My work

Cows and curry are all very nice, but it’s time I wrote a little about what I’m actually doing here. It’s my fifth day based at the eye hospital and so far I’ve done three days of eye camps, 1 full day at the hospital, and 1 day on the internet (today, could you guess?). Overall, I have seen more than I ever expected.

The hospital runs rural eye camps every day or two to both screen for cataract/disease and test children’s visual acuity. A doctor, an ophthalmic assistant or refractionist, and one ophthalmic nurse set up to test the long lines of elderly (or other) patients who have gathered at the village school. At the same time, two ophthalmic nurses go around to the different classrooms, testing each student’s eyesight with Snellen charts (those lines of letters you read over and over at the optometrist’s). I’ve been observing and helping a bit with both. My first day I simply watched; my biggest contribution was probably the masking tape I procured from my bag for sticking up the eye charts. However, I now get to help with nurse duties like measuring blood pressure and intra-ocular pressure (they definitely don’t have the automatic IOP machine like the one I used in Kingston, but the small hand-held one works just fine), and I’ve also helped with the school screenings. Pointing to different letters on a chart all day could get boring, but luckily the students are all so curious about having a westerner in their midst that I stay amused by smiling at them and watching them hide their faces or giggle.

The hospital is pretty neat. It’s crazily efficient from diagnosis all the way up to surgery. In addition to doing some regular appointments for paying patients with various eye troubles or refractive error, they also push through 10’s of cataract patients per day, for free. They are brought from the rural eye camps by bus, stay one or two nights in the in-patient rooms with meals provided (no beds but that’s the norm here), have their operation, recover, and are returned home with antibiotic drops and temporary glasses. For some reason, I am allowed to observe and help at all these stages. Never would I get this kind of opportunity, free of restrictions, in Canada, so I feel really lucky. Although I’m not exactly going to learn the technical side of cataract surgery in 14 days here, I do get to observe it if I choose, talk to the doctors, staff and patients, and help with minor things like prep and bandaging.

I don’t feel all that useful right now since there are so many qualified people around and things run smoothly already, but it’s neat to see. Hopefully the report I write at the end will be useful, as the fundraising money I sent definitely will be. That seems to be their biggest obstacle right now – simple funding. So if you’re in the Kingston area you can expect to see me holding a few more bake-sales in March/April! Other than that, I really wish I could help on the patient-interaction side of things. While the medical side runs very well, it seems like the patients often get lost in the shuffle. I wish I had the language skills to talk with them, reassure them, answer their questions, and provide guidance or simply a listening ear. That’s the part that the staff don’t seem to have time for, or don’t want to have time for (maybe that’s a reality of all hospital settings). Sometimes, I can see myself slipping into a mind-set of ‘patients as objects to be treated’ (especially since I can’t understand their conversations and therefore have a hard time understanding their personalities), so this is something that I want to be conscious of in the future. In that sense, this volunteership has already accomplished something.

Today, after this reflection, I visited the in-patient wards and talked with several elderly patients, with translation help from one of the staff. They seemed really happy to be able to share their stories with someone and were also excited to pose for photos. When Janardan, the translator, left for a while, we hung out on the mats together and tried to communicate as much as we could (lots of laughing), settling for a song sung by one of the old men when we’d exhausted my range of topics of conversation. A very excellent morning.