Page 39 - Dentistry Magazine 2021

Class Notes 39
“Needless to say, I spent quite a bit of time in the dental chair that year, and it really sparked my interest in dentistry.” So
he reached out to James Gambucci, DDS, another Gopher hockey star turned dentist, “and the rest is history.”
“He was very instrumental in my decision to become a dentist,” McHugh said of Gambucci. “Along with my college roommate, who was the one who knocked my teeth out.”
Today, McHugh is a partner at Blue Ridge Dental Center, with two locations in Minnetonka and Maple Grove. He loves being a dentist because every day is different. “I love meeting new people and helping them in any way I can,” he said.
“And I cherish the relationships I’ve formed with my patients and staff. They’ve truly become family.”
Dentist embraces her creative side to shine a
light on the profession’s mental health
Marie Moeckel, DDS ’08 is a force of nature. She is an artist, a writer, a creator who doesn’t plan to stay in one place too long.
“All my life, I’ve wanted to go, and do, and travel,” she said. “Wild horses couldn’t change my mind.” She’s bold and excited about life.
But that is not who she was in dental school.
The DDS 2008 graduate from the University of Minnesota School of Dentistry remembers her struggles with fitting
in and being herself when she prepared to be a dentist. The feeling of needing to be “normal” was compounded by Moeckel’s mental health struggles during dental school.
“I had to unlearn a lot of things, and accept that I’m fallible,” she reflected. “If you don’t fail, you can’t be successful—but in dental school, I felt like if I failed, there was no coming back.”
These feelings of loneliness and isolation came to a head when Moeckel chose to sell her Fargo,
North Dakota practice. Desperate with the need to process, but unable to share with anyone, she turned to writing.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to write something that if someday, someone couldn’t talk to anyone else and needed a book, this could be it? I wanted to throw this out to the universe, and this book could be the voice for them.”
That’s how Ignite was born. Moeckel’s first novel in the Terrible Love Memoirs trilogy was first completed under a pseudonym in 2015 and published through Atmosphere Press on March 1, 2021.
The book chronicles the “premature existential crisis” of dentist Ruby Carlson, who’s struggling to balance her family life with the desire to break free.
Moeckel was deliberate in her choice to make her main character a woman who “happens to be a dentist.”
Recognizing that dentists are infrequently recognized as main characters—and are odd, zany caricatures when they are— Moeckel said she “wanted to write a success story.”
“There is this idea that once you hit a point of desperation, there is no alternative,” she explained. “I wanted to show that you can successfully pivot, you can change.”
Moeckel also hopes that showcasing her creative, free side will inspire others in her profession to be their full selves and combat the myth that dentistry means never showing weakness or difference.
“I want people to feel more at liberty to be themselves,” she explained. “I’d love to see more people showing their personalities and embracing who they are.”
That work is ongoing in the School of Dentistry. Sara Johnson, assistant dean of student and resident affairs, knows that “stigma is a barrier to students seeking care.” She encourages all students who are facing academic and mental health struggles to work with her office and their professors to prioritize their mental health.
“We need to destigmatize mental health so students don’t feel alone and will let some- one know when they’re struggling,” she said.
At the School of Dentistry, that means creating change in policy and in culture. “We’ve updated policies to explicitly acknowledge that mental health concerns are to be treated just the same as physical health concerns,” she said.
Johnson hopes students know that no one needs to feel alone, or overwhelmed, or hopeless at the School of Dentistry. “It can be hard to know where to start,” she said. “They can reach out to me or another mem- ber of the student and resident affairs team, and we can help them identify next steps.”