Dr. Geoff Tabin is changing lives. www.CureBlindness.org
I just read a powerful story in the December issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. A story that has caused me to shift my thinking about a lot of things. You can read the short version below, or you can click the link above to read the whole thing.
Dr. Geoff Tabin was the 4th person to ever climb the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain in every continent. Very few people have done this and it is a very impressive feat. But, it’s a personal feat. It does not really improve anybody else’s lives.
It’s kind of like my competing in the Olympics. Sure, it might inspire a few people to work harder for their dreams and goals, but it’s mostly a personal goal.
What’s incredible about Dr. Tabin is what he’s done since climbing the 7 Summits. He found out that in 3rd world countries, most blindness is due to cataracts and through a simple 10 minute surgery he can give sight - and a life, back to a blind person. And, he can do it for about $20 per surgery.
Dr. Tabin goes to places like Tibet, or Ethiopia, sets up a clinic, and with the help of several other doctors they perform hundreds of operations a week.
Get this, the life expectancy of a blind person in these places is one third the life expectancy of a person with vision, so by giving blind people sight, he’s not just improving their lives, he’s lengthening their lives and making them non-dependent on others and more productive.
As far as I’m concerned, Dr. Tabin is a hero.
Below you’ll find the shortened version of the article. His website has some really cool videos of what they do. By the way, their organization is rated extremely high in how they use funds people donate to them.
I intend to start donating a very generous portion of the fees I charge for my speeches to help Dr. Tabin give sight to the blind. I may not be able to perform the operation, but at least I can feel good that I can help this humanitarian project in a small way. www.CureBlindness.org
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Most Blindness is Curable
Cataracts—a clouding of the lens of the eye—typically afflict only the aging in wealthy nations. But in Nepal, as in most developing countries, the condition plagues the entire population, from infants to the elderly. Poor nutrition, physical trauma, unfiltered exposure to UV rays, all lead to cataract disease. More than half of the treatable blindness on Earth is caused by cataracts.
The challenge is inventing a cost-effective way to deliver a surgical procedure that costs $3,000 in America to people in the world’s poorest and most remote places.
By developing a vastly simplified (but no less effective) operation and manufacturing his own artificial lenses at a factory in Nepal, Ruit pioneered a way to do First World–quality cataract surgery for under $20 a patient. And together, he and Geoff Tabin packed surgical microscopes onto horses or the tops of buses and began conducting high-volume eye surgery camps.
Little Miracle
Hunched over a surgical microscope, with his iPhone blasting Howlin’ Wolf through crummy speakers, Tabin works his 13th case of the day. The patient, Lam Lam Berhar, is a 55-year-old woman with large, milky cataracts obscuring both eyes. She also has a mild case of trachoma, an infection that can cause the eyelashes to turn inward and scar the cornea.
Berhar has traveled a day on foot and 80 miles by bus from her village to be here today. She says her husband is also blind but they could only afford a single bus fare. Berhar’s vision has degraded to the point that she can make out only light and dark. I can see myself, reflected in the cataracts’ blank, blue-white surfaces as I lean over her to watch Tabin work.
I ask how quickly trachoma leads to blindness. “Not as fast as masturbation,” Tabin says, holding out his gloves for Sarita Paudel to rinse with a sterilizing solution.
With Paudel assisting, Tabin makes an incision in each of Berhar’s anesthetized eyes with a diamond blade he’s had built to his specifications. Delicately, he works each cataract-clouded lens out of the tunnel he’s constructed through several layers of the eye and flicks it into a bucket by his feet. Next he inserts a new synthetic lens in its place. The process takes ten minutes. “It’s the single most effective medical intervention on Earth,” Tabin says, “a little miracle. Tomorrow, she should see 20/20.”
Chansi drives the doctors hard the first day. They break once in the early afternoon to use the bathroom and swallow a protein bar each before tying their surgical masks back on. At 9 p.m., after 114 surgeries, Chansi pulls the plug. We all wedge into a Land Cruiser for the short drive to our hotel in Mekele. I wonder just how much energy Tabin will have left for the dancing he promised. He slumps sideways and begins to snore. At our grim hotel, we skip dinner and fall asleep in our reeking clothes.
