After missing a year, we headed back to rural Syangja to run what was our 5th series of health camps in this region.
As we walked up to Gabde School, the location for our first camp, the lines had already formed, with early arrivals keen not to miss out on the opportunity to have their eyes and teeth checked for free, and for the ladies, to see a gynaecologist.
As soon as were set up, registration opened and our medical teams got down to work. Such was the demand that within the first two hours, we had already registered 191 patients, almost as many as we registered in a whole day in 2016.
As always, the most popular check-up was for eyes with the queue for first the visual acuity test and then to see the eye doctors themselves seeming to never end.
Despite many of the eye patients being from the older generation, it was school aged kids who had the most serious problems and also a total lack of awareness that their lack of vision was not normal. One 10 year old girl was suffering from high myopia with -14 vision in her right eye and -12 in her left. She hadn’t mentioned her lack of vision to anyone before as it was her belief that everyone’s eyes were the same.
This 13 year old girl only realised a month ago that their was something wrong with her eyes, despite not being able to see with her left eye, as she was so accustomed to just using her right one. Once again, she thought her condition was the norm and so didn’t say anything about it. She is now using prescription glasses to rectify her avaisometropice amblyopia.
In total our eye doctors saw 328 patients. Discovered 15 operable cataracts, prescribed 130 sets of reading glasses and 28 prescription glasses.
The dental team was also much busier than usual seeing 156 patients and performing 28 extractions, 26 restorations and scaling 14 sets of teeth.
The line outside the gynaecological room was long and this team was the last to finish up at the end of the day. Offering consultations as well as internal examinations and education, the ladies from the surrounding villages (159 ladies) took full advantage of this service.
They saw a full range of issues including 3 uterine prolapses, one of which was ulcerated on both the posterior and anterior sides. All 3 ladies were referred for further treatment.
Perhaps the most interesting case they saw was a 63 year old lady who had had a herbal pessary wrapped in plastic, the size of a large tomato inserted into her vagina by a Jhakari (Shaman) 25 years before, to push her uterine prolapse back inside. She was not complaining of any pain, discomfort or infection and this mass has now become a part of her body and thus will not be removed due to the risk of excessive bleeding. They have only seen one other case such as this at their clinic, but the patient thought that there were many village ladies living with the same condition.
In total, in one day we:
Registered 415 patients: 264 ladies, 141 gents of which 368 were adults and 47 were children of 16 or under and provided 643 consultations across the 3 disciplines.
A massive thank you to everyone involved who helped to make this happen, especially Tila Ale and Kumar Rana who did all the pre camp organisation, our health care providers, Gabde School and the volunteers of the Tri Netra Youth Club and of our course Dr Del Endres, One World One Heart and our donors, without whom these camps would not be possible.
