OPEN WIDE

What really happens when the dental chair reclines and the door closes?

For eighteen years, Sugeily Richards lived behind the mask - as a dental assistant navigating operating rooms, private practices, military hospitals, and academic institutions where professionalism was preached and chaos thrived behind the scenes.

Open Wide: Scrubs, Secrets, and Survival is a raw, darkly funny memoir that pulls back the curtain on the dental industry while tracing one woman's relentless fight to survive systems designed to break her.

From toxic offices and predatory power dynamics to whispered scandals, workplace sabotage, and secrets that never make it into patient charts, Richards exposes a healthcare culture built on silence - and the women who pay the price for keeping it.

But this book is more than dental drama.

Woven through the surgical lights and sterilization rooms is a deeply personal story of survival: a childhood marked by abuse and displacement, teen motherhood, domestic violence, poverty, and the quiet strength required to keep showing up when the world keeps demanding more. Dentistry didn't just test her - it mirrored every system she'd already survived.

With unflinching honesty and biting humor, Richards takes readers from Puerto Rico to Texas, from strip-mall clinics to military operating rooms, from professional humiliation to personal collapse - and ultimately, to clarity, boundaries, and rebirth.

This memoir is for:

• Women in healthcare who feel invisible, overworked, and disposable
• Readers drawn to insider exposés of toxic professional cultures
• Survivors who turned endurance into leadership
• Anyone who has ever been told "this is just how it is" - and knew it wasn't

Open Wide is not a takedown.

It's a reckoning.

A story about surviving silence, exposing the system, and choosing yourself - even when the cost is everything.

Once you see what happens behind the mask, you'll never look at a dental chair the same way again.