Thursday June 17 Clinic Day 4

Before beginning our extremely busy day, Honduras played their first World Cup game at 5:30am against Chile. Many of us got up to watch the game with some of the locals at the Mission's Rectory. Father Craig provided some breakfast cakes, coffee, and fruit for us to snack on while we watched the game. Unfortunately they lost 1-0, but fortunately for us, that meant we had patients lining up at 8am.

For the past day, Jeesoo had been suffering from a very terrible bug bite on his right ankle. His ankle was extremely swollen, painful and red. He could not walk on it and the inflammation was not getting better even with the strongest antibiotics the clinic had. Sister Maria began to worry about the pain and inflammation and decided to send pictures to an ER doctor in Tegucigalpa. The doctor suggested that he come in to get it looked at. So, Jeesoo and Alex ventured off to Tegucigalpa with some of the mission staff. He ended up staying in the hospital for 2 nights until the doctor agreed to release him. He is extremely thankful for all of the medical care that he received in the city and for the fact that he had a TV in his room with all of the World Cup games. He made it to Roatan a day late and is now finishing up his SCUBA certification. We are all so happy to have him back and well.

After a rough morning, the day began with 32 patients scheduled for extractions and another 10-15 for restorations. However, these extraction patients were not your typical primary teeth...these were root tips, first and second molars with very little crowns left, and removing peoples' last remaining teeth in order to make them edentulous. We purposely scheduled all of these patients today knowing that the two local dentists from Honduras and their team of prosthedontic residents would be visiting the clinic and offering their assistance in exchange for a presentation on TADs (temporary anchorage devices) by our very own Dr. Patterson. Sister Maria first put me in touch with Dr. Corrales when I began planning the trip back in January. He and his wife (also a dentist) were instrumental in getting the mission set up as they were our eyes and ears in Honduras and at the clinic. When we arrived on Saturday, we realized that we were missing a couple of supplies that we needed for root canals. Dr. Corrales had the items ready by Tuesday and had them sent back to the clinic with one of the sisters. It was really cool to talk with all of the residents and the two dentists about what dentistry is like in Honduras and how they think oral health education can be improved in the country. From chatting with all of them, we decided that it would be awesome if we could create a short 10-15 min video describing some good oral hygiene practices and how to take care of your teeth at home. In addition, the video would include some diet guidelines for children such as not drinking sodas before bed, brushing kids' teeth regularly, and not allowing them to snack on sugar cane. Hopefully this summer some of us students can put this video together and have it playing in the waiting room for patients while they wait for their appointments.

Some of the patients that we saw in the village on Tuesday came to our clinic today because their situations were at the stage of emergency. Most of them were children and Dr. Patel was able to see and treat all of them. In one of the cases, a young man in his early 20's had a cracked front tooth. It had split right down the vertical axis and when we were at the village, we could actually move one half of the tooth. He came today and we had to unfortuenately extract the tooth. But, at least we were able to help him by eliminating the pain that tooth caused him.

In addition to all the patients we had scheduled for the day, 3 or 4 of us taught yet another oral health class to the remaining 35 girls from the mission's girls' school. We provided fluoride, toothbrushes, toothpaste and floss to all of the girls and did a preliminary screening for each of them. The situation was much the same as it was with the other groups of girls and I really hope that the September trip will be able to focus a lot of their time on helping these girls back towards oral health.  

As the day came to an end around 7:30pm, we all headed back to the dorms hungry for dinner. At 8pm, the entire girls' school came over for a presentation to thank all of us for the work we were doing and for coming to Guaimaca to visit them. They performed 5 or 6 traditional Honduran dances in traditional Honduran clothing. It was so much fun to watch them dance! After they finished, they made all of us get up and learn a few of the dances with them. They laughed and laughed as many of us had a difficult time with the footwork. It was awesome to just hang out with the girls, play around a little bit and learn some new moves. After learning their dances, they asked us to teach them something that we do in the US. All we could come up with that we all knew was the Macarena. Hector sang while we all danced for the girls. Then we made all 60 of them come up and dance with us. It was awesome!! After all the festivities were over, they hugged each and everyone of us goodbye and thanked us for everything we were doing for them, their families and their city. That night made all of the hard work completely worth it.