I'll give you entertainment
The ugly, gory, bloody secret life of NHL dentists
WHEN THE PUCK finally came to rest, it was almost entirely inside Craig MacDonald's mouth. It was Dec. 21, 2007, and with 1:51 left to play, the Tampa Bay Lightning winger, working in his own zone, stepped in front of an errant, elevated slap shot that instantly cleaved a grisly, bloody and impossibly wide swath of carnage through MacDonald's lips, gums and tongue before reducing nine of his teeth to dust. He spat out the 6 ounces of vulcanized frozen black rubber like it was a rotten MoonPie to reveal a fractured lower gum line and his half-cleaved tongue, hanging by a thread.
Team doctors reconnected the filleted parts of MacDonald's face with 75 sutures, then sent him home, where he sat on the couch until dawn, jolted awake by even the slightest puff of air passing over a mouthful of raw, exposed nerves.
"Worst night of my life," he says.
As MacDonald sat in Rivera's chair the next morning, the anatomy inside the player's mouth -- monstrously swollen gums, shredded tongue and Tic Tac nubs instead of teeth -- was unrecognizable. Rivera recoiled. He had no idea what he was looking at, or where to start. "His mouth was just obliterated," Rivera says. Out of instinct, he grabbed his air and water syringe and began washing away the dried brown blood and coagulate. Still unable to describe what slowly came into view next, Rivera puts his wrist against his mouth and wiggles his four fingers, like a walrus. "Four nerves just dangling there, flapping in the wind," he says. "I was like, 'OK, we need to do [six] root canals right now.' Oh, that poor guy."
Over the next four months, on off-days and between games, Rivera pieced MacDonald back together again during a dozen visits and more than 50 hours in the chair. The most hockey thing ever? MacDonald missed a grand total of one game.
Rivera, who grew up in Puerto Rico, had never seen a hockey game until he attended the University of Connecticut. Three months after completing his residency, and new to Florida, he got a message from the senior partner at his dental practice telling him to report downtown to lend a hand with the Lightning. Rivera Googled "Tampa" and "Lightning" and, after briefly considering that the last thing lightning-strike victims needed was a good tooth cleaning, he realized his boss was talking about the city's NHL team.
Most NHL arenas have dental chairs somewhere near the locker rooms. The work performed there is so vital to teams' health and success that dentists are often some of the few staff members to survive an ownership or coaching change, and many, including Rivera, get championship rings and their own day with the trophy after a run to the Stanley Cup. "After seeing how many lips had been on the Cup, I gave it the slightest little kiss I could ... and then I went and disinfected my mouth," Rivera says.
On his first trip to the Bolts' rink in 2002, Rivera, then a baby-faced 26-year-old, became lost inside the labyrinth of narrow, dark hallways under the arena. After the final horn blew, signaling another Lightning loss -- back then the team was, shall we say, toothless? -- Rivera looked up to see Tortorella, a notorious hothead, charging in his direction. Thinking that Rivera was a fan, a purple-faced Torts started screaming "Who the f--- let this f---ing kid back here!?"
"Somebody came running over, going, 'No-no-no, Coach, that's our dentist!'"
Even Sidney Crosby, the face of the NHL, has a reassembled smile. In 2013 a teammate's slap shot shattered his jaw, damaging 10 of Crosby's teeth.
That same season, the Rangers' Ryan Callahan was bearing down to deliver a check on an L.A. player when the guy turned around at the last second and bayoneted Callahan's mouth, "Game of Thrones" style, with his stick blade. On his first night on the job, and at his first hockey game, no less, new Kings dentist Kenneth Ochi sat Callahan down in the chair at Staples Center, took a deep breath and aimed his dental lamp at the side of the player's mouth.
The light shined straight through to the floor.
Callahan's teeth were intact, but there was a 3-inch hole in his cheek, like he was some kind of gaffed tuna. A closer look revealed that a large portion of Callahan's exposed jawbone was covered in a strange black substance. Ochi labored over it with his curette for an excruciating 15 minutes while trying to keep his dinner down. Later, a staff member with more hockey experience informed him, with a shrug, that the substance was stick tape. "There's no manual for this stuff," Rivera says.
(much more)
https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/27851359/the-ugly-gory-bloody-secret-life-nhl-dentists
