Termites Ate My Couch - PUBLISHED!!!

Termites Ate My Couch – PUBLISHED!!   

It has finally arrived – my book has been put to print.  It will be available at your local book store soon, but in the meantime, it’s available at all the major distributors including:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble 

 
Abe Books

US Book Depository
 

And will be available in Kindle soon.

This book has been through a lot of revisions, and a lot of love and angst has been put into the pages that you are about to read.  With the literally hundreds of stories I could possibly share in the over 10 years of being on the mission field, I tried to put down the ones that would interest, intrigue, enlighten, and inspire you.  I hope I succeeded in this.  

“Have you ever wondered what life on the mission field is like? This book is an attempt to share stories that are thoughtful, heartbreaking, inspirational, funny, and crazy - in other words - an average day in the life of a missionary. These are true tales from a mom, nurse, wife, and flawed person. These stories show how reliance on Jesus Christ brought her through the most emotional, rewarding, and hilarious times of her life. You are invited to read these stories and laugh and cry along with her.

Erin spent eleven years in the U.S. Army.  She received her bachelor’s in Nursing, is working on her Masters of Public Health (will be completed in September 2017) and worked at a children’s hospital for 12 years.  She has traveled the world working in disaster response and as a medical missionary.  After eight years as a missionary in Honduras, she currently works as a full-time missionary in Central Africa.”

Dental work and Blindness

1.      In my continuing pursuit of medical myths, I decided to tackle this one...

 

P    Pulling teeth can cause visual problems, even blindness.

Question:  Can pulling teeth cause visual problems?

P – Patient Information:  19 year old girl in Central Africa

I – Intervention:  teeth pulling

C – Comparison:  normal degeneration of visual acuity

O – Outcome:  blindness related to teeth pulling

I have had a number of people come to my clinic complaining of “blurry vision.”  Many of these patients are 40 years or older, and simply asking them to try on my reading glasses – they find out that they can see “much better.”  Some visual problems are related to other causality problems like diabetes or blood pressure issues.  However, there are a significant number of other people who need their teeth pulled and simply refuse to because, “later in life it will cause me to have vision problems.”  

 The first time I heard this I was totally caught off guard.  Where in the WORLD did this myth derive from?  So I did a little research and found that Africa isn’t the only location where this myth exists.  The good ol’ U.S. of A has this belief as well.   

The origin of this myth?  Here are some possibilities:

  In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, upper tooth infections often did spread to the eye as well as the brain, leading to blindness and death in some cases.

§  The nerves and blood vessels supplying the eye tooth are similar in location and origin to those supplying the eye. You could incorrectly conclude that if you remove the tooth, the nerves and blood vessels going to the eye would be removed too.

Answer:  “Removing upper, or any tooth for that matter does not have effect on a person eyesight.  The nerves which supply the eye and the teeth are different, hence no interconnection.” - Sujoy Chakraborty, BDS Dentistry, Dayananda Sagar College of Dental Sciences (2010)