Dr. John Batson and his wife, Rachel, with their children, Maggie, from left, John Jr. and Bobby. Photo by Matthew Sewell.

 

Fate, family led to a career in oral surgery

 

There is little in Dr. John Batson’s early life to suggest that he would have ended up where he is, a Little Rock oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Batson does not come from a family of dentists, nor was a career in dentistry always his dream. However, getting to where he is today may have been due to a few key moments of fate along the way, he said.

 

“I never had this burning desire to go into dentistry or medicine,” Batson said. “If you asked me what I wanted to be in high school, I would have said a professional baseball player.”

 

He played baseball from age 4, but a major sports injury, pressure from his mother and matters of the heart changed that pathway. Just as he was turning 18 and setting his sights on school at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, he met Rachel, the woman who would one day become his wife.

 

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I had a serious girlfriend,” Batson said. “I actually proposed to her when I was 19.”

 

Batson also knew he needed to find a path that would give him a stable career to take care of Rachel and a family. The first career that came to mind was as a doctor, but when he talked with his doctor about it, the physician advised against it, telling him instead to become a dentist.

 

“I talked to my family dentist, and he said he was super happy,” Batson said. “‘[He told me], ‘I’d recommend dentistry to anyone.’ It was just kind of fate intervening.”

 

After undergrad, Batson entered the dental program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City on a military scholarship. At the end of his second year of dental school, he took the first part of his board exams and scored in the 92nd percentile. Batson said he realized that meant he could specialize in any form of dentistry he wanted, so he began to shadow different types and landed on oral surgery.

 

“It was really cool,” he said. “You’re putting people’s faces back together.”

 

After years of grueling residency hours at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, he continued in the Army, working in Georgia, which he said was a nice change of pace compared to the almost 20 hours days he had been putting in before that. The newfound free time offered him the chance to help coach his children’ s baseball teams and spend time being a dad.

 

As his eldest child, Maggie, began to reach high school age, he and his wife started to consider whether to stay in the Army or make a permanent move back to Arkansas. When both Batson and his wife’s fathers died within a week of one another, the couple knew they needed to move back to be close to their mothers.

 

After leaving the Army and moving back to Arkansas in 2017, Batson worked at a few local practices with different partners, but this year, he has made plans to finally set out on his own.

 

Batson hopes his middle child, who is a sophomore at University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and wants to become a dentist, may join him at the new practice one day. If that happens, it would be the latest sign that everything up to now has been the right move and set the stage for more chapters of the story to be written in the years to come.

 

“Again, sometimes fate intervenes to make your decision,” Batson said.

 

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