Eye Care Everywhere: Preventing your jewel of inestimable value

IN my youth, one of my favourite songs was, “No more sorrow, no more pain.” I can’t remember the other lines in the song now. Wait a minute! I think the next line is, “We are together in this world.” Bible scholars will immediately recognise the possible origin of the title, “No more sorrow, no more pain.”

But to be honest, at the time, it never occurred to me that the words were taken from the scriptures. I was just fascinated by the key words – ‘sorrow’ and ‘pain’.

I hated pain as a child, yet, unknowingly courted it at every turn by my actions. If I wasn’t knocking over boiling pots, on shaky stone tripods, while opening them out of curiosity to see what was happening inside, I would be climbing mango trees plucking mangoes or involved in other rough play. Thus, I had a fair share of self-inflicted pain and sorrow that came in its wake.

But what is ‘pain’ and what is ‘sorrow’? These are twin words which are inevitable companions. Pain is an unpleasant experience occurring in varying degrees of severity and may be physical or emotional. It is nearly always accompanied by sorrow. ‘Sorrow’, on the other hand, is an uneasiness or pain of the mind – a feeling or an expression of distress caused by loss, affliction, disappointment, grief, sadness, or regret happening to one or to someone else.

Sorrow is emotional and even more difficult to quantify than pain. It is very difficult for me to separate it from emotional pain.

As described above, I had a good deal of physical pain as a child and have numerous scars to show for it! And surely my parents must have felt some degree of sorrow to see me in pain. But now that I am a ‘little’ older, it is the emotional pain or sorrow that is devastating. Watching others suffer or doing something that will inevitably result in pain is perhaps one of the most distressing things that can happen to anyone.

Can you therefore imagine the pain an eye medical specialist goes through every day as one patient after another comes in with avoidable blindness? If you find it difficult to understand the message, please take a look at the following statistics and if you don’t experience any pain or distress, you must be superhuman.

More than one out of every 170 Nigerians are either blind or visually impaired from cataract. Cataract blindness is reversible by simple surgical operation yet only about one in 10 cataracts are operated by the eye doctors.

An equal number of cataract patients are operated by quacks and charlatans with disastrous consequences. The remaining eight patients are buried with their cataracts.

Glaucoma is the second commonest cause of blindness in Nigeria. Glaucoma blindness is irreversible, but avoidable. Unfortunately how can we help when two out of 10 patients are already blind in both eyes and six out of 10 are blind in one eye or severely visually impaired before they come to us? In a disease that causes no physical pain or discomfort, complacency is rife!

If you haven’t visited an ophthalmologist in the last one year, do you know you might be in this group? Are you waiting for blindness to announce itself before you visit? Please, note that I am not talking about Mr or Mrs Somebody. I am talking to you about you!

Being blind in a country like ours poses numerous challenges to the individual, the family and the community. These include poverty because of severe limitation of employment opportunities, social stigma and discrimination and increased mortality owing to loss of independence, lack of care and large-scale economic consequences.

For every blind person to survive and have a measure of comfort, at the least, one other person must be out of job to look after him! The community too has to provide a disability friendly environment with increased economic burden.

How do we prevent people from going blind? How do we preserve our jewel of inestimable value?  The first step is to create awareness among our people as to the leading causes of blindness. This is one of the major objectives of the World Sight Day which takes place every second Thursday of October.

The second is to advocate for the provision of access to eye care everywhere – at primary, secondary and tertiary levels. A few years ago, it would be seem unattainable in a country like ours.

Now, technology is coming to the rescue and very soon, it would be possible to provide access to eye care everywhere and to screen for the major eye diseases not just in our schools and communities, but also in the inner recesses of our individual homes at a cost that most people can afford.

This is one of the priorities of Eleta Eye Institute’s Centre for Innovations in Eye Care. Thus, you and I would be in a great position to preserve our jewel of inestimable value. Would you like to join us in this great pioneering effort? Send a message to WhatsApp 0805 400 5447.