A Smile Worth Celebrating
Some stories are worth pausing for.
This is one of them.
Texas A&M University College of Dentistry recently featured a beautiful piece about Marie Seykora, a new dental hygiene graduate from Flower Mound who finished at the top of her class of 30. We are proud to say that story runs straight through our own practice and through our own family.
The Night It Happened
In October 2016, Marie was a high school student when she tripped and fell on a brick stairwell outside her home. Three of her front teeth were knocked out of position. Her parents did what any neighbor would do in a moment like that: freaked out! Fortunate for them, though, was that their next door neighbor was none other than our own Dr. Aaron Vickers.
Dr. Vickers came over, assessed the damage, and brought Marie to his Flower Mound office that same evening. He numbed her mouth, manually repositioned her teeth, and used wire bonding to splint everything in place until she could follow up with her dentist. He told her to take the next day off school. She went anyway.
That is the kind of tough that tends to go places.
Grace
The Seykora and Vickers families were already close neighbors, and that relationship only deepened over the years. Marie became a babysitter and eventually a true fixture in the Vickers household, especially for Grace, Dr. Vickers’ daughter, now 12, who has Kabuki syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that can affect multiple systems in the body. Grace has been through three open-heart surgeries and faces ongoing developmental challenges.
Marie describes Grace simply: “like a sister to me.”
Caring for Grace shaped the kind of dental professional Marie set out to become. She pursued special care dentistry with intention, worked at A&M Dentistry’s Special Care Clinic, and shadowed providers at both Children’s Health and Scottish Rite for Children. Her experience with Grace gave her a firsthand understanding of how closely oral health connects to overall systemic health, a perspective that every patient deserves in their provider.
What This Means to Us
Dr. Vickers has spent his career helping patients through some of their most difficult moments: traumatic injuries, complex extractions, implant surgery, full-arch restorations. That one Thursday evening with a teenager and a brick stairwell was not unusual for him. What is unusual is learning, years later, that it helped set someone on a path to a career in dentistry.
We congratulate Marie Seykora on graduating at the top of her class and on the compassionate, purposeful clinician she has clearly become. And we are proud of Grace for being exactly who she is.