Cataract Chronicles-25 years
As I celebrate my 25th year volunteering as an eye surgeon in Southeast Asia. I am delighted to share photos and stories about the vision challenges and the people and cultures of India, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. - Dr. Gary Barth
Chronicle 17 - Inaugurating a Corneal Transplant Service in Western Nepal: #2
The next series of three photographs shows Dr. Bidya Pant’s remarkable results on an Indian patient who traveled over the border to Nepal to obtain a corneal transplant. The first photo shows a permanently scarred blind right eye. The left eye was recently injured while working in a sugar cane field. He has a painful central corneal fungal infection.
Medications do not cure large corneal fungi. Without a corneal replacement transplant, he was on track to lose his other eye and be permanently blind.
A pertinent Nepali adage: “A blind person is a mouth to feed.”
The next picture shows a corneal transplant performed the same day by Dr. Pant, on his first day ever of doing a corneal transplant. This picture was taken that same day, utilizing a corneal tissue I brought from California on a different patient. In this picture, the sixteenth sutures are easily seen holding the clear central.
The last photograph shows the patient, Babu Ram, three weeks later. The right eye is still permanently blind. The left eye is comfortable, free of infection, and has a crystal clear California central cornea.
Truly this was an international success: American corneal tissue carried to Nepal for an Indian blind patient operated by a surgeon from Nepal.