Camps

My first screening camp on the morning after my arrival in Chennai, in the slums north of the city close to the beach. I viewed the reed-hut slums on the sand, multitude of stray animals and indelibly chaotic traffic from the van on my way here (with Tamil music blaring on the radio). Three optometrists checked vision and refracted patients using trial frames. I was at the ophthalmologist station with another Tamil-speaking
doctor where I had a flashlight, a portable slit lamp and my direct ophthalmoscope and checked for cataracts. If other pathology was present that required further examination, I referred the patient to the clinic. There was a fair amount of corneal scarring/opacification, likely from previous infectious keratitis. A few had rAPDs with pale nerves viewed with the direct ophthalmoscope for unknown reasons. We didn't have the setup to do indirect ophthalmoscopy. If the patient didn't need cataract surgery and just had presbyopia, he/she went to the glasses station to get a pair of free reading glasses (dispensed by the other volunteers). If the patient needed surgery, I'd refer the person to another station for referral to Uma Eye Clinic for pre-op measurements and Hande Hospital for surgery scheduling. In the span of about 2.5 hours, we had screened over 200 people. For this particular camp, we decided to transport the patients who needed pre-op measurements back to Uma ourselves right after lunch (a delicious, non-veg thali cooked by the neighbors next door). Amazingly, we squeezed about 15 people in with us in the van--the right half of my rear end had a bouncy, precarious seat on the way back.


I tried my hand at giving out reading glasses to people who didn't speak English during my fourth camp, at left. The biggest challenge was really getting them to understand that they shouldn't be looking up and around in the distance with those things on (they would come back to me saying everything was blurry)--even though I had told them "for reading, for reading" ten times in Tamil.



The portable slit lamp came in handy sometimes. Most of the time, we didn't use it. With just a regular flashlight, even without dilation, it was relatively easy to detect cataracts. This young woman came to me complaining of headaches. Her AC looked pretty shallow with the slit lamp, so I referred her for further workup/gonioscopy at Hande Hospital.