Why I built a clinic where pain is against the rules

And he did it while I was sitting in his dental chair, drenched in sweat, with that metallic smell of the clinic in my nostrils.

They say a shoemaker's children always wear torn shoes. My case was a little more extreme.

I was 22 years old. A dental student. I had a throbbing pain in my back molar, the kind of pain that feels like someone is hammering on the nerve from the inside.

I sat down in my dad's chair, scared the way any normal person is scared in a dental chair. And yes, even dentists get scared. Don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

He looked at me and in his sweetest "dad voice", the one I had trusted my entire life, he promised: "Nothing's going to hurt, sweetheart."

I begged him for anesthesia anyway. I was that scared.

But the lower jaw needs a long needle inserted from inside the mouth, and my dad didn't want to do that, so he decided to try, let's just say, a creative way of bending the truth. He told me: "To give you the anesthesia, I'll have to push the needle through your cheek from outside, through your face. Do you want that?"

Today I know that technique exists only in dusty theoretical textbooks. Nobody has ever actually done it in practice.

But at 22, terrified, I would rather have the work done on a live nerve than have a needle pushed through my face.

So that's what we did.

I cannot describe that pain in words. But that wasn't the worst part.

When he finished drilling, I was shaking and gasping for air. He said: "There, it's done. Just one more second to put in the medication. Hold on, sweetheart."

I opened my mouth. I heard the drill spin up.

The next thing I knew, I had jumped halfway off the chair. That's how hard my body reacted. That kind of pain ejects you from your own body.

He put medicine on the nerve to kill it. "See?" he said. "Now the nerve will die, and in seven days we'll just take it out. That doesn't hurt at all."

I believed him. He's my dad. He's a dentist.

Seven days later I came back, completely relaxed. The nerve was dead, right?

Removing the temporary filling was fine. Then he took the thin needle and went into the canal.

I think I lost consciousness from the pain. I screamed at him through tears. I asked him why he was lying.

And he just kept repeating: "Hold on. One more second. It'll pass."

There, still crying in that chair, something in me turned.

Not because the tooth hurt. But because the man who loved me most in the world, my own father, looked me in the eye and lied. Just to make his job easier.

It took me ten years and several hundred patients of my own to understand what really happened that day.

My father wasn't a bad man. My father was an average dentist.

And that's the truth nobody in this business will say out loud: when a dentist tells you "hold on one more second," he is rarely saying it for you. He is saying it for himself. He's thinking about how to finish faster. How to move to the next patient. How to skip the 15 minutes of waiting for the anesthesia to fully kick in.

Your pain in a dental chair is not an accident. It's not "this tooth was complicated." It's not "it had to hurt a little."

Your pain is a decision. A decision someone made. About you. Without you.

After that day, I physically cannot make that decision.

That's why I built this practice on one rule: my patient does not feel what I felt. Period.

I called it Aponia. It's an ancient Greek word, ἀπονία. It means painlessness.

Every decision I made about how this clinic works was made by the 22-year-old girl crying in that chair. She is the one who set the rules. I am the one who keeps them.