by Gina Cariño
Home >> Take My Eyes (Interview with an Ophthalmologist)
Let’s talk about eyes with my high school classmate, Minguita Padilla, founder of the Eye Bank of the Philippines.
GC: Bette Davis eyes…
MP: Soulful.
GC: The eye is the window of the soul.
MP: Agree.
GC: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
MP: Disagree.
GC: When people don’t see eye to eye…
MP: They are using only two eyes.
GC: What’s the third eye?
MP: Faith.
GC: When did you see the light like a blind person who suddenly sees?
MP: It was in a high school class retreat that I first saw myself pursuing medicine.
GC: The Eye Bank is a work of enormous vision, the project of your life.
MP: And a lifetime project. The Eye is living tissue with ever growing needs.
GC: In the medical profession, you could be in an ivory tower, but you aren’t.
MP: Setting up the Santa LucÃa Eye Bank, so named after the patron saint of vision— involved huge amounts of groundwork: phone calls, letter-writing, lobbying with legislators, wrestling with bureaucracy, negotiating with transport companies, fund-raising… My staff includes a manager, technicians, transplant coordinators, but at first I did all that paper and logistical work alone. Of course there was help from people with connections in the legislature, the police… I had to learn to go drinking with the cops, just to get into their good graces and make them cooperate. It’s one thing to get a law passed that allows the bank to retrieve corneal tissue from corpses in the possession of coroners. Making the law work is another matter.
GC: So the Eye Bank gets eyes mainly from the unclaimed bodies of vagabonds, murder victims, criminals…
MP: Oh the places and situations I found myself in to get this Eye Bank started! Though my husband and other male friends joined in the fun, many men-colleagues tended to stay out of these missions. Sometimes a woman is the “best man for the job�!
GC: Almodóvar’s All About My Mother addressed the taboo on organ-donating…
MP: Through our Hospital Retrieval Program, more and more people are signing to donate their eyes or corneas upon death, and the Eye Bank has a nationwide outreach program in the form of altruistic surgical missions.
GC: You like Gabriel GarcÃa-Márquez…
MP: His magic-realist themes and style remind me of Filipino life.
GC: Remember the story about the colonel who waits forever for a letter to come, like the blind in poor and remote places waiting for tissue.
MP: Corneal blindness in the Philippines, especially among the poor, was tantamount to a life sentence of living in shadow because of the scarcity of corneal tissue for transplant, a result of the absence of a structured and efficient, internationally accredited eye banking system in the country. There was a need to be met and I feel honored to have helped meet that need.
GC: Optical illusions come true. And we thought you would become a concert pianist. Do you still play?
MP: Not as often as I’d like.
GC: José Saramago’s novel Blindness describes an epidemic where the ophthalmologist, too, goes blind… What piece of piano music can you play blind?
MP: “Consolation� by Franz Liszt. I close my eyes and travel to another place.
GC: Your favourite blind musician is…
MP: Andrea Bocelli.
GC: Love is blind.
MP: I quote an old saying: “Love is not blind. It sees more, not less. And because it sees more, it is willing to see less.�
GC: I see.
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Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2007-10-18 10:00:00 +0200
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I’m in favour of donating organs upon death. I think it’s necessary. But many people think it’s a horrible think, I don’t know why.
If you are dead, you won’t need your organs any more, so the best option is donate them.
I couldn’t imagine the life being blind. But I think it’s a different way to live the life. Blind people have the rest of sense very developed, so they can feel many things that the rest of the people never would feel.
Hello Gina,
Our eyes (vision) are the main entrance for stimuli into our brain. It is the sense that we use the most so any problem in the eyes really does change our lives.
I remember that in the U.S when you get your driver’s licence, it comes with a sticker you can put on it for organ donation. In the sticker you put a cross on the organs you wanted to donate in case of death in a car accident.
I think all these initiatives are good as long as they don’t speculate with people’s money…
Regards,
Cristina
I am a registered organ donor. When I die, I would like my organs to be used by somebody else, if possible. I think that child-bearing and organ-donating are the two best ways I could attempt to reach ‘physical immortality,’ so to say.
