Spring 2013 - Tufts University School of Dental Medicine

Norma Desjardins, D92, knows
how tough it is to find dental care
for kids in rural Maine. She’s on a mission
to make it easier
by jacqueline Mitchell
photography by patrick mcnamara
hen the 8-year-old girl climbed into
the chair, hygienist Williams Rodriguez
wasn’t prepared for what he was about to see.
“Her 6-year molars were completely riddled
with cavities, like a bomb went off,” he says.
The girl’s mother thought her young daughter’s teeth
were all baby teeth, destined to fall out eventually. “I had to
tell her, ‘No, those were supposed to be there forever. If your
kids lose those, that’s a big problem,’ ” Rodriguez says.
Rodriguez says he might well expect to see this kind of
extensive decay in his native Dominican Republic. He was
stunned to find it in America. Children with rotted-out first
molars, toddlers with tiny sepia-tinged incisors or teenagers
with plaque so extreme it’s cemented along the gum
line are not uncommon at St. Apollonia Dental Clinic in
Presque Isle, Maine, where Rodriguez is the only hygienist.
Just 12 miles from the U.S.–Canadian border, Presque
Isle is about as far east and as far north as you can get
and still be in the United States. The downtown of rural
Aroostook County’s largest city is little more than an intersection
surrounded by rolling potato fields that are blanketed
by the plants’ white flowers in midsummer.
Norma Desjardins,
D92, on Presque Isle
farmland.
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