Asheville!

Hey all!
     I've been working with the Mission-St. Joseph Children's Hospital doing pediatric work in the OR. Mostly my days start at 6:30a and we treat 2-3 kids under general anesthesia each day ending around 4 or 5p. These children range from 1-9 in age (mostly pre-K) and have the saddest mouths I've even seen - mostly due to juice in bottles, Mountain Dew in bottles, this popular flavored sugar water called "Bug Juice" and horrible, horrible parental neglect (Fun fact though: on every questionnaire I've seen, the parents say they brush their child's teeth 2X a day). The patients are referred to us from all over Western NC and usually every tooth in their mouth has a cavity. There is certainly no shortage of practice on stainless steel crowns and pulpotomies! Our saddest case so far was last Friday when we had a 22 month old with completely bombed out teeth - so bad we could only save two canines with stainless steel crowns and had to pull all the rest.. The group I'm working with has been on a huge campaign in this part of the state to push for oral health education and even has a ToothBus with two dental chairs to provide work to elementary students in rural areas.
     Asheville is wonderful - Tyler Banachowski, Tim Chang, Vincent Ha, Matt Parr and I are all here scattered over various rotation sites. We've also met up with some GPR residents who graduated from UNC last year for baseball (and I see them occasionally on their anesthesiology rotation through the hospital). The food is marvelous, the hiking great and this past weekend we were here for the Bele Chere street festival, one of the largest in the US.

     Pictures below:

ToothBus - somewhere outside Brevard, NC

Inside: Two ADEC chairs, x-ray equipment, an autoclave and lots of Pixar movies!

Matt Parr and I with some recent UNC grads: Chris Planer, Jessica Oliver and Kasee Metcalf at the Asheville Tourist's baseball game 

Street graffiti downtown.
My favorite shirt so far has been "If you're too weird for Asheville, you're too weird". 

Vincent, Tim, Matt and I downtown at The Southern. Yes, that is lobster mac and cheese. And hell yes, it was delicious.

Bacon and Maple Syrup ice cream - AMAZING.
Going to get fat (and poor) eating my way through this place.

My mom came up one weekend and we went hiking along the Mountains to Sea trail right off the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Yay! We're halfway through this round - keep up the great dental work I know y'all are doing and please keep posting! If you're having trouble - shoot me an email.

E