Gemur Clinc Day 2

I was stationed in dental today along with a pile of other people that hadn't been there yet. None of us were expecting to see many patients so we were surprised to see a crowd gathering. The med clinics and the eye clinics were slammed today.I got to pull out a molar which was pretty cool. The pt looked to be in a good amount of pain even with the dental blocks. We asked him if he wanted more stuff for the pain but he would deny it and tell us to just get it out. It was strange for me to be doing something like this because I have never really had to inflict pain to help someone before. Many people that we saw in the dental clinic would have a mouthful of rotten teeth. One man in particular had pretty severe dental decay and he denied any type of treatment except for medications. This has been a common theme throughout all of the clinic sites and all of the different med clinics. There is this misconception that Westerners have different drugs to treat any type of ailment.

For the afternoon I went up to the eye clinic to help out and Anna and I got some more patients for the study. The eye clinic went until the very end of the day and we were the last clinic operating. Ravi had told us earlier in the trip that the general pattern when you have a multi-day single location clinic site is that everyone piles in on the last day. This was certainly the case. I guess it also takes a little while for the word to spread.


Tomorrow will be the last day with our drivers and cooks so we had a little farewell tonight. The dinner, as usual was excellent tonight, but I have been getting some uncomfortable heart burn the last few days and I haven't been eating the spicy stuff for a while. I am going to cut out a few more things the next couple days to see what helps.