CHAPTER THIRTEEN - A SIEGE IS RAISED

 
 
 
ANOTHER 'cold weather' with its kindlier, gentler warmth and blue had come, with it too the familiar crowds of importunate blind. I had been the 'Eye-maker' for almost two years in the jungle hospital and had lost all sense of time, even of the monotonous succession of moons so that my stay seemed much longer. My last months were unexpectedly and happily marked by several visits from senior eye surgeons in the course of their world tours, who had heard of my unusual hospital and came to keep their hand in on some eye surgery, or to escape a surfeit of conventional organised sight-seeing. 
The first was a Swiss doctor who told me with a twinkle in his eye that he had come as an eye surgeon and left as a practologist as well. The latter medical word refers to haemorrhoids or piles. The unpleasant spate of patients with this trouble, which happened from time to time, coincided with his visit. We concentrated on these unaesthetic operations - so unlike cataract surgery - one day a week, which we called 'Bloody Friday'.
 
 
1 Feb 1932   I usually let the cases accumulate –(it is a disgusting operation)- until there are ten or so, and so do them all at once, one day a week –“Bloddy Friday” I call it.  It is a revolting sight to see me, having finished the ninth case, walk across to the tenth over the unconscious bodies of the previous cases which are littering the floor ( with the occasional relative who has fainted}.  When they come to they get up and totter off.

Since the hospital had no trolleys, patients were removed from the operation theatre after operation by hand and placed on the floor of the theatre veranda, to be watched by an orderly till they had recovered consciousness.  As ten patients may have been dealt with during the morning, when we left the theatre to go for lunch, the mass of prostrate forms on the verandah looked like a battlefield. 

The second visitor I had was a New Zealand eye surgeon who arrived when I was just 'going under' in my attempt to keep up with the daily influx of blind.  As well as saving me from a physical breakdown, I remember his sound advice, cheerful encouragement and critical banter with gratitude. With two doctors instead of one we even managed to escape into camp for a weekend's rest. 

Two months later, when I had again reached the stage by evening of feeling pursued by the blind, and was ready to shut myself up in my room if another appeared, I received the following letter from a friend in Calcutta which made me dance with joy across the verandah: 

Dear Doctor, 
Two Globe-trotters from America's Middle West want to do some cataracts. I gave them your address. Will you contact them through 'Thomas Cooks, Calcutta .... Good Luck, Yours… 

I dashed off a letter of invitation at once, asking them to bring bed-linen and tinned stores, and to expect a kind of hospital they had never seen before. 
On the day of their arrival, I went down to the railway station sixteen miles away in the old Ford, and on the return journey they were thrilled with the jungle and the water splashes at the un-bridged rivers. 
They were elderly, 'successful' men, keen and vocal in their appreciation of everything. Taken away from their formal, conducted world tour (which after six months was beginning to pall), they got the biggest thrill of their 'vacation'. Though they did not quite escape the attentions of their travel agency. The Cook's courier who accompanied them fulfilled the strangest assignment of his career - he accompanied the learned doctors to the operation theatre to interpret instructions to the cataract patients in their own language, - 'Look down', 'Look up', and so on. 

My Santals noticed in the visiting doctors a subtle difference in speech and manner from that of the doctor sahibs to whom they had been accustomed.  History was made - 'Merican' was passed into the Santali language.  My servants also showed their sensitivity to 'something different' by not bringing in the bible with coffee, after dinner. 
On the day of their arrival, I asked casually at lunch if they would like to do a dozen cataracts that afternoon, I am afraid very much in the same tone of voice as one might suggest so many holes of golf (not that I could offer them that). They nearly choked with excitement .
They each had their own exclusive clinic in Nebraska USA, but did less than that in a month - 'Yes-Sirrr!' 
They ultimately decided to wait till the morrow, and instead spend the remainder of the day sorting out and polishing their ophthalmic instruments (like golfers doing their clubs at the beginning of a holiday). Accustomed as I was to a modest selection of instruments - though I did send the delicate cataract knives in batches to London for re-sharpening - the variety and quantity of theirs was a revelation. 

Two blissfully happy weeks followed, in which I myself completed my 2000th cataract. It was an education to watch them at work, discussing each step in their Middle Western brogue, and which instrument they would select from their pile. "I guess a spoon would be better, George? .... Yeah?" 

My opportunities for technical discussion, too, had been rare, so talking shop was permitted at meal-times. In fact we discussed nothing else but the methods of extraction or expulsion of the cataractous lens of the human eye for days on end, levering table-knives between inverted saucers and embroidered tablecloth to the obvious curiosity of my table servants as to our behaviour. 

These visits served to show me how vast indeed were the ramifications of the speciality which had been thrust upon me, and I determined to go home to follow it under more academic conditions. 
They invited me to America, but the Wall Street crash of the early thirties followed and they wrote to say it was no longer a good time to come. 

Thus ended my two years as the 'Eye Maker'. 
I went home and got married and after a spell at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, returned to India to join the army. But that is another story.
 
 

EPILOGUE