August 30 Tuesday--Cricket at lunch!

 Tuesday was similar to our first clinic day.  Hot and humid with over 100 patients.  About 20 patients are scheduled each hour so the queues for fillings, extractions, sealants and cleanings ebb and flow on the hour.  If one group of providers is ahead of the others, we internally refer to get most of the patients seen before the next 20 show up.  Teamwork!

Meeting lots of new friends.  Two standouts.  Amy is managing our 'out-take'.  She checks all of our paperwork after treatment, passes out toys, antibiotics or Ibuprofen depending on the need and tracks and collates all of our treatment.  She is precise, punctual and articulate, (and always calls me 'sir').  Found out she is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel!  She has kicked ass all her career and she gets it done here in Grenada.  Thank you LTC Amy! 

My assistant today is the 22-year-old son of a Canadian dentist.  Mom, dad and Gabe are part of the team.  Dad is an 'escort' of patients through our treatment maze, Gabe let me know Monday he has assisted his mom and asked if he could assist me.  Sure.  Actually, he is excellent.  Very intuitive and great to work with.  At dinner last night, dad told us that Gabe is a skater, really?  Check it out!

He was college ranked ice dancer a few years ago, but decided to 'retire' and 

not assume the 'lifestyle' necessary to compete at the Olympic level.

You can check him out at Gabe Clemente!  Very cool!

Back to patients.  This gal needed a front filling and didn't want to watch me do "anything".  Easy solution.  

Finally, we watched cricket at lunch today.  Our Canadian friends tried to explain it to us.  Didn't help.

August 29--First clinic day under the Cricket Stadium

 Well, actually not too bad.  About 20 chairs and units.  We did have more dentists and hygienists than chairs so dentists assisted dentists and hygienists assisted dentists.  But, it was a fairly productive day with 122 patients seen from 9-4:30.

Although very hot and muggy, there were fans everywhere.  We had 3 of them blowing on my patient, assistant and me making it tolerable.  Still soaked with sweat though.

This is Dr. Amin next door to me.  He is an Oral Surgeon who would tackle any teeth!  Excellent clinician and whenever I had a chance, I would peek over and see what he was doing.  I did a combination of extractions and fillings and one root canal.  Had to turn one patient down, she wanted a neck massage.  Sorry.

This is our transportation to and from the stadium.  Two buses, they pack us in.  About a 30 minuted drive.  Grenada is beautiful and green.  Quite hilly, houses and traffic everywhere.  Fun to people watch.

Getting to Grenada the 'easy' way

 Friday/Saturday/Sunday, August 26/27/28

Routine transit from home except rather than getting to SFO at 4am to catch a 6am flight, we arrive at 9pm to catch a midnight/red-eye to Miami.  Nice to finish last-minute chores at home and clean the house after two weeks of grandkids.  (Plus no commuter traffic to San Francisco).  Routine 6 hours to Miami, arriving at 8am, breakfast, and a 3-hour flight to Grenada.  Saturday night was an orientation to Grenada and 1000 Smiles.

Today was the 2-hour clinical orientation with the whole group.  No set-up of the clinic since this is the 3rd week.  We are told it is at the 10,000-seat National Cricket Stadium!  Kinda underneath, so perhaps cooler than otherwise.  Speaking of weather, mostly sunny with mid '80s during the day, mid '70's at night, high humidity and daily intermittent showers.  

Papa Joe, founder and leader

After clinic orientation the afternoon was free so Gloria and I took a SCUBA refresher course.   It has been 3 years since our last dive so we thought it was in order.  It was in a pool so very routine, all went well.  Along with us was a couple who lives on a 45 foot catamaran!  They are wintering in Grenada.  They took three days from the boat to celebrate a birthday and do some diving.  They are seeing the world.  Nice people.

Tomorrow, we eat breakfast at 7 then head to the cricket stadium to be begin work.

The Team. We are last row on the left.

Off to Grenada for dentistry

 How did we get here?  This was planned for 2020 and you know the rest of the story.  1000 Smiles travels to many Caribbean countries each summer providing dental, optometric and teaching services.  Since its inception, it has been supported by Sandals Resorts.  This means, we provide the dentistry all day and Sandals Resorts provides the lodging and food/drink in the evenings.  Not bad.  We first went with 1000 Smiles to St. Lucia in 2019.  So we are back!