not even look in that mouth thingy. Swollen, painful gingiva is not the only or main sign of AML, yet it is associated with certain variants1 to know.

Join us at MOMOM 2013 in May , so it is something

Last, sometimes you have to spend time with people talking. Rushing through an appointment, delegating taking histories or ignoring the slightest detail can have major effects—even if, as one kid told me, dentists are not real doctors.

What lessons did I learn about being a person from this patient?

No matter how old you are or safe you are … no matter how healthy you think you are, your number can come up at any time. Life does not go on forever. The 5-year survival rate for AML is 15 to 70 percent with a 33 to 78 percent relapse rate, depending on the sub- type.2

for young adults is 40 percent.3

Cure rates vary, but the average What

could an additional week have meant for Roger? Cancer, and ultimately death, does not pick good or bad people; it can get anyone, even a 27-year-old loyal father with a toddler at home.

When you complain about waiting in traffic, or getting the wrong order at a restaurant, or how bad your seasonal allergies are, or how angry your spouse makes you, or how your kids do not listen, or other little things in life … be happy you have life in the first place, because some people don’t. f

REFERENCES

1) Mani A. “Leukemic Gingival Infiltration.” New England Journal of Medicine. 2008; 358:274, January 17, 2008. www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/ NEJMicm066017

2) “Acute Myeloid Leukemia.” Wikipedia. February 19, 2013. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_myeloid_leu- kemia

3) Newson L. “Primary care review: Acute Myeloid Leukemia.” onmedica. August 11, 2009. www. onmedica.com/newsarticle.aspx?id=cd770089-0aa7- 456f-ae05-c7c088d37562

The following notes are from lay volunteers who will be part of MOMOM 2013, May 3-4 in Cape Girardeau. Please plan to join them and their enthusiam, plus your many dental colleague volunteers, for the special event! Register online to volunteer at www.momom.org. Online registration will close one week before the event to allow processing of all registered volunteers.

by DIANE SIDES

The Board of Regents, faculty, staff and students of Southeast Missouri State University are thrilled to have the opportunity to host and volunteer for the Missouri Mission of Mercy!

Our University is a comprehensive, public university, serving a region of 24 outstate counties plus a shared responsibility for the City and County of St. Louis. We also serve large populations in southern Illinois, western Kentucky, Tennessee and northern Arkansas, so we feel the MOMOM event is a very good “fit” for our institution.

The Show Me Center, a public venue owned jointly by the University and the City of Cape Girardeau, is an outstanding facility for hosting MOMOM, and the event itself provides opportunities for our faculty, staff and students to provide community service, and for our students to get valuable experi- ential learning. Internships and experiential learning are strongly emphasized at South- east with more than 96 percent of all majors having an internship or clinical experience built into the curriculum. So our pre-medical students, nursing majors, criminal justice, foreign language, dietetics, music, theatre and dance majors, just to name a few, will be volunteering in areas of the MOMOM to get hands-on experience and to provide service for our region.

We are proud to have the opportunity to host such a worthwhile event on the Southeast Missouri State University campus and look forward to both the volunteers and patients joining us in May.

DIANE SIDES is the Assistant to the President and As- sistant Secretary to the Board of Regents at Southeast Missouri State University.

by CHERYL MOTHES

Dr. Janet Ruopp had asked me to help with the upcoming Missouri Mission of Mercy, so we thought it would be a good experience for me to volunteer at an actual MOM event, which is when I attended the ARMOM in Arkansas last April. My granddaughter, Lynsi, was excited to volunteer, too, as she had just completed her dental assistant training.

When we heard about MOM and then researched it online, we were impressed with the massiveness of this undertaking and the incredible organizational “smoothness” of it all. Experiencing it firsthand in Arkansas, though, was absolutely unbelievable! The conditions and needs of the patients were, well, shocking. The ability of the MOM to provide care to so many in such an efficient and organized way was incredible. The dedi- cation of the dental teams to give so much of their time and attention to these patients was remarkable.

As a member of the planning committee for our upcoming Missouri MOM, I see how much time, resources and energy is donated months in advance of the event. It’s an honor to be a part of such a truly caring group of professionals.

CHERYL MOTES is a financial advisor in Cape Girardeau. She is pictured with her granddaughter Lynsi during a dental mission trip to Haiti last May, which was led by Drs. Janet and Pat Ruopp and Dr. Nathan Seyer, all of Ruopp & Ruopp Dentistry. Lynsi is a student at SEMO and is serving on the local MOMOM planning committee.

ISSUE 2 | MAR/APR 2013 | focus 7 ISS