Cataract Chronicles-25 years
As I celebrate my 25th year volunteering as an eye surgeon in Southeast Asia. I am delighted to share photos and stories about the vision challenges and the people and cultures of India, Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. - Dr. Gary Barth
Chronicle 4 - Large Cataract Eye Camps 1999
In 1999, I joined the Prasad Project as the youngest eye surgeon in a group that intended to do 300 cataract surgeries a day for four days. The advanced team had cleaned out a rural Indian factory floor to make it safe for eye surgery. The doors and windows were then sealed with tape and formaldehyde was saturated for two days to kill all the bugs.
In a second room, my wife, Kevin, with a smaller team, performed 50 cataract surgeries daily. In our big room, we could perform 250 cataract surgeries a day, day after day.
Included is a picture of the large room and the multiple medical personnel and microscopes needed to perform that many surgeries on the never-ending line of blind patients. In the end, we performed more than 1,100 free cataract surgeries.
