Right to Sight... Do what now?*

Last week I made the trip to Tambacounda (Tamba) to help with an Eye Clinic. Another Gou volunteer, KC, and I had booked tickets on the 5am bus to Tamba, meaning that be the time we got there we would still have pretty much a full day outside of travel. Unfortunately, about twenty minutes into the ride the bus broke down enough that it became obvious that it could not make the full ride to Tamba. So, the bus turned around and we made our way back to Gou. It sounds like this all happened fairly quickly… After getting our money back in a shockingly painless procedure we made our way to the “Garage” just as a 7-Place filled up and left for Tamba. Giving us the first 2 seats on the next car, which wound up leaving Kédougou at the same time we were expecting to be arriving in Tamba.

Now, moving into the Eye Clinic – A group of American health workers by the name of “Right to Sight and Health” sent two doctors and two nurses to Tamba to do as many cataract surgeries as possible. I helped out for the second week, during the first week there was another doctor around who happened to be the father of one of my Stage-mates. She heard about the clinic which has happened in Kédougou the last two years from older volunteers, told her dad the eye doctor about it, and he contacted the Right to Sight people and the rest is history. A fun story I know little about.

Anyway, Right to Sight really has a system down and knows what they are doing and likes to work with Peace Corps Volunteers when possible. Where we come in handy is all the cutting open of the eyes. Kidding, it’s the translating. The health system in Senegal is similar to the education system in that it is made up of a lot of ‘affectés.’ Meaning the person working at the Hospital or health post is not necessarily from that place and often times their spouse is back home. There is no guarantee that they speak the local language at all, nor is there any training provided to them. Normally this isn’t an issue since a majority of the public isn’t willing to pay for medical treatment – that would be the group of people Right to Sight is looking to help most. So, we step in there to translate into the variety of local languages that the area has. My mediocre French wasn’t even that much of an issue since we were working with American doctors – They did train a Senegalese doctor using French during the first week, but I wasn’t around yet.

So I showed up for my first day on the job and went to my assigned post… the operating room! The two other volunteers and I in there weren’t there handing the doctor his tools ‘stat’ or anything, but we did had tools to the nurses STERILY and they would hand them to the doctors. Gauze and other bubble-packaged items may never be opened the same again. It’s fun to not touch the inside.

There were two set-ups in the room so two surgeries could be happening at the same time, one of them was even a training microscope so during the brief bits of down time when we weren’t fetching stuff or telling patients to lie still we would take turns watching the surgery. Here’s a little rundown:

1. “Block” eye with injection so they can’t feel anything or see anything or move their eye. 
2. Insert speculum to keep their eye open 
3. Sew a thread through the white of the eye that you can then clip to the eyebrow to keep the eye from moving around as you work on it. 
4. Burn stuff so their eyes don’t bleed 
5. Make a longer cut along the top of the iris and a tiny one on the outside 
6. Stick in the pointy thing and wiggle until you can see the cataract spin in a full circle – careful not to rip the bag! 
7. Use the squirty loop thing to pull out the cataract, which is basically a foggy lens. 
8. Make sure all the little foggy chunks are out. 
9. Insert new lens implant 
10. Make sure the eyeball is fully inflated and the implant stays where it is meant to be. 
11. Add liquid that seals the holes you cut in 
12. Take everything off/out and put a patch over the eye (unfortunately not of the pirate variety) 

That’s it! All done! Hopefully you can see tomorrow when we take the patch off. Most people were thanking us before they even got off the operating table, it was really cute; for many of them though it was their only chance to see again.

By the end of the two weeks 185 cataracts were removed thanks to the Right to Sight and Health people. The last two were relatively noteworthy in that on the last day the American doctors were doing surgery – they stayed another day to do all the follow ups and pack their equipment – it turned out that there were two women waiting for surgery that couldn’t get it… for reasons that amounted to mistakes on our part. With that in mind a group of Peace Corps Volunteers set themselves to the task of convincing / guilting the Senegalese surgeon into doing the two surgeries on Friday so the Right to Sight people would still cover part of it with their money. By the time I finished helping with the last surgery they had been successful! From what I hear it was kind of a sneak attack where he was basically left no choice but to agree to doing the surgeries without being a HUGE jerk.

For the literate and illiterate

Speaking of this Senegalese surgeon… so the American doctors taught him this new surgery technique for cataract removal. By the end of the two weeks he was a master, moving faster and (according to the American doctors) with better results than his trainers. One of the Americans was so impresses that she wanted to make sure to watch him do a few surgeries to see if she could learn anything from him! I found the whole thing really impressive.

All in all it was a really good week, a good reenergizing that I was in desperate need of. There was the added bonus of getting to see friends that I hadn’t seen in a really long time all week, and get to know a few more. Then, back to Gou, and time to explain myself to my village.