Dominican Republic Trip

Okay shocker, that's right, this may be the one and only time I post an entry on our blog. It is more like a blog about random stuff Amy thinks about. Now everybody gets to know what I am married to, and I think I'm super lucky! Oh, that was so sweet :)

I thought I better let everyone know about the trip. It was really awesome, and is something that will stay with me forever. Seeing all these people who want to go to the dentist, I know, its unheard of. Our day consisted of meeting for breakfast around 7am, leave for the clinic around 7:30am, arrive at the clinic around 8am, work all day with a 15min lunch break, and then end the day somewhere around 5'ish. When we would show up to the clinic in our personally guarded (by the Dominican Republic Air Force) bus, this is what would be waiting for us...lines and lines of people. Some of these people started to wait for us at 4am.


Our dental clinic is actually an emergency room. The clinic consisted of a Diagnosis Room, where the patients were screened for their dental needs and oral cancer. In the Diagnosing Room we had three stations.

Then we had two rooms for Restorative. Between the two rooms we had 7 stations where we would do cavity fillings. Let me tell you, by the end of the week my back was killing. As you can tell from the pictures we didn't have dental chairs. The patient would sit down in a plastic chair and we would have to bend over or kneel down to see into their mouths.

Then we had one Oral Surgery Room, with 3 stations. This room was basically for pulling out teeth. We did do a couple of biopsies for cancer.

Then upstairs we for the pediatric room. We had 2 pediatric residents and a pediatric dentist come with us. They had some interesting stories, for example, a kid throwing up and urinating on one of my classmates, but luckily I was never selected to join them upstairs. As much as I love hanging out and teasing kids, I do not like treating them.

I wish I had all of the numbers to tell you guys but I don't. I know we treated over 300 patients and there were still many more that needed to be treated, but we ran out of time and had to turn them away. I'm pretty sure we did over 2,000 different types of procedures. For instance, the one day I was in the Oral Surgery rotation we extracted 83 teeth (remember that is between 3 students and an oral surgeon). When I was in the Restorative rotation, I would be doing somewhere between 2 to 8 fillings on one mouth in one visit. So each day you would work your butt off and sweat till your clothes were soaked through. It was awesome :)

Then the worst part of the trip was coming home after working to these really fancy condos that were right on the beach. You go straight to your room and change into your bathing suit and then hit the waves. I mainly did body surfing. The waves sometimes got the better of me. I came home with a cut up nose from the waves forcing my face into the sand. I literally ate the sand. I also had a bruised shoulder and lower back. Good times, good times.

Here's a few other pictures in this filmstrip.



You can also check out all the pictures one of the faculty members took. Make sure you click on the link to Dominican Republic 2008 (Nov 8-16). I'm warning you though, you could be there for hours looking at all of the pictures. Check it out at: www.nyucdoutreach.com