Dana L. Yeoman, DDS

Dentures and Implants

The Power of a Smile to Transcend Borders Part 25

As dental students, we suffered through a class ominously titled “General Pathology.”  We studied countless diseases that involved the whole body for what seemed like an eternity, though it was only for two quarters.  Having endured this, we graduated into “Oral Pathology” for the third quarter, which seemed far more applicable to a bunch of dental students.  The school’s mentality, which in retrospect I agree with wholeheartedly, was that dental students should at least understand the whole body and have studied its diseases.  This is important because dentists may be the only doctor a patient visits.  Often times a dentist can identify earmarks of diabetes, pulmonary disease, thyroid disorders, or even cancers simply by being given full-body instruction while at the University.  I discovered this education to be helpful in saving some of my patients’ lives.  

We had seen a multitude of picture slides in class of people with severe deformations from birth.  Somehow it was easy to be emotionally distanced from a slide of a person taken 35+ years ago.  There was this sense of, “If the slide was taken in the 1960’s, then maybe medicine is so advanced now that it doesn’t happen anymore.”

So with this naive idea that “it doesn’t happen anymore,” I walked headlong into a baby orphanage reserved for hiding the handicapped and severely deformed children of Ukraine.  The best way I can describe it - it was like the difference of looking at the Amazon Jungle in a National Geographic Magazine, and actually being in the Amazon Jungle.  Suddenly there was no distance to be found in a photograph.  This was a real life education and we were a part of it.

The orphanage building itself was out of the way and nearly hidden by foliage.  The large front room housed the Downs’ Syndrome babies.  I had worked with and seen children with Downs' Syndrome in the past, so it was at least somewhat familiar to me.  The back room, however, was not.  We were allowed past the doors into a room with an unidentifiable stench.  It took a lot of self-possession to keep my composure.  None of us knew quite how to behave, and we didn’t want to offend the nurses.

My classmate, Heidi, and I went from crib to crib, holding back tears, trying to occupy our hearts, while our minds identified aloud the syndromes, diseases, and malformations of each child that lay confined to a crib.  We were amazed by how many were represented in one room.  One little diapered child, unidentifiable as male or female, was severely crippled and malformed, and not allowed out of the crib.  The lady told us this child was four years old.  I didn’t ask any more questions because I was afraid of the answers.  This was not my country, not my culture, not within my comprehension.  This was outside of the realm of anything I had ever experienced.  I didn’t know what could be done to help a baby like this.  My heart wanted to protest, but my mind didn’t know how.

When I said that this baby orphanage hid their children, this was really true.  Best I could tell, the culture did not want to deal with the issue, particularly since many of the deformities could be tied to the Chernobyl disaster and radiation poisoning.  This left-over Soviet mentality meant that unpleasant things just weren’t discussed, which was why this orphanage did not get donations like the “normal” baby orphanages.  Probably most of the townspeople didn’t even know where this one was located.  We were told it was a rare privilege for foreigners to be allowed inside at all.  It was certainly a sobering honor, and a hard one to take.

Most of our visit involved playing with the Downs Syndrome babies.  They were sweet, interactive, and fun to entertain.  It was easy to love on babies, but it was difficult to shake the eeriness of it all.  I was humbled yet again to consider how blessed I was to be healthy and able.