Having said this, I wish it were possible to select who gets my organs. I wouldn’t like them to go to a bad person!
Hi all
I’m not a registered organ donor, but I know I should be. I’ll put it on the top of my to do list. I like your comment Paola about not wanting your organs to go to a bad person. It’s hard to judge, though, isn’t it. I personally hope to get as much use out of my organs as possible before passing them on. But you never know, I suppose. I do hope they’re of some use to someone and that they get as much or more out of them as I have done. I had a blind student in an English class some years ago. He told me that his favourite colour was black!
Hi all,
In this weekly letter I see two interesting ways. One about organ donation. It would have different points of view, and another one, my favourite in this case, how people fight for things that they think is important for everybody and how they begin great and hard projects for it. My congratulation for this kind of people.
Kind regards,
Ramón
Hi, everybody,
I have always thought that loosing the vision would be for me the worst thing that I could loose, even worst that loosing hearing or movility. I can’t imagine me without eyes.
The eyes are very important, you can get a lot of information about world thankful for them, and I’m agree with Minguita, they are the window of the soul. If somebody speak you without look at your eyes, be careful about him.
“To be the apple of your eye” is like “to be the baby of your eyes” in Spanish?. The “apples of my eye” are my husband and my niece.
I think that after several years the organ donation will be in the Philippines more important that now: it is problem of time. With the work of people like Minguita things will change very soon. I admire them. I have to be organ donor, but by the moment my family know that to do in this case.
Grettings.
Conchi Calvo
Hello!
This is a very important subject above all because around the world it’s very necessary people have the enough sensitive to understand it’s very important to donate your organs when you die. Sometimes it’s more difficult when you have to decide about a friend of yours or your family than you (your body), but if you think about people can’t live because the need eyes, or a hearth or…it’s very sad to see the rest of the people don’t colaborate.
It’s a very good action, of course.
Best regards,
Conchi F.
Hi all,
when you die you don’t need eyes, kidneys, liver etc…So, the best thing we can do is, if it is possible, to give them for other people and not to feed worms.
I’m not an official donor but I think I’m going to do it soon. You can never know when the ‘Parca’ is going to kiss you.
JC
Bocelli wins, but in Cebu (Philippines) there is a blind guy who sings at various events and he sounds just like Bocelli. He is very very good, but poor and unknown.
Why hasn’t anyone voted José Feliciano?... Last night I put on some Stevie Wonder and realized that it’s not you are the apple of my eye but you are the sunshine of my life, which amounts to the same thing anyway. The apple of my eye these days is a kitten named Chaplin. Who is yours?
“_Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are_â€? said Madeleine L’Engle, the author who died this month.
Blind people are not always those who bump into things. Very often blind people have perfect vision but can’t help bumping into themselves. Seeing reality as it is and not as we are would solve a lot of people’s unhappiness. If souls had white sticks, we would be deafened by the clattering.
You know, I was going to vote for José Feliciano, but stumped for Stevie Wonder in the end. I remember listening to a concert recording of José Feliciano when I was a child and thought it was nice when he commented between songs that there were a lot of beautiful women in the audience. There was a very famous blind Irish composer called Turlough Carolan . He lost his sight as a youngster and then started to write music. For almost fifty years he travelled all over Ireland with his harp, composing and performing tunes for anyone who would take him in. His music has since become part of Ireland’s musical heritage.
An incredible presentation of some powerful themes Gina.
The article’s final quote is…difficult not to re-read a few times…
A bit of a coincidence that this week saw me buy a Stevie Wonder album, so that says who I voted for in the poll.
Here are some parts of the interview that I left out…
GC: Does the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark, where Bjork goes blind, make sense ophthalmologically?
MP: I have not seen that movie so cannot say if it is ophthalmologically correct.
GC: What’s the greatest eyesore?
MP: So much ignorance.
Now it’s me talking. Me, Gina. Love is not blind. It is cross-eyed.
Hello all:
We know that when we die we don’t need anything. For that reason it´s very important to donate our organs when we die, overcoat our eyes, because after our funeral, we haven´t much to see ….
