The Sense of Sight

In Al Bahar center. Outpatient clinic.

'Hajjiya, wain hada iftah ? Yemin aw yeesaar'? (Which way is this box opening? To the left or right?)
'Shon yaani ? Ana maa shuff' ( What? I can’t see anything)

Rewind a bit. I was driving out on a random road last week when the air conditioner decided to be funny and let in some dust through the vent which landed straight into my eye. Two blinks later, my contact lens popped out and in the middle of a packed road, at night time, I decided against searching for it an kept driving with one eye closed; something that I would not recommend to anyone. At the traffic signal, I tried to wink alternatively and see how much I could read of the number plate on the car in front. The inability to do so with my now defected eye made me say a silent prayer for the inventor of contact lens and lens in general. Call it coincidence that 2 days later I began an ophthalmology rotation.

A week into that place and I’ve already shifted the doctors working there into the number one spot in my ranking of Best-est Doctors of the World. This needs some explanation. The thing is ki I like to rate doctors according to the difficulty of the work I feel they do. This indirectly lets me know which specialty I will NOT AT ALL consider after graduating. Now since I don’t like surgery I’m partial towards surgeons in that ranking and have rated them high. Nevertheless, there’s an aura about them that commands respect and it feels nice to see how ordinary looking people do pretty extra ordinary things while dressed in the light blue gowns. This respect multiplied three folds after I witnessed a cardio surgery last year. Dr. A opened up a 750gm baby to fix a ‘hole in his heart’. While preparing for surgery he let us know that the diameter of the vessels in this patients heart were about as think as threads. How lovely.
God must have spent extra time crafting a surgeon’s hand; and then just to put them to perfect use he designed ophthalmic complications. Make that surgery-requiring-ophthalmic-complications.

So then, on day 1 in the center I saw some very expected scenes.
Men with eye patches, woman being wheeled in and out and children with squints being examined in dimly lit clinics. What was striking was what happened at the doctor’s end. Through a set of plain lens, these people look into what’s possibly the most complicated organ I’ve come across till date and it seems to make sense to them. A yellow blob with a red cross is somehow explained as being the retina and its accompanying arteries, all in the name of fundoscopy.
The teaching lens was switched on and the doc called in a young girl who I noticed had a slightly larger right eye. ‘Describe what you see through the scope’? I looked and what I saw took to while to put into words. There was a ‘tube’ in her eye, a straw, a hollow cylinder, a hose, like the kind used in gardens to water plants. ‘I see an object, a tube’. ‘Yes yes, this is a case of congenital glaucoma, we’ve added a tube to drain the excess aqueous humor being produced’ he said, and continued to fiddle with the lens as if what he had just said was the most normal thing in the world. This school girl in a uniform had a tube in her eye. Like inside her eye. And I could see it. What could possibly be normal about this situation? I suddenly wanted to meet the person who’s placed this tube into her eye and wanted to take a picture of their hand, for keeps sake. What an amazing ability to have. Then they say the stitch used in eye surgeries is microscopic and is seen only with a magnified lens. Wow.
Another day I was handed the ophthalmoscope an asked to look into a man’s eye. It was different from the few earlier one’s I had seen and the doctor let me know that he was blind. Then I was told ki the visual cortex provides 30% of the input to the brain, so technically a blind person has 30% extra brain space to distribute to ‘other’ sense. Moral of the story - ‘Blind people are more intelligent’. But why would a person with no sight need extra brain power? What’s a good enough compensation for the inability to see?

That same morning, BBC radio had carried a piece on some highly secretive company in New Jersey that stores computers that run the stock markets of the States. These were super-duper machines that transfer stock information i.e. buy and sell stuff in millionths of seconds. After doing the math, that was calculated as dealing in 400 thousand stocks in a second. The commentator remarked that the world needs such sharp and talented people who come up with such intelligent things.
This made me think.
With due respect to every profession and even thought it seem strange to relate and conclude the above events together, but I am somehow happier in a world where someone exists who can fix my eye rather than pileup stocks in micromilli seconds. Ability and skills definitely come in all forms, but nothing like preventing someone from saying they can’t see.

That’s just how I see it.