When a 35-year-old farmer goes blind, he loses his farm, all of his income and his family becomes beggars.
When a 25-year-old mother goes blind, she loses her marriage and her children as her husband throws her out and marries someone else. Blindness hurts women much more than it hurts men.
And when a child goes blind, they pretty much lose everything. The chance to go to school, to get a job, to lead any kind of a normal life.
For most children, blindness can be a death sentence. The WHO reports that 60% of children die within 1-2 years of going blind. Whether you are 8 years old or 80 years old, in most developing countries they say a blind person is like a “mouth with no hands.” The saddest part of the problem of blindness is that most of this pain and suffering is completely unnecessary. The simple surgery that can cure blindness is quick, extremely inexpensive and it gives patients not just eyesight back, but a 2nd chance at life.
Over the past 20+ years that I have been traveling the world and doing charity work, I have seen a lot of amazing things. Extreme hardship and massive poverty. Incredible compassion and selflessness. Along the ways I have seen many modern-day medical miracles and life-changing surgeries.
But I have never seen anything as powerful as watching a blind child open their eyes and see their mom for the first time in their lives.
The bandages come off of the child’s eyes and he recoils and squints severely as the light rushes into its eyes for the first time. The child gradually adjusts to the light and opens her eyes wider and wider – stunned at seeing the world for the very first time. And then he hears his father’s voice and his head swivels directly to his father he connects the voice that he’s known all his life with a face he is seeing for the first time in his life.
I have been privileged to see this dozens of times and every time I almost fall on the ground, my eyes tear up and I am absolutely speechless. Blind adult patients act differently when their bandages come off but it is also very emotional. The vast majority of adults had normal eyesight for most of their lives before losing it for a variety of reasons.
I have watched hundreds, maybe thousands of adult patients have their bandages removed after blindness surgery, open their eyes and see again. They also squint as the light rushes into their eyes.
I think many of them too are afraid to open their eyes because of the fear that the surgery didn’t work. But within a few seconds, their eyes are wide open, and they are seeing just fine. Some of them let out a scream. Some of them start crying with joy. Some of them put their hands together and thank the surgeon and nurses for this life-saving miracle they have just experienced.
They too look around in amazement just like the kids and they too lock onto a loved one who brought them here to the hospital. A loved one they haven’t seen in years, sometimes decades. A wife or husband. A son or daughter. Sometimes an entire family crowds around the patient hugging him or her, crying, shaking with happiness. I have been involved with so many surgeries over the years. Cleft surgery. Reconstructive plastic surgery. Hole-in-the-heart surgery. Orthognathic surgery. Water-on-the-brain surgery. Burn surgery. Club foot surgery. And blindness surgery. And just like it is with my three kids, I love all the surgeries all the same. But I tell you, if I could only choose one surgery to work on it would be blindness.
Giving a blind child or adult their eyesight back is the greatest miracle I have ever witnessed. And I am very proud that 20/20/20 helped restore the eyesight of more than 225,000 blind children and adults.
