WATERVILLE – An office manager who sold sexual aids via office telephone. A dentist who treated patients while wearing a belly-dancing costume. A patient who thought her “face was going to explode” from an infection after she had two teeth pulled.

Those were some of the complaints aired by co-workers and patients during a three-day hearing before the state Board of Dental Examiners that led to the six-month suspension of Dr. Denise Nadeau.

Nadeau, who also was placed on five years’ probation with numerous conditions, is seeking to reopen her practice in Waterville after her suspension ends Sept. 17.

The complaints, which included false prescriptions written for staff members or patients and after-hours office parties that involved liquor and sex, paint a picture of a dental practice run amok.

They were detailed in reports by investigator Karen Packard and the board’s findings, the Kennebec Journal of Augusta reported.

The board voted unanimously to find that Nadeau was incompetent in several areas of dentistry practice, used a controlled substance for purposes other than dentistry, inappropriately prescribed or administered drugs, failed to follow infection-control guidelines, violated standards of record-keeping and violated board standards governing sexual conduct.

Nadeau’s attorney, Mark Franco, said he was preparing an appeal of the findings and that Nadeau, 47, is in the process of complying with conditions to resume her practice.

At Nadeau’s former workplace, Community Dental Center in Waterville, Nadeau was “under great stress occasioned by her and her husband’s attempts to successfully extricate his family out of Iraq and to the United States,” its board noted. Nadeau’s husband is from Iraq.

It also said the complaints added to her stress, as did an office atmosphere that “had become increasingly poisoned” after an after-hours party at Emergency Dental Services, which Nadeau opened in 2006.

At that party, according to board documents, Nadeau had a dental assistant buy liquor that was poured onto various body parts, including an office manager’s bared breasts.

Nadeau told the board she was not in the room at the time, but she admitted showing employees during office hours a nude photo of herself and allowing sexual aids to be sold over the phone by the office manager.

Staff members said Nadeau wore a belly-dancing costume in the office and invited employees to look at photos of naked men on the computer in her office.

In March, a 26-year-old patient told an investigator she thought her “face was going to explode” after two teeth were pulled in a five-hour operation that involved administration of 14 glass vials of dental anesthesia. She later received emergency-room treatment.

Nadeau, who admitted first attempting to extract the wrong tooth, was found to have failed to record the mistake. The board also said she failed to give a written diagnosis or treatment plan, and to provide an after-hours emergency phone number, postoperative instructions or follow-up.

Nadeau’s license was suspended that month after three patients returned to the office with problems from root canals she had performed a week earlier.

Nadeau worked for 10 years as a dental hygienist before graduating from the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery at the University of Maryland in 1997. She was first licensed as a dentist in Maryland in 1998 and has renewed that license every two years.