Day 7 3rd Clinic Day and flooding at Poppy’s Place

The rain has stopped, for a while.  The bridge to the island is partially submerged, so the villagers are repairing and raising it in places.  One of our hosts actually took a small dugout canoe across, we may need to do that next week if it continues to rain.

Clinic was very different today.  I only saw two patients in the morning!  Gloria pulled many more teeth then I did.  My first patient was a boy about 8 who needed an adult lower molar removed.  It had only been in his mouth for 2 years, but the decay was so deep it needed to be extracted. I numbed him up as usually and as I started to elevate the tooth to get ready to put the forcep on, it would not move!  After working at this for a few minutes with both elevators and forceps I still couldn’t get it to move even a little. Zero, Nada.

So, I elected to “slice and dice” the tooth to take it out in pieces.  A  challenge in that I nor the clinic had any surgical burs, so I had to kinda make it up on the go.  But with a little bit of time and patience, I was able to finally get some movement and remove the separated thin, LONG roots without breaking any of the root tips off.

My second patient was even more interesting.  Backstory:  What is popular in 3rd world countries are “window bridges”.  If someone looses a front tooth, or just for cosmetic reasons, people will have window bridges or window crowns placed. These are made of gold and they are like little cans that are swedged over the teeth with a window in front for some of the enamel to poke through.  When they smile, you see a lot of gold with little whitish boxes where there teeth are.  People find these very attractive.  The main problem is they fit very poorly, so eventually they leak and get decay under them.  Finally the teeth need to be extracted when the crowns of the teeth are reduced to decayed mush.

SO….this older lady who came in wanting her window-bridge removed and all the teeth extracted.  Typically these bridges are 3 or 4 teeth.  She has a 12 unit bridge!  So, for the next hour and a half I carefully cut it into 4 pieces extracting 6 or 7 mushy, infected teeth!  Quite a bit of gold actually,  I offered it to her, but she didn’t want it.  I will have it assayed and send “People of Peru” the check.

Finally, we discovered that the sandbags we placed to protect Poppy’s Place helped and hurt.  It helped keep the Amazon out as it raised, but because of the incredible rain, it didn’t allow the runoff from the campus to flow into the Amazon.  So….the sandbags kept the Amazon water out, and the rain water in!  Result, all the first floor rooms in the 2 buildings had had 5 inches of water in them!  Lots of pumping of water!