Sight restoration · Jumla District, Nepal
“I had forgotten that my grandson has a gap in his teeth”
Dhan Maya walked for two days to reach a cataract camp in the hills of Karnali Province, holding her daughter’s shoulder. She walked home on her own.
Dhan Maya is sixty-eight and has lived all her life in a village above the Tila river, a day’s walk from the nearest road. Cataracts took the sight of her left eye about eight years ago and of her right eye three years later. By last spring she could tell day from night, and the shape of a person against a bright doorway, and not much else.
“I knew my family by their voices,” she says. “And my grandson by his feet. He runs everywhere.”
In April, word reached the village that an eye camp would be held at the district hospital in Jumla for five days. Camps like it are run each spring and autumn by Karnali Mountain Eye Camps, with surgeons from the Gandaki Valley Eye Unit, and are paid for by the Foundation. The surgery, the lens, the food, a bed for the night and the bus fare home for the patient and one companion are all covered. The walk to the road is not, because no one has found a way to pay for it.
Two days to the camp
Dhan Maya walked to the road with her daughter, Kalpana, one hand on Kalpana’s shoulder, over two days. They slept the night at a cousin’s house. At the camp, 398 people were examined on the first day. Dhan Maya was one of 281 who had surgery that week.
The operation on her right eye took eleven minutes. The surgeon, a former Kiroshi Fellow, made an incision of a few millimetres, removed the clouded lens and folded a new one into its place. Dhan Maya remembers a bright light and someone humming. The next morning a nurse took off the pad over her eye and asked her to count fingers.
I said, four. Then I said, your nail polish is coming off.
The walk home
Patients wear a plastic shield over the operated eye for a week, and are sent home with drops and a card telling them when to come back. Dhan Maya and Kalpana took the bus to the end of the road and walked up the valley. This time, Kalpana says, her mother walked in front.
Her grandson was waiting at the edge of the village. “He smiled at me,” Dhan Maya says, “and I had forgotten that my grandson has a gap in his teeth. In front. I had forgotten he would be losing teeth.”
Coming back
Six weeks later a camp outreach worker visited the village to check Dhan Maya’s sight, as the programme does for patients who cannot travel back. With her new lens and no spectacles, her right eye read the 6/9 line of the chart: a good outcome by the World Health Organization’s measure, and better than three-quarters of the patients we fund.
Not everyone at the camp did as well. Of the 281 operated on, 236 were seen again, and of those, 177 had a good outcome. Twelve had a poor one, mostly because of other disease in the eye that the cataract had hidden. The programme reports them too.
Dhan Maya will have her left eye done at the autumn camp, which the district hospital has scheduled for the second week of November.