Day 2 of Clinic!!

We are in the middle of Day 2!  

We forgot to mention that on Sunday most of us played soccer with the locals and got our butts kicked.  They even gave us some players from their team, which made it 11 vs. 6, but that didn't even seem to help very much.  

We had such a long day in clinic yesterday and worked from 7:45am until 8:00pm.  Most of the patients that we are seeing have had their appointments for over a year and come from long distances.  Many other people come and sit outside for the entire day to try to be seen.  Although we cannot promise anything, we try our best to fit them in and were able to see everyone yesterday, which meant some of us staying until 8:00pm to finish.  Many of the patients come in having severe decay and pain.  We have been doing a LOT of extractions, some root canals on anterior teeth, and many composite restiorations on anterior teeth where we basically have to rebuild the whole arch because of the severe decay.  We were exhausted last night and went to bed fairly early to prepare for today.

We got another early start at 7:45am and had a very hectic morning!  We saw very similar cases to yesterday, but are getting faster at deciding what the treatment plan should be and restoring what we have time for.  We also saw a mentally ill little girl who had such a severely decayed tooth that only the base of the crown was left.  Although very uncooperative initially, she did so good when Dr. Graves extracted the tooth with assistance from several dental students.  We are also getting used to the very poor or no suction on several chairs, chairs that don't lean back, and minimal light.  

So far, so good!!