Same-Day Miracles: Karl Holzinger
An elderly man had entered the clinic supported by his wife, his blindness making it impossible for him to walk unaided. Now, Dr. Karl Holzinger, an ophthalmologist with a practice in Vineland, and Dr. Thomas Baah, his host at Save the Nation’s Sight, a clinic run out of Baah’s home in Ghana, watched the man leave the clinic on his own, his vision restored by an operation most in the West take for granted. Holzinger had come to Ghana to offer sight to the sightless, some of whom had been blinded by cataracts or the corneal growths known as pterygiums, for decades. The thrill of witnessing the instant transformation never gets old.
Few other specialists are as well positioned to offer what many in the developing world must view as near-miracles. Though in Ghana Holzinger and his colleagues use an older and less refined version of cataract surgery than they do back home (the equipment needed for the newer procedure is too large to transport) and operate with only local anesthesia, they can change a life in a day. That’s especially true for patients who are farmers and field workers in their 30s and 40s, who develop cataracts due to intense sun exposure and whose blindness means they can no longer support their families.
Miracle working can be addictive. Holzinger went on his first mission, to the Philippines, in 1995, when he was stationed with the military in Hawaii. Since then he’s gone on some 40 others, most recently to Cambodia, India, and, this past July, Ghana, with Dr. Gary Domeracki of Temple University with the California-based nonprofit Surgical Eye Expeditions. The organization, he says, provides all the supplies needed for surgery. Holzinger and his colleagues provide the transformations.
Restoring sight to someone who has lived without it for decades can even yield the occasional moment of humor. Holzinger remembers uncovering the eyes of an elderly woman in Indonesia who had had cataract surgery earlier that day. Typical of the newly sighted, her eyes darted around the room for several minutes, finally fixing on the face of her husband. “Ho,” the woman said, examining the old man her husband had become. “I didn’t know you were so ugly.”
But light can quickly give way to darkness. “We see a lot of people with glaucoma, which is slowly taking their vision away,” he says. In the West, patients are routinely screened for the optic-nerve disorder, and medication can usually keep it from progressing into blindness. For the glaucoma patients Holzinger sees on his missions, it’s already too late. “It breaks our hearts,” he says.
1,000 Years of Impact: Reza Momeni
A cleft lip or palate is, among other things, an aesthetic deformity. It can affect a child’s ability to speak and to eat, and predispose that child to ear infections, but the deeper damage is social. That’s rarely a problem in the West, where most orofacial clefts are surgically repaired in the first months of life. But in many developing countries, where the costs of surgery are prohibitive, some clefts are never repaired. It’s common for families to keep a child with a cleft lip or palate hidden in a back room. That child’s chances of having a normal, productive adult life are slim in cultures where deformities are routinely met with bullying or shunning.
Given those grim facts, it’s easy to understand why Summit Medical Group plastic surgeon Reza Momeni resolved to fix as many orofacial clefts as he can. Once or twice a year for the past 12 years, he has gone on missions to places like Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, China and the Philippines, traveling with a team from one or another nonprofit dedicated to fixing orofacial clefts, like Healing the Children, Smile Train and Destination Hope. Each time, they go for a week or two, working until they’ve run out of supplies or patients, whichever comes first.
Momeni may do 20 to 30 surgeries in a week, but he doesn’t think of them as cases. “If you fix a baby when he’s one or two, that kid has a chance at 50, 60 years of a productive lifetime, instead of 50, 60 years of hiding,” he says. Doing the math, he estimates that each case is worth about 50 years of impact. Whenever he leaves on a mission, he thinks, Can I make 1,000 years of impact on this trip?
On a recent mission to the Philippines, Momeni’s team had just run out of anesthesia gas and had started packing when a man appeared at the hospital with his 15-year-old son. The boy had a wide cleft lip and palate but, says Momeni, “he was a really good-looking guy.” And the kid had an attitude. Unlike most people in the developing world who have lived their lives with a deformity, “he clearly had not let this get to him,” Momeni says, recalling the boy’s sharp clothes, his swagger, the way he playfully teased the young women at the hospital. It pained Momeni to turn the kid away. The surgeon did something he would never have done at home. He asked the boy if he would be willing to undergo surgery with only local anesthesia. And, says Momeni, “he didn’t bat an eye.”
The surgery took an hour and a half, and at the end, one of the nurses handed the boy a small mirror. He greeted his reflection with what Momeni calls “one of the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen.” Those are the moments that keep Momeni returning year after year.
“I will never get depressed in my life if I go on two of these missions a year,” he says, “because it is such an incredibly positive experience. If I can get on a plane and go over there and, with some basic equipment and a lot of help from our team, change somebody’s life for 50 years, that makes me really, really happy.”
Leslie Garisto Pfaff is a longtime contributor.