Branching out with Skills

In the chair, endodontics resident Olivia Isshak ’21 had a 12-year-old patient. He was suffering from inflamed nerves and needed three root canals on his front teeth. He was in so much pain that even Isshak could sense it. The moment she got the nerves out of his teeth, both felt an instant relief. So did his mother, who came back the next day just to tell Isshak how much of a difference she made in her son’s life and how he began eating, smiling, and dancing again.  

“It’s so difficult for these patients to come to the clinic, yet she came back just to tell that,” Isshak said. “It made me tear up, and the mother said, ‘Don’t ever stop what you do because this is all we have here.’”  

Isshak, a second-year resident at Rutgers School of Dental Medicine (RSDM), went to Jamaica on a mission trip supported by the AAE Foundation for Endodontics. She is a member of its Resident Expert Advisory Council (REACH) Committee, which helps the organization to connect with the next generation of endodontists. When the opportunity came up, she was in.

“My family is from Syria, so I’m a product of an immigrant family and understand access to care can be very difficult and, especially, access to specialty care,” she said. “I feel like I’m finally at the point in my life where I can apply my skills to provide a service to help people, and I wanted to take advantage of that.”

Isshak grew up in New Jersey. She went to Rutgers for her undergraduate degree and then enrolled in RSDM. Following dental school, she completed a general practice residency at Hackensack University Medical Center, where she discovered her interest in endodontics during rotations. “Those days, I felt the best and happiest in my program,” she said. “I think it was the most rewarding to me to get people out of pain.” She later shadowed an endodontist­­—an experience that affirmed her decision to return to her alma mater for her endodontics residency.

“Rutgers prepares you clinically so much more than you can ever imagine,” she said. “I’m grateful to have gone to this dental school because we’ve always had a great patient population, and professors are always more than willing to help us excel in dentistry and constantly challenge us.”

These clinical skills came in handy on the one-week Jamaica trip. She saved many teeth that would have gotten extracted, especially the front teeth. “I didn’t know this before, but a lot of the people in Jamaica end up getting service jobs that require front teeth, so these meant everything to them because missing your front tooth means you may not have a job.” She also practiced thinking on her feet. “Sometimes the radiographs would stop working, sometimes my suction would go out, and I’d have to figure out how to adjust. There was a lot of problem-solving.”

This trip was her first, but she hopes it will not be the last.

“I just want to get a little bit more experience under my belt [with these volunteer trips],” she said, “and eventually, I can see myself mentoring one.” Maybe, she said, it could be to help Syrian refugees. “I want to give back to where I came from.”