A couple years ago, at an outreach clinic about a 3.5 hour drive from the hospital, we saw a 10-year-old girl and her father. The girl was blind in one eye from a scar covering her pupil after a previous eye surgery three years earlier by another doctor. Her blind eye had also started to drift outwards so her eyes were not straight anymore. I was impressed to hear where they came from, and the great commitment of the father to the well being of his daughter.
The father had walked out of the jungle for two days to bring his daughter to our outreach clinic, hoping something could be done for her. We examined her in the humble outreach facility and told the father we thought we could help her with a surgery at the hospital. He asked about the cost for her care, as he was poor and worked only as a subsistence rice farmer in his remote village. We were grateful to be able to tell him that anything they couldn’t afford would be covered through a poor patient fund, and that cost didn’t have to be a barrier for his daughter to get the care she needed.
We knew the girl’s case would be more complicated than a routine case and thought it would be best to wait for some equipment we had shipped on a container to arrive before doing her surgery.
About two weeks later the container arrived and we were ready to attempt the surgery. This time the father and his daughter traveled about three days to get to the hospital from their remote village. Their travel included walking out of the jungle on foot paths, riding on a small boat down a river to get to the nearest road, and finally catching a passing bus for the final leg of the journey.
At the hospital we discovered that Karina not only had dense scarring in her eye, but also had no lens implant from her previous surgery. We discussed the complex nature of her case with the father and told him we couldn’t guarantee that his daughter’s vision would improve after the surgery. We explained there were many unknowns in his daughter’s case, including the original condition that prompted the first surgery, how she would heal from a second surgery, and the fact that we were not able to see into the back of her eye to know if it was healthy or not due to the dense scarring in the eye. We prayed and hoped his daughter’s vision could be improved.
After an involved surgery, which included removing dense scar tissue and inserting a new lens implant, we sent Karina back to her hospital room with a patch over the eye to recover. The next day when we removed the patch, her eye looked very good – and by one week after surgery her vision had recovered to almost legal driving vision without glasses!
Praise God for restoring Karina’s vision! It is simply a miracle that this little girl from a poor family in a forgotten, remote, jungle village was able to have a sophisticated eye surgery, with good quality medical equipment, at a mission hospital, at a price her family could afford… not to mention the miracle that is God’s creation of the eye in the first place!
What is remarkable about this young girl’s story is not only the miracle of her vision being restored, but also the great love and commitment of a father who went to great lengths to care for his daughter. It reminds me of the great love our Heavenly Father has for us, and what great lengths he goes to care for us, even to the point of sending his Son to die on a cross for our sins.