I consider that we need to reduce the stress of this issue and talk with naturalness like the article.
Best regards
Another option is to donate your whole body to medical science, to be poked and probed in the anatomy classes of medical schools. What do you think of that?
When my mother had a miscarriage, my parents donated the fetus to medical science. So for a while I had a brother floating in formol.
As a baby, Helen Keller of Alabama suffered an illness that left her deaf and blind besides frustrated and spoiled, but with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, she learned to see the world and communicate and she went to Harvard, wrote books, and gave lectures. I read a book about her and have seen a movie about her and I even saw a play about her here in San Sebastian, in the cultural center of Egia. There was singing and part of the play was in the form of a puppet show. I really enjoyed it and so did my classmate and friend Ander, who is deaf. His twin sister Leire is okay.
I think that Helen Keller could not have been operated on. No corneal transplant could have made her see again. Not all blind people can be saved by an eye bank.
I chose Stevie Wonder, because he is the happiest of the lot, though José Feliciano comes in a close second. Feliciano is why most anglophones can wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of their hearts.
I didn’t choose Bocelli because I feel that he, as well as Pavarotti (R.I.P.) and, for the love of God, Il Divo, should stick to their far-extreme operatic genre and window-rattling vibratos and probably not do it their way!. Sometimes stepping out of our genre can be dangerous!
Ah, and what about a blind date?
I know the importance of the eyes because I wear glasses every day. I haven’t got so much dioptre but it is enough for not watching perfectly. I can also wear lentils but the problem is when I have to work in front of the computer with them a lot of hours. I finish with a terrible headache, so I only use them at the weekends. I don’t want to operate because it is probable that I reach the dioptre again and then I can’t use lentils anymore. There’s no problem, I have been wearing glasses since I was five years old so they are part of my body. I only wish I wouldn’t get more dioptres.
The apple of my eye is my cat, Duende. I admire him because he can see perfectly in the dark. He can be next to you in the night and you can’t notice him. He is like a phantom because you only see his eyes…. When he was a kitten I found him on my pillow during the night, it was a little scary but know If I find him next to my I usually smile at him.
Blind date! I forgot to ask the ophthalmologist about her blind dates when we were in high school!
What an inspired and insightful comment, Eva! There is perhaps something to learn from the apples of our eyes, our pets, about SEEING IN THE DARK. And I wear glasses too. I have four eyes, so to speak, and soon I’ll have six because my ophthalmologist here says I now need bifocals. Do e-mail me your photograph so that we can SEE you too.
I have also much enjoyed the light, fun comments about music and love. After all, corneal transplants may now be obsolete. Blind people can now get artificial corneas. The technique was developed in the United States and the first (and I think still the only) public hospital to use it hereabouts is in Barakaldo.
Hi Gina,
Good report!!!
I am a registered organ donor, too. My best friend, Carlos, has a problem in his eyes, he needed a corneal transplant. Five years ago, he was operated on and there were no side effects. We only know that the donor was a young boy.
For that reason, I’m very proud to be an organ donoer.
Bye,
Leticia.
Hi everyone.
It is blindingly obvious that this Organization is brilliant,a good start for those who really will need to have a pair of eyes to watch.Even though sometimes is better not to see what is around,due to the world we have created.Having a chance of a proffesional group looking after ours eyes is the best new for blind people and everybody should keep in mind to be registered to an organ donation. After all, once a person die some organs might be still useful for another and it is not the point to leave those organs to dissapear.
Nothing better that to have the chance to enjoy the view of a scenary,film,a nice lady, etc so we have to encourage everyone to register to donate their organs.
Greetings
I’m a registered donor too… I filled a form more than 20 years ago and I always carry my card in my wallet.
I found the form in the journal, and I just needed to include two witness’s signature, apart from my info. I sent it by mail (snail mail in that time!) and they sent me back the card.
I always talk to every people about that because I’d like everybody was a donor… that just has good things!
Regarding blind dates… I won’t tell much but I could say Internet helps a lot for that, doesn’t it?
Elena