Farewell Mongolia

We have had two successful days in surgery earlier in the week, completing six corneal transplants for patients at the First National Hospital in Ulaanbaatar. It is difficult to perform surgery in an operating room with equipment that one is not familiar with and in a country whose language you do not understand. We tackled some tough cases in this foreign environment with limited access to resources. Each time I do this, I ask myself why I volunteer for this stress, as if my day job back home isn’t already packed with challenging cases. But then I think about corneal blindness worldwide and see the eager faces of the doctors who desperately want to provide a surgical option to their patients. I remember that if I were not here, these patients would remain blind and these doctors would have no way to learn this surgery. At the end of the week, we’ve forgotten the sweat and tachycardia we experienced in the operating room when we see the patients’ vision improvement. This makes it all worth it.

Our Mongolian colleagues have never done corneal transplants before, so they need education from us on how to take care of these patients after surgery. The patients also required thorough instruction on how to protect their operated eye. We are afraid that our good work here will go down the drain if the patients do not continue to use the eye drops or come back to Ulaanbaatar for their follow-up care. Some are living a nomadic lifestyle in the remote countryside, residing in a traditional portable Mongolian dwelling called a ger. We made sure they will have access to a cornea specialist here after our departure.

This trip has made me feel grateful for so many things. The resources like medications, surgical equipment, and especially, donor corneas are easy to come by in the United States but not so in Mongolia. However, the Mongolians have no shortage of motivation to learn and improve. Meanwhile, I am grateful for the skills and knowledge passed to me by my own mentors, teachers and colleagues. A skill is a gift that you carry around with you all over in the world and can give away freely, if you so choose. I wish there were more we could give, more we could do and more we could teach, but our time here is short. One of the Mongolian doctors said it best on our last day together: This trip didn’t just help the six patients we operated on; the effects of our teaching will benefit thousands of patients. Our work is far from finished in Mongolia–there are other forms of corneal transplantation that we must return to teach; and they have requested help in other subspecialties in ophthalmology as well. Farwell, Mongolia, see you again next time!

Thank you all for coming on this journey with Laura and me. We appreciate all your support and encouragement. We want to express our gratitude to all our sponsors for making this trip possible. Click here and here to learn more about the philanthropic work done by our partners and how you can get involved. To support our future teaching trips to Mongolia and other international destinations, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to our international mission fund. If you have not done so already, please consider registering as an organ donor so that one day you can potentially save the vision and lives of many.

We want to thank all of our partners who made this work possible:
The Virtue Foundation
SightLife Eye Bank
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Alcon
Karl Storz
Katena
Moria
Samsonite