my top 5 horror movies in dental school
if dental school had a film genre, it would be horror. here are my top 5. some of you will know exactly what i mean.
1. the empty dental chair
you swabbed it down. you set up the tray. you mentally rehearsed the appointment. you waited.
thirty minutes later: patient cancels.
that specific feeling of dread — after doing everything right, through absolutely no fault of your own — is genuinely hard to put into words. and it never really got easier, no matter how many times it happened.
2. hunting for clinical requirements
at NUS, we had to source our own patients to meet graduation requirements. which sounds manageable until you're deep into the clinical years and you realise that no matter how hard you work, the actual ticking-off of requirements is partly just... luck.
and we weren't allowed to post on social media.
so i did what any desperate dental student would do. i asked taxi uncles. i struck up conversations with strangers at restaurants. i genuinely considered whether the auntie at the hawker centre might need a filling.
looking back, it's kind of funny. at the time, it absolutely was not.
3. the crown provisional that flew across the room
the third time i sat my crown competency, my provisional flew off mid-trim.
just — gone.
i failed, obviously. there was nothing to assess. i spent the rest of the session quietly catastrophising while the examiner moved on.
i found the provisional on the floor beneath Oscar (our dummy head) after the competency ended. 🤦♀️
4. paying for lost lab instruments
i'll be honest. i was probably the top payer in my cohort.
i lost my wax knife and Lecron carver more times than i can count. somehow it always happened the same way: i'd walk to the plaster room, come back, and they'd just be... gone.
i also kept forgetting my sim lab key and had to pay the $5 fine multiple times to get my locker reopened. i still wonder where all that money ended up.
5. spending a small fortune on $2 plastic teeth
(i've heard it's $4 now. inflation is real.)
at one point i was the operative dentistry rep, which meant my desk was perpetually buried in plastic teeth and purple $2 notes. i don't know how to explain the specific stress of being responsible for everyone else's plastic teeth on top of your own.
honourable mentions (things that didn't quite make the top 5)
showed up to clinic in slippers. didn't notice until i was already in. briefly considered tying plastic bags around my feet. ended up making an emergency run to Kent Ridge MRT to buy a new pair 😭 (that shoe shop has since closed, rip)
failed the clinic chair bid
had an exam question on the exact topic covered during the lecture i skipped (don't skip your lectures!!)
NUS orientation deserves its own entry but i'll just say: iykyk 👀
looking back, most of these are funny now. but they definitely weren't funny at the time. dental school has a way of doing that — turning the worst moments into the best stories, eventually.
did any of these resonate with you? drop your own dental school horror movie in the comments. i know i'm not the only one with stories. 😭
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Dr Watt Sook May. BDS MDS (Orthodontics) (Singapore)
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