For three days, a team of three eye specialists, one of whom is a Chennaiite, operated non-stop on young Kashmiris whose eyes had been wounded in pellet gun injuries during clashes with the security forces.
The medical team landed on Tuesday in a city where mobs were throwing stones and where everything was shut down, including the Internet and television.
Two of the doctors said the team went straight from the airport to Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital, where scores of people who had lost vision in one eye had come in.
ADVERTISEMENT
The doctors — S. Natarajan, who trained at the Government Ophthalmic Hospital in Egmore and worked at Sankara Nethralaya before settling in Mumbai, Syed Asghar Hussain, who runs the Optimus Maqbool Hospital in Triplicane and Kenshuk Marwah from New Delhi — were contacted by the Borderless World Foundation, an NGO that focusses on geographically remote and disadvantaged border areas.
“The Foundation had sent out an alert asking for retina specialists to go to Kashmir. I didn’t hesitate. I decided to go, and contacted two doctors who had trained under me to come as well,” said Dr. Natarajan, who is the director of Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Mumbai.
Only one operation theatre at the Srinagar hospital was functional for the particular surgeries, and the three doctors performed a total of 48, said Dr. Natarajan.
ADVERTISEMENT
“In about 10 cases, we removed the pellets. Some of the patients have suffered optic nerve damage, cataracts, iris and corneal damage,” he said. It was completely overwhelming, said Dr. Hussain, to see young people who had been caught in the crossfire — the youngest they operated on was 12 — suffer from critical eye injuries.
“The hospital has three vitreo-retinal surgeons but their hands are full — in a week, they have had dozens of admissions,” he said.
By Friday, a second theatre was set up to treat patients. That evening, the three doctors flew out, but they have plans to go back very soon.