your wait. We’ll get started right away.” Harper washed her hands at the small sink in the corner.
Mr. Owen scoffed, then turned appraising eyes on Dan. He gave Dan a once-over before offering a stiff nod of approval. Dan had a sense of where this was headed, and he didn’t like it.
“All right, let’s get started,” Harper said, snapping on gloves. “Do you understand what I’ll be doing today? We have plan—”
“Why don’t you let the doctor speak, sweetheart,” Mr. Owen said, cutting her off and waving an impatient hand at Dan. “Let the man do his job.”
The air whooshed from the room. Dan’s eyes snapped to Harper’s but, to his surprise, she looked unfazed. Despite her calm, he was swarmed with the need to defend her, protect her.
“As I said before, I’m Dr. Horowitz, your student doctor. This is Dan and he will be my assistant.”
Mr. Owen turned to Dan with an incredulous scowl. Dan stared back in silence, arms crossed over his chest. Mr. Owen apparently took Dan’s disdain as a nonverbal declaration of allegiance, directing his next words only to him.
“I don’t know what this—this…” He flapped his hand toward Harper. “… girl thinks she’s doing, but I’ll have you take the tooth out. It’ll need muscle. A small thing like her won’t do it right.”
Dan’s anger burned, and he opened his mouth to tell the dick exactly what he was going to use his muscles for, but Harper cut him off.
“Mr. Owen, I’m highly prepared for your case. I’ve done extensive treatment planning with the surgical clinic’s attending, and your general dentist. Dan is a first-year student on a rotation to observe and assist. Now, let’s begin. I would hate for you to be even further off schedule, since timing is so important to you.”
She said this with kind indifference and turned to lower the patient’s chair. Dan balked at her level-headedness when all he wanted to do was rip this asshole’s tooth out with his bare hands.
“No! I’m not having some stupid little girl working on my mouth! Get me a male doctor. Now.”
Dan took a step toward the man. “Okay, ass—”
Harper cut him off.
“Dan.” She said his name with a snap, and he shut his mouth at the angry flash in her eyes. She fixed him with a stern look for a moment before turning to Mr. Owen.
“Why don’t you tell me exactly what concerns you.”
Her spine was stiff and her stare hard as she said this, but Dan still wanted to step in and defend her. He didn’t want this man’s toxic words to touch her. Dan knew how easily another person’s doubt could seep below the skin like a poisonous cloud, settling into bones and chipping away like a cancer. He wouldn’t let anyone do that to Harper.
Mr. Owen’s face twisted. “Little slow, honey? Let me repeat myself. I don’t want a woman botching up my goddamn tooth. Why sit here and have you strain your little arms for an hour just to have you go and get a man to come and fix your mistakes? The tooth is in there deep and good, the other doctor told me so. It’s retained.” The man gave a cocky smile like he was some sort of Einstein instead of a rotten-mouthed dipshit. “You don’t have what it takes.”
He folded his arms over his chest and shot a smug look between Harper and Dan, as though his logic was foolproof. Dan’s heart sank when he saw Harper nodding. Nope, not while he was around.
“Listen up, dic—”
“Dan.” Harper’s voice cut through the room.
He met her heated stare. Why was she getting mad at him? Why wouldn’t she let him handle this guy for her?
Harper cleared her throat and moved to the computer. She clicked through a few screens before pulling up an X-ray of Mr. Owens’s lower jaw. The remaining teeth in the man’s mouth glowed white on the image, jutting at unnatural angles and littered with dark shadows that even Dan’s untrained eyes knew meant decay. Two twisted roots were buried partially below the bone near the back, the tooth next to it almost completely black and tilted at an odd angle.
“So, here is your panoramic. As you can see”—she pointed to the small line of jaw bone the teeth rested in—“your lack of oral hygiene and neglect of your gums has left you with severe alveolar bone loss. This means that your periodontal ligament is almost completely worn away from the root of your teeth, including these retained roots and molar geared for removal today. This bone loss means your teeth are so weakly held in your mouth, they don’t need a lot of force for me to remove them.” She shot Mr. Owen a tense smile.
“Believe me,” Harper continued, “I’ve removed much sturdier teeth from men with drastically stronger, thicker bone. In fact, an excess of force—the force you seem to expect from a male practitioner—would likely shatter your delicate, rotten tooth and bone, leading to excess trauma.” She leaned against the sink counter.
“Any excessive trauma could result in the piercing of your inferior alveolar nerve, causing paresthesia, or the molar fracturing in the socket and the need for a surgeon to lay a flap, causing greater wounds. Your years of smoking mean you have disrupted wound healing and would put you at risk for infections and possible necrosis. I don’t believe in laying unnecessary flaps and prefer to do the least invasive methods of removal to also prevent alveolar fracturing during the procedure—a common complication seen when big, strong men whip impacted teeth out with too much force.”