IT WAS a New Year never to be forgotten for Lai Chun. The 64-year-old mother of six saw in the Year of the Pig like no one else. All those long, blurred days of the Year of the Dog, she had not been able even to count the fingers of her own hand. The nightmare hours passed by in a milky gloom, as if she had been living in a dim steam room.
What's more, it hurt. 'It hurt so much I wanted to tear out my eyeball and get rid of it.' It was agony to go out into the sunlight and it pained her to stay indoors. She was in despair: a succession of 10 doctors had said they could do nothing.
But three days before New Year's Day, Lai sat up in bed and said: 'Thanks to Dr Lam, everything is going to be all right.' And it was.
A few minutes later, fully conscious but sedated, she was in an operating theatre at the Prince of Wales Hospital, her right eye under the magnified scrutiny of Dr Dennis C. S. Lam. In only one hour, his nimble fingers gave her the gift of sight again, replacing a cornea that was as much use to her as an oily windshield and a focusing lens that was encrusted with the cataract gunge of age.
Stitching up the whole thing with sutures half as thick as a human hair, he comes out with the nonchalant understatement: 'Our hands must be very steady.' On New Year's Eve, Lai was discharged from hospital to celebrate with her family. As the week went on, her sight improved daily. By yesterday, she was reading print the size of a small headline in this newspaper.
She is one of Hong Kong's lucky ones. There are 1,000 like Lai known to be in need of immediate corneal transplant surgery, yet only 200 such operations are performed each year. The technology is here, the facilities are here, the skill is here. All our fine surgeons, like Dr Lam, who is team head at the Prince of Wales Eye unit, are lacking is donor tissue, spare parts from the recently departed.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 30 million to 40 million people suffer from blindness worldwide, about one-quarter of those from largely curable problems with the cornea. In the US, 40,000 corneal transplants are conducted every year. Transpose that figure to Hong Kong's population and we should be giving 1,000 people new sight every year. But we are not.
