Teeth

Dr. Koff teaching us how to use equipment
and do an exam

Evacuation from Antarctica can be extremely expensive: millions of dollars last year for a single, heroic, winter evacuation from the South Pole.  In the summer season, a critical care evacuation can cost upwards of a million dollars.  The most common reason for evacuation, however, is pretty mundane.  It's teeth.  Dental problems are incredibly common.  Fortunately, however, they are rarely urgent so no added flights or equipment are required; evacuation just entails hopping on one of the relatively frequent Air Force flights from McMurdo to New Zealand. Nevertheless, the Antarctic Program likes to avoid evacuations because the loss of essential personnel can be quite challenging in and of itself.

Because teeth are a substantial concern, over the last two days, our afternoons have been spent learning emergency dental care.  The goals are: 1) to prevent evacuation, and  2) to tide people over until either a plane arrives to evacuate or the dentist arrives in January.   We spent about 6 hours in a dental office (generously provided by a Galveston private practice) learning the essentials including:

• Dental history taking 
• Examination and differential diagnosis of dental pain
• How to take dental x-rays (pretty challenging to do well)
• How to do dental anesthesia (also not so easy)
• How to replace a knocked-out tooth and create a dental splint out of a paper clip
• How to make a temporary filling.
• How to manage and buff down dental nicks.
• To call Bob Koff, our instructor and consulting dentist in Colorado.

Ann, one of the Aerospace Medicine Residents
fixing nicked teeth of Palmer Station doc

The dental education exemplifies why I'm excited about the trip.  Bob is a wonderful teacher, passionate about dentistry, interesting, funny and dynamic, and available 24/7 by phone to walk us through problems in the months he's not there (he's the visiting dentist in January).  Our Antarctic Medical Group (more about them later) enthusiastically volunteered themselves to be guinea pigs for the exams,  the x-rays and even for a dental splint.  One of the team (not me--no one was coming near my mouth) allowed a resident to buff down the nicks in his incisors.  I learned a ton and, surprisingly for an ondotophobe, enjoyed it.  

Will I be able to do any of this in real life?  We'll see.  Maybe.

On a different note, the rest of the orientation continues to display the comic incompetence of Catch-22.  For example, every day, they've told us they'd have breakfast for us.  Nope.  Nothing. Then yesterday, they explicitly told us no breakfast today.  This morning, there it was--pastries and coffee.  Maybe English is just different here in Texas?