Like yourself, I enjoy extracting teeth. It's the one discipline of dentistry where I feel like I am in a totally different zone. The instruments are different, the experience is different.

There is an immense sense of job satisfaction when I bloody tooth comes out, pun not intended. The rush of endorphines is even more so when the tooth breaks into pieces and it all finally comes out, even if it took 1 whole hour. But for me, the most frustrating moment is when I just can't remove a fractured root. This has happened three times in my very short dental career. The last one being an upper left wisdom tooth.

It took me 2 hours, and I would've been persistent enough to keep going if I didnt have other private patients waiting and that the patient in the chair was getting quite tired of me working in his mouth.

There is that sense of "grrrrr.." A sense of defeat and a desire to get back into the mouth again to redeem myself.

The annoying thing is, for wisdom teeth, there is not much buccal vestibule space to access and perform a surgical extraction. I worry that my surgical bur will slice the buccal mucosa off. I need a good dental assistant, the correct cheek retractor and a gut lining made of steel for wisdom teeth extractions.

If it was any other tooth, access wouldn't be as much of a problem. But I'm determined one day to find out how to properly do a surgical wisdom tooth extraction.