A Lofty, Liberal, and Typical "Save The World" Post

Currently writing from a small village called Karaga, where the people are soft-spoken, the food is dense, and the flies are starving. We've just returned from an outreach inside the village, where we examined nearly 220 patients, dispensed hundreds of drops and antibiotic eye ointments, and booked 50 patients for free cataract, pterygium, and glaucoma surgeries to be done this Friday. Personally, I am finding the work extremely rewarding and vocationally corroborative-- that is to say, I am beginning to see myself as a doctor more and more as I examine patients. I've learned a bunch of phrases in the local language, Dagbani, and wield them flaccidly, but at the very least I can assess how the man is ("agbira"), ask him to cover his eye for a visual acuity test ("poma nimbla") and tell him that we will do our best to eliminate the problem (much too long to type and I still need a translator for some parts of this mini-spiel).

Seeing patients down here can be as thrilling as it is heartbreaking. At times, we find people no older than 50 with mature cataracts or full blown pterygium, and knowing that we can provide surgical treatment is very satisfying. At the same time, I saw a woman yesterday, 22 years old, with absolute glaucoma, meaning we have no effective surgical or medicinal treatment that will resolve her issue. Objectively, our solution is to hand her eye drops that will slightly reduce the vitreous pressure in the eye, but tacitly, among ourselves, we are certain that she will completely and irreversibly blind by years end. I read about this type of stuff in books and journals and visually observe all sorts of medical phenomena on TV. Somehow, seeing it in person unwraps it all for you, makes it crawl into your brain and say, "this is real, people actually go blind here for no reason." I met one woman today with immature cataracts and severe conjunctivitis, so severe that her left eye appeared as a membranous duct, running with a sickly yellow discharge, preventing her from telling me how many fingers I was holding up from five feet away. These pathologies-- glaucoma, cataracts, conjunctivitis-- are scoff-worthy here in the United States, controllable and swiftly corrected. So they should be here, these pathologies, so invariably squelched that no one should go blind from them as a result. We are plagued by the "lack"--of knowledge, of access, and of locally trained professionals-- in Ghanian eye care. Back in the states, many people told me of Ghana's beauty-- the lush plains gushing with verdant leaves and wild flowers, red dust roads slicing the heart of the north into bucolic chunks, and the warm, tactile-obsessed population, trying desperately to populate those around them with happiness. And it is beautiful, for those that can see it. For those that cannot see the thatched adobe lining the savannah like sunbaked ornaments or witness their children growing and walking and changing, Ghana is still a wonderful place--everyone takes care of everyone here. But if people are to have full agency here, to be employed and to parent and to take care of others when they are in need, then these pesky, resolvable pathologies must be eradicated. 

So. That is my blindness spiel. Now that it is out of my system, you can expect less lofty, less liberal, more interesting reflections in the future. My next post will center on our shepherd and infinite source of inspiration, Ali. Until then...