Medical Mission: Part Deux

I got to put a guy’s eye in.

Let me explain.

A recent medical mission came into the town: New York Eye Doctors! I was on hand for the full week to interpret. There were many jobs for interpreters, interviewing for patient intake, working on the various stations of the eye exam room, interpreting for doctors working on preliminary consults, and finally interpreting for staff for pre and post op. I spent the bulk of my time working intake and in the eye exam room, but I did get a chance to do all of the jobs. (And on the last day we all got to play eye doctor with one another and a real patient.)

On one particular morning in consults, I was called in to help a nurse who was working with prosthetic eyes. She had a patient whose eye was shrunken and dead, but had not been removed. She was fitting him for a prosthetic and needed my assistance to help teach him how to place and remove the eye for himself. He was having trouble with the prosthetic. So, the two of them worked on it for a while until he asked her if he’d be able to go to work that day. That’s when her cultural sensitivity kicked into overdrive. Not only was she then worried about fitting his new eye properly, but she was also concerned for his comfort and for his employment. At the same time, she was called, twice, by nurses coming out of surgeries to look for her, and both times the nurses had a lot of urgency in their requests for her.

I knew what was coming, but was still a little shocked when she looked to me. She told me he was not to leave until he’d removed and replaced the eye a few more times. She asked if I could oversee that. It was so clear to me that she was needed somewhere else that I nodded my head of course and waved her off to her other, more urgent job. But in reality, I was nervous.

He began to struggle some more with the eye. He had been, very obviously, in a great amount of discomfort fitting the eye into a crevice where before there had been nothing but fluffy tissue. His eye welled up as a result. He needed to get to his job, or who knows what might have happened, but it was imperative that he learn how to work with the eye before leaving. So, we got to it.

He struggled, acknowledging my encouragement, but all the while being unable to force the eye in. After watching with frustration for a while, as he tried to wiggle it in, I decided to be proactive. With his permission, I lifted his upper eye lid so that he could lower the lower lid and slip the eye in under the upper lid. Again he struggled, as I encouraged, until finally it was in! But that was only one part of the battle. He had been given a tiny suction cup to use on the eye to remove it. It was either that or pushing his own finger up and under the eye to take it out. He’d been unsuccessful with the suction cup in the presence of the nurse and had given up on it. So, he pushed his finger in, as I still held his upper eye lid, tear ducts flowing all the while, he got the eye out! Once more he put it in and then left, to come back the following day to speak with the nurse again about other cleaning the eye and the future.

As I left the room I held the wall, fearing that if I kept my arms to my sides I’d fall over. Not once watching hernia surgeries or eye surgeries had I gotten faint. But this time it was an eye, and it was staring at me, and I was right there in it, and so yeah, I felt a little faint.

The next day I asked to sit in with her and him again, and he allowed me to take a photo of the two of them working together with the eye.