Dale Finkbine – As a dentist, Dale worked with other dentists to serve 2,000-2,500 people in need in the Florence area. The Florence Civic Center was filled with dentists doing procedures ranging from fillings and root canals to extractions…all for free! Read all about this wonderful ministry.
What would you do if you had a toothache and no finances or availability to get to the dentist? This is the question that many of you may never have to ask but it is a question that over 1700 people in the Florence, South Carolina area asked the weekend of August 26 and 27. For the third year the South Carolina Dental Association sponsored Dental Access Days (DAD) and were able to treat these people and take care of their needs. I, along with my two dental daughters, Megan and Betsy were blessed to be a part of this undertaking and feel it is an opportunity for us to share our God given talents with the community.
Thursday morning the convention center in Florence was nothing but a concrete floor the size of an ice skating rink and by 2pm the area had been transformed into a dental clinic with 120 dental chairs with all the power needed to support from electricity and suction to sterilization and laboratory. The patients were first screened to see what their major concern was. This allowed us to triage the patients so that we could take care of as many patients as possible in the short time that we had available. Once it was determined if the patients needed extractions, fillings or even root canals they were directed to the treating doctors to perform the needed work. I worked in the triage area and was most humbled by people that had been out of work for 2 years plus and couldn’t afford to go to a dentist and were so thankful that we were there to help them. We had people waiting outside the doors of the convention center from 9pm Thursday night so that they might be able to be seen on Friday and the same held true on Friday night for Saturday. Some patients even would wait so that they could just have a checkup and cleaning. Megan and Betsy were in the treatment area and worked with patients that needed extractions done. Again they were amazed that patients would wait for so long to have something done and felt blessed by the gifts that they have so to perform them. Megan said that the number of teeth removed was not as great as she expected. We were able to do some much needed restorations on teeth in order to keep them for the patient. We also were able, through the number of specialists available, to even do root canals on patients that previously felt that the only thing to do was to extract the teeth in question. All of the work was done gratis to the patients and the latest numbers that we have put the amount at over $1 million worth of care.
As the three of us have discussed since the weekend, we have all come to the conclusion that what we received from doing the work far outweighed any sacrifice we made to be there.
~ Dale Finkbine