What it means to be responsible doctors

This week I underwent surgery to remove a cataract.

A simple procedure, at least when described: the surgeon enters the eye, removes the “damaged” crystalline lens, and replaces it with a new one, selected to compensate for any pre-existing visual defects.

This is the account of an ordinary patient whose quality of life has improved

You go home immediately.
The operation lasts four or five minutes, the eye is bandaged, and the following day the ophthalmologist checks that everything is as it should be.

From that moment on, the recommendation is clear: use the operated eye, because both the eye and the brain need to adapt to the new visual field.

For me, the real surprise was not so much the sharpness of vision without corrective glasses, but something else entirely: the clarity of colours.

I had not realised — and how could I have? — that for some time I had been seeing the world as if it were covered by a greyish film. The colours were there, but muted.
Now they are not.
White is truly white again, no longer an indistinct creamy shade, and the sky is finally blue.

Contraindications, or when the patient does not cooperate

The surgeon and the ophthalmologist are very clear, and they repeat the concept in every possible form: do not touch the eye. Do not rub it, do not get it wet (except for eye drops), treat it for what it is: an organ in the process of healing.

Simple, right?

In reality, no.
Vision improves so quickly that, without noticing it, you relax.
And when you relax, you let your guard down.

In short: I feel an itch and, absent-mindedly, rub my eye with my knuckles.
The itch disappears. My vision, however, suddenly worsens.

It is Saturday afternoon!

I immediately call the ophthalmologist friend who is treating me, half-expecting to be told off for blatant carelessness.

Instead, he immediately calls the surgeon, and they decide to see me straight away at the clinic.

What it means to be responsible doctors

No complaints, not even friendly ones.
My ophthalmologist friend drives thirty kilometres to reach the clinic.

The surgeon has just returned from a city two hundred kilometres away, where he had been operating all day after leaving home at six in the morning.
And yet, forty-five minutes after my phone call, they are all there.
Checking what might have happened.

A third specialist also arrives, specifically called in to perform a more in-depth laser analysis.

I apologise, more than once. No one complains.

I confess that, inwardly, I hope that at least in their thoughts they have sent me to hell. It would be understandable. Perhaps even deserved.

While waiting for the drops to dilate my pupil to take effect, we talk.

We are all middle-aged men — today, being in your sixties counts as middle age, not old age — and we talk about work, daily fatigue, and families.

I sense no irritation or annoyance.
What I do sense is attention, responsibility, and genuine concern for carrying out a careful and correct clinical assessment.

This is so even though the surgeon mentions his desire to retire into private life: the wish not to discover, one day, that he has missed important parts of his own life, that he has never truly enjoyed the well-earned peace after an entire career.

And I am there, meanwhile, having given him one more worry.

How it ended

Thorough examinations are carried out.

Two ophthalmologists check every detail.
The verdict is reassuring: we were all worried for nothing.
The situation will settle by itself.

I am once again politely “urged” to continue the treatment — four different eye drops, every four hours — and, for heaven’s sake, not to touch the eye.

Only at this point, in the general atmosphere of relief, does a very slight hint of irony appear regarding my lack of discipline.
That, too, is well deserved.

Moral

The doctor is responsible for the patient’s well-being, even when the patient does not cooperate.
The doctor knows this.
It is the patient who often does not.

Being a doctor is certainly a profession.
But it cannot be legitimately practised without empathy.

Before the operation, the surgeon had jokingly described himself as a “mechanic”.
I can confirm that he may indeed be an excellent mechanic, but I have never known a mechanic to speak to the soul of the part being repaired.

And, at the same time, to repair the soul of the person who entrusts himself to his hands.