02 Mar IF YOU LOSE AN EYE FROM A ROCK
Dr. Sergio Tabacchi, an ophthalmologist from Ferrara who has spent part of his holiday volunteering in Adwa for the last 7 years, found himself operating on a hopeless case…
Adwa, Kidane Mehret Mission, 5 p.m.
It’s been a hard day: seven surgeries in the morning, while Piero visited about 50 patients in the clinic and 30 more in the afternoon. The guard comes in and says there are about 70 people at the gate who aren’t on the list. They’ve come from far away and are waiting to be seen. Piero and I exchange looks: OK, I’ll see another 20…no run on the football pitch tonight, we’ll do it tomorrow…
Among the people that come in is an 8-year-old boy with his dad.
“Come take a look at this eye,” Piero calls to me. A rock, thrown by a friend two days before while he was in a tree picking a mango, had split the eyeball, causing a perforating wound. He’ll never see out of that eye again…
At home, in Italy, a situation like this would be taken care of at the hospital, with emergency surgery under general anaesthesia… In Adwa: ophthalmologists come to the hospital once every 3 months and they work with makeshift instruments that they bring with them every time, then take away with them again when they leave…
…here, there’s us. We’re well-equipped but we’ve got no anaesthesia, nor is there a paediatrician… We can’t leave the eye open, and we decide to give it a try anyway, even if 8 is young for local anaesthesia…
Operating theatre, the young women are brilliant at cuddling the boy when I come over with the syringe for the local anaesthesia…painkillers and I begin…the little one cries, it hurts but he is so good…every now and then I stop, I tell our interpreter to have him talk. He tells us that he lives in a village far from Adwa. I start again, it hurts him again, I stop. More eye drops, he says he’s got five siblings…
In the end, the wound is sutured. He’ll never see out of that eye again, but at least the eyeball has been saved.
Coming out of the theatre, the nurses and volunteers compete to pamper him: bananas, crackers, candies…something to eat and drink for Dad as well, who is perhaps more exhausted than his son…
…he says he can’t bring the boy back for the check-up the next morning because transport costs 50 birr (2 euro), which he can’t afford…
Obviously, we find the 50 birr right away and tomorrow we’ll see the boy again, who will get his life back little by little…
This is what happens in Adwa, a short story as to why the hospital that Sister Laura is struggling to complete and that will be inaugurated in January is so very important…
Sergio Tabacchi