Did you know that February was National Children’s Dental Health Month? That was a mouthful! (pun intended)
February is a special month for us because it gives us an opportunity to teach families and children about the importance of oral health. Every year we organize school visits to bring the Tooth Fairy and some of our team members to bring better awareness about oral health and going to the dentist.
This year, we wanted to do something different. With Dr. Neda’s experience going on dental missions, we decided to organize a local dental mission.
We had to solve a couple of challenges along the way:
Who is going to volunteer?
How are we going to get patients?
How do we get enough supplies and equipment?
One step at a time–that’s what it took to gather the team together.
Our doctors were Dr. Neda Kalantar, Dr. Sana Zaidi, Dr. Ali Ghatri (orthodontist), Dr. Monica Neshat (cosmetic dentist), and Dr. Pedram Yaghmai (oral surgeon).
This rounded out our dental team with specialists from around Reston whose pure motive was to serve our community.
The past couple years Dr. Neda Kalantar has been an outspoken supporter of Cornerstones Reston. (Click on the link to learn more about what they do and their mission). It became clear that we needed to contact this organization to get us connected to some individuals and families in need. Before we knew it, we had our patients!
Although we helped many families there was one in particular that we wanted to highlight because we don’t always come across these cases and they were so appreciative of the free services we were able to provide for them. This family recently immigrated here to the Northern Virginia area to escape the plight in Afghanistan. The youngest child had never seen a dentist and was suffering from rampant decay and some teeth were infected. It broke Dr. Neda’s heart to have to remove multiple baby teeth prematurely, but it was the best course
of treatment for this little girl because of the pain she was in.
In the same family, the eldest boy, had a permanent tooth that was in need of a root canal immediately. We are hoping through the network of dentists he will be able to get this procedure done to save that tooth from being removed.
These are the families that we would normally not run into on the day to day. Ones we would otherwise not hear about or be able to help. Mission For Smiles became a beacon of hope, especially in our community. We know it will not be the last Smiles Event. Be out on the lookout for more from Mission For Smiles by Pediatric Dentistry of Reston!