Promptly at 7 a.m. the Land Cruiser arrives to take us back to work. Before scrubbing in, the doctors inspect the results of yesterday’s surgeries. The line of squatting patients with bandaged eyes stretches along one entire wall of the hospital, around a corner, and halfway down the side of the building. Local priests with long beards and flowing robes circulate through the crowd, comforting anxious family members. They hold carved wooden crosses in one hand and horsehair flyswatters in the other. Say what you will about the efficacy of the crosses, but the flyswatters are righteously useful, and I wish I had one.
It’s difficult, looking at the six or seven hundred people gathered at Quiha, not to feel that Ethiopians have won the genetic lottery. Their café au lait skin glows in the early light. Women wear their hair in elaborately plaited shurubba, piled high over imperious foreheads. And the eyes of those who are able to see pin me in place with striking intensity.
Berhar is one of the first in line. Tabin crouches in front of her, peels back her bandages, and shines his climber’s headlamp in her eyes. Berhar, like many women in the second oldest Christian country on Earth, has a black Coptic cross tattooed in the center of her forehead. “Perfect,” Tabin says, “crystal clear.” He waves at her.
For a moment, Berhar’s face remains perfectly blank, and I’m afraid the surgery has failed. Then her hand flutters up to touch the cross on her head and her eyes focus on Tabin’s grinning face. Berhar jumps to her feet, throws back her head, and ululates. Her cry is contagious. As the doctors move down the line, dozens of other women who’ve regained their sight stand and add their voices to the trilling chorus. Sometime in my life I may hear a sound that expresses joy more purely. But I can’t imagine when.
Small Victory
All day long buses and carts arrive at the hospital gate, unloading streams of the sightless. The blind walk unsteadily into the compound with staffs, or are led forward, clutching the hem of a son or daughter’s long, trailing shawl. Chansi tells me that more than 500 patients have arrived. But the crowd grows to well over a thousand. Families, unable to find solid shade, squat in the latticed shadow of thornbushes. The swelling crowd illustrates the toll blindness takes on a developing country: Not only are the functionally blind unable to support themselves, but those who care for them are pulled from the workforce as well.
By 9 p.m. on the fifth evening the team has completed 699 surgeries, but more patients keep arriving.
On our sixth day, I work beside Tabin from dawn to dusk. I manage flow, taking care to always have someone prepped at the end of his operating table so I can slide them into place the moment I finish bandaging the previous patient. Mohari makes frequent deliveries of his strong medicine. And we find an agreeable rhythm that speeds the surgeries along, accompanied by Tabin’s iPhone playing loud electric blues.
Just after 10 p.m. I drip antibiotic drops into the eyes of Tabin’s last patient, a frail, emaciated woman who is far too easy to lift onto the table. When he’s done, I press surgical tape over a gauze patch, smoothing it to the woman’s forehead and cheekbone. Tabin and I both note the number I write on her taped forehead with green marker: 82. She is Tabin’s 82nd patient that day, a record for the trip.
By the middle of the eighth day, we’ve all become cogs in a machine making a difference. The compound empties out. Buses and carts carry patients away. People who’d arrived clutching blindly at the hem of a relative’s clothing walk confidently, without assistance, toward their homes. By early afternoon I bandage patient number 907. With a shock I realize no one else is waiting. We’ll all be leaving soon too. Most of us will return to our own countries, to sleep as much as our families will allow while we nurse our various minor ailments.
But not Geoff Tabin. He’s feeling “fantastic” again and has scheduled a morning tennis match with one of Ethiopia’s top players upon our return to Addis. After that, he’ll head to San Francisco to meet with the Dalai Lama, who will present him with the 2009 Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award. Then two weeks later, after a precious few days with his family in Utah, Tabin will get back in his eternal coach class seat and travel to Nigeria, where he’ll lead another high-volume surgical camp.
But that’s all in the future. For now there is only the Quiha Zonal Hospital, and this lesson: Somehow the overwhelming need of the crowd outside the door makes some people, certain rare individuals like Tabin, not only stronger, but better. And as I walk our last patient outside into the blinding Ethiopian sunlight, I realize that we’ve all found hidden reserves in ourselves that Geoff Tabin knew about all along. And we’ve become better too.
David Oliver Relin is currently working on a new book, See How They Shine, about Tabin, Ruit, and the quest to cure preventable blindness. It will be published by Random House in the spring of 2011. For more information on the Himalayan Cataract Project, go to cureblindness.org.
Olympic Motivational Speaker Ruben Gonzalez
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