Day 1

Today went surprisingly well for the first day of clinic. It took us awhile to set up because we had a lot of trouble getting the compressors and vacuum/suction to work. The whole experience of setting up chairs really made all of us thankful for having these simple dental necessities back at UCLA that we usually take for granted. But somehow we managed to get them to work, thanks to everyone's help, especially Reemon and Hayley, and started seeing our first patient at 10:30 am which was really exciting. 

Michael and I teamed up and saw an elderly woman who seemed very nervous and anxious. She wanted us to extract all of her remaining teeth, which of course we refused to do. Instead, we restored two class 5 lesions on her lower premolars. Since it was our first patient outside of school, we decided to each do a prep. We anesthetized her via mental nerve block and local infiltration. Michael did the first prep on 28, which was minimal because it was a lesion due to abrasion. I did the second prep on 29, which had some decay. The decay was deeper than I expected, and when I hit a deep part, she winced, which told me she wasn't numb. I then gave her more anesthesia via infiltration and asked her if anything hurt, to which she responded no. I even had Eugenio and Ginny translate for me, but she insisted that she didn't have any pain. A little shortly after she sat up and walked away from the chair. At that point, Michael and I just stared at each other dumbfounded. After talking with one of the nurses, she decided to come back. Dr. Espinoza overheard what she was saying to the nurse and came and helped us with the rest of the procedure. While this was disappointing and somewhat lowered our confidence in our newfound clinical competence, it really made me realize how difficult it can be to treat someone with a language barrier. In retrospect, I think I would have done an IA block just to make sure that she was definitely anesthetized. 

Our next patient was a young male with two recurrent class 3 carious lesions on 8 and 9. They were fairly large lesions under already large restorations. They were fairly straight forward, but it was difficult to achieve good isolation because of constant bleeding from the gingival papilla. Dr. Rima helped us with better isolation by using a cotton pellet with hemodens.  Dr. Espinoza took before and after pics, since it was an esthetic case. 

The last patient we saw was a young girl who needed restorations on incipient caries. Although I would prefer to not restore these, Dr. Espinoza explained that there are no such things as incipient caries here, because they will only grow bigger and we are unsure when they will see the dentist next. All in all it was a good day, but I'm hoping we'll be able to see a lot more patients tomorrow. 

After our long clinic day Dr.  Rima treated us to dinner at the hotel down the street where is is staying , which was so nice and sweet of her. Some of us had chicken, while others had fish. It was definitely the best meal we had all day, since we only had ham sandwiches for lunch. Dr. Espinoza recommended the plantains at dinner, which were AMAZING!! We also talked about what each person did that day, and how we could improve the next day. In recap, we saw 21 patients today, and did restorations, prophies, sealants, varnish, and one RCT. Hayley treated an autistic child, which she said was challenging but a good experience. She said she learned good ways to deal with such anxious patients with Dr. Espinoza's help. She also got the opportunity to do the RCT on a mandibular molar. She also paired up with Yoonah, who got to remove some decay. Reemon and Eugenio paired up and did restorations, with Eugenio taking the operator chair at times doing a class II and local anesthesia. Sami paired up with his mom and did three restorations on 18, 19, & 20. Natalie also got her hands dirty with applying fluoride varnish and assisting when needed. Noha got to do several extractions, explaining that it was exciting, a good experience, but also stressful, saying she she needed a fan multiple times :) 

At dinner, Dr. Espinoza explained that she had been fighting with the nurses at the mission all day because they had neglected to tell the community we were coming to provide free dental care. They had only opened it to the people of their church. We were not happy to hear this because we want to treat as many people as possible, especially those who need urgent care. Hearing this, Mama Espinoza spent the day going around and trying to pass the word around town. We are hoping the nurses will be more open to us treating anyone who needs our care, even if they are not part of the church. 

We ended the night playing several rounds of mafia and had some good laughs. Yoonah was our resident mafia :)

Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!

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