A HOOK man left with a permanently damaged nerve after a nightmare dental appointment has been awarded £13,500 in compensation.

Brendon Watt, 53, thought he was going in for a routine tooth extraction when he visited Dr Pablo Lobato in Woking, Surrey, in August 2016.

But the plumbing and heating engineer was left in agony when the dentist spent two hours trying to take his tooth out.

He was given nine painful injections and was left in a t-shirt soaked in sweat from the saga.

His dentist’s failure to extract his tooth properly has led to him experiencing numbness at his lip, chin and jaw. He also suffered excruciating pain following the treatment.

“I’d seen a different dentist a week or so before because of toothache,” Mr Watt said. “I was prescribed antibiotics but the pain flared up again a few days later. I tried to see the same dentist again, but they were away so I saw Dr Lobato instead. He immediately recommended that my tooth was extracted.

“The extraction was horrific. I had nine injections into my mouth over the two hour period he spent trying to get my tooth out. He eventually extracted it, but by the end my t-shirt was soaking wet with sweat from the pain and stress of the procedure.”

But unfortunately for Mr Watt, time has not cured the agony.

“The right side of my lip, chin and jaw were still numb on my way home,” Mr Watt recalled. “I assumed this would only be temporary, so wasn’t particularly worried at first. But over night the pain intensified and the numbness was still there. I tried to go into work the next day but everyone told me I looked awful and to go home. The pain was horrendous and I couldn’t sleep or anything.”

The numbness persisted over the next week, so Mr Watt made another dental appointment.

“The dentist I saw indicated that the numbness should stop and feeling would return,” Mr Watt explained. “But as time went on I realised this wasn’t going to happen. It just never got better. I still have the numbness now.”

Mr Watt contacted the Dental Law Partnership. Analysis of his dental records revealed that Dr Lobato had failed to use reasonable skill and care in relation to the extraction of Mr Watt’s tooth. This caused nerve damage that led to Mr Watt suffering from excruciating pain and long term numbness.

“I imagine I’m going to have to live with this for the rest of my life,” Mr Watt said. “If I fall asleep upright watching TV I’ll wake up drooling because I can’t feel when I am doing it. It makes it difficult to eat and drink properly sometimes too. It’s unbelievable really, and it’s all because my dentist wasn’t doing his job properly.”

Jenny Wood of the Dental Law Partnership commented: “It was our position that the distress and pain our client experienced would have been avoided if the dentist had provided care to the correct standard.”

The Dental Law Partnership took on Mr Watt’s case in 2017.

The case was successfully settled in 2019 when the dentist paid £13,500 in an out of court settlement. The dentist did not admit liability.