Shital Patel has never been a confrontational person.
But in the dental office lobby in Leland that day, she felt in her gut that something was off.
It was a Thursday afternoon in summer 2020, at the height of pandemic precautions, and her husband was undergoing a routine dental procedure. Hemant “Henry” Patel, himself a well-respected cardiologist, trusted his dentist, Mark C. Austin, and had no concerns about the procedure–a dental implant where a tooth had been extracted several months before.
The procedure was supposed to take 20 minutes. After 30 minutes, his wife checked in with the front office staff, who told her they got a late start. Ten minutes later, the staff reiterated the same message.
After another 15 minutes passed, Shital Patel dropped all pretense. “Totally out of character for me, I said, ‘I want to see my husband now.’”
Another staffer emerged and told everyone else in the waiting room to go home. “Nobody’s telling me anything,” Patel said. “I just knew.”
She ran to the door that led to the dental suites, but staffers blocked her from going farther.
Police arrived first, then paramedics. For 21 minutes, paramedics gave her husband CPR before he regained a pulse. But all that time without oxygen had taken its toll. Three days later, he was taken off life support. The 53-year-old left behind his wife, two adult children, and hundreds of patients, friends, and colleagues who revered him. His COVID-era funeral was so well-attended online that it hit the livestream’s 3,000-viewer cap.
It took a week for Shital Patel’s anger to set in. At first, she assumed her husband’s death was an accident–not something preventable.
“When you go to a place, you just assume everything is in order,” she said. “You don’t walk into a building and say, ‘Do you think the ceiling is going to fall down on us?’”
How a Widow’s Appointment to the State Dental Board Got Spiked
Shital Patel’s husband died while undergoing a routine dental procedure. After she advocated for safety reforms, the governor’s office told her it had named her to the state dental board–then dentists intervened.
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