Mother: Daughter 'Died,' Revived After Visit With N.J. Dentist Linked To Bacteria Outbreak

It's been a year of hell for 25-year-old Nikki Taylor since she got her wisdom teeth pulled, and her mother never knew why.

But it wasn't because of any chronic pain that bewildered her. It was an episode of cardiac arrest in April that stopped her heart from beating before, her mother said, "she was brought back to life."

"She basically died," Maryann Taylor of Hackettstown said. "She was literally dead for a while."

Her doctors at Morristown Medical Center weren't sure what was going on either, even though the hospital had dealt with similar cases linked to Nikki's dentist.

They even gave her a pacemaker, thinking that, perhaps, she had some sort of undetected heart defect.

Then came this week, when Taylor found out that her daughter's dentist has been linked to 15 cases in a bacteria outbreak, one of which involved somebody's death.

Now Taylor isn't so confused anymore. Her daughter is among a growing number of people who went to Dr. John Vecchione to get dental work and came back much worse than they were before. Many now are speaking out about it, too, and lawyers say they're gearing up to file malpractice suits against him.

"Anything we'll do to get this guy out of business, we'll do," she said.

Amazingly, neither Nikki nor Maryann were aware of the reports. Indeed, Nikki even had an appointment with Vecchione on Tuesday — he's still practicing despite being sanctioned by the state.

"She [Nikki] told him the story about what happened to her this year, and he looked like a deer in the headlights," Maryann Taylor said.

Vecchione, who operates in Mt. Olive and Parsippany, engaged in practices linked to at least 15 bacterial infections of the heart called "endocarditis" for at least two years, including one case that led to a death because of surgery complications, according to records obtained by Patch and filed by the N.J. State Board of Dentistry.

And there could be more than 15 cases in which Vecchione engaged in questionable practices — including one in which a Roxbury man claims he "almost died" in his office when the dentist allegedly administered too much anesthesia. Read more: Patient Of N.J. Dentist Linked To Bacterial Outbreak: 'I Nearly Died In His Office'

Attempts to reach Vecchione have been unsuccessful. Read more: N.J. Dentist Linked to 15-Case Bacterial Outbreak, State Officials Say

Nikki Taylor was like a lot of people who had trouble following her visit with Vecchione: There were no signs of physical problems, particularly with the heart. She's a mother of a 3-year-old who was athletic, played sports, and took care of herself.

"If she had a heart problem, it would have come out with all those sports she played," her mother said.

Her wisdom teeth work was in January, and over the next three months, Nikki didn't have any problems.

Then came April, when she fainted three times, out of nowhere. Then, a few days later, she was about to have a meeting with several people while working at the Sunrise House, a drug rehabilitation center in New Jersey.

She fainted again, this time falling on her face and breaking her two front teeth. Nikki went into cardiac arrest, and needed 30 minutes of CPR to be revived.

"It's a good thing there were a lot of nurses around who could help her," said her mother, who also works at Sunrise House in Lafayette.

By the time she got to Morristown Medical Center, Nikki was having seizures. They put her on antibiotics. They put her in a medically induced coma for three days. The family and friends even had a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for her medical care.

The doctors said that Nikki had about a 1 percent chance of not suffering brain damage, and it doesn't appear she does. But she did miss about five months of work, and she's not allowed to drive until October.

All the while, the doctors and the family still didn't seem to know why this was happening.

"They had no reasoning for this happening," Maryann Taylor said. "They couldn't figure it out."

Now she's just recently back at work, and Nikki hopes to follow old routines relatively shortly.

But there was still one lingering issue: She still needed to follow up on her wisdom teeth work from January.

When Nikki visited Vecchione on Tuesday, her mother said, the dentist told her he may consider giving her implants for her teeth.

After everything that's happened, Maryann said, there's no way that's happening.

"This guy shouldn't be working," Maryann Taylor said.