In a rare, but tragic incident, a Waterloo, Ontario teen died July 4 during a routine trip to the dentist for the removal of three wisdom teeth, according to an article on the Canada-based Web site, TheRecord.com.
Leejay Levene went to a Waterloo dental surgeon last week, sat back in the dentist's chair and slipped under a general anesthetic.
But soon, the anesthesiologist noticed something was wrong: Levene began struggling for air. A call went out to 911 as the anesthesiologist tried to resuscitate him.
Paramedics and, later, doctors at Grand River Hospital tried everything, but by the next day, the 18-year-old was dead.
Now, the Waterloo Region coroner, assisted by regional police, is trying to determine what happened to the teen, who was by all appearances healthy, and was undergoing a simple dental procedure routinely performed on patients his age.
"This is such an anomaly," Irwin Fefergrad, the registrar for the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario, told the Register.com.
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Dr. Timothy Wallace, the surgeon who was to perform Levene's surgery last week, has practiced dentistry for 32 years and declined to discuss what went wrong during the surgery. He would only say that the tragedy occurred when the boy began having trouble breathing.
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