After yesterday’s sweltering day, we woke up to a cooler morning and an overcast sky. Nice. We had an hour and a half drive today to a village just on the Guatemalan border. Although they are in a multi-year project of regrading and paving the road to Guatemala, the last 45 minutes of our drive was either on road under construction, or road ready to be excavated. As the road heads west, electricity follows.
Our clinic was a three room block building, fairly clean, and interestingly, had lights, plugs, and switches, but the closest electricity was probably 30 miles east. They are ready when it arrives. Nobody was waiting for us when we arrived but the sign was in place, after asking around a bit, the director appeared and patients started to queue up. Today we had Mike seeing kids in the triage room, with him sitting on a sack of beans and the kids laid out on a bench. Gloria, Zach, and Jim in the larger room, doing most of the extractions, and Dan and me in the smaller back room either doing fillings or checking people’s ears.
Out back was our generator and compressor, and everything worked great. It took an hour to set up everything to do fillings. Rochell and I worked off of a wooden bed, with a thin mattress, we both stood up. That is a bit hard, because I have to use a foot pedal to run the dental handpiece, so, it is the same as standing on one leg. Rochell, had her back against the wall for support. Over 30 patients with lots of extractions. Teeth weren’t as bad as some locations I have been at. This is an agrarian culture, with little sugar in their diet. It makes a difference!
Everybody had a good experience extracting teeth. We got Zach right in there giving anesthesia and developing the techniques necessary to get the teeth out. I had only a couple of patients that needed fillings, but I got to bail out several patients whose broken or decayed root tips defied 1st world techniques of removal. Tricks of the trade when you don’t have a surgical option? Patience, cradle the patient’s head in your belly, steady pressure, and you can usually get them to walk out. The “tooth whisperer”.
Whoa, it is 7pm, and the lights just went out in the whole city! It is dark, and without A/C, it is starting to warm up. Enough battery in my laptop, I will keep going. For now. Oh, no WiFi either I guess!
9:30, electricity AND A/C back on. We were told that electricity frequently goes out in Belize for between 2 hours and 2 days, we were lucky. Time to turn the AC back on and upload for the day.
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