Catching ‘mission fever’: A week in St. Vincent with Sight for Life
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After selling her ophthalmology practice, Cynthia Matossian, MD, FACS, packed her bags for her first-ever mission trip to St. Vincent in the Grenadines, joining dozens of others on a surgery mission entering its third decade of service.
After more than 800 clinical exams and approximately 80 surgeries were completed on the trip, including two Ahmed valves and five corneal transplants, Matossian told Healio she came back with a case of “mission fever.”
“It was such an incredible experience,” she said, adding that her time on the Caribbean island was unlike anything else in her decades-long career.
The mission, which is run by Sight for Life, brought 27 people — four ophthalmologists, three optometrists, two residents from the University of Florida, and a variety of family members and others willing to lend a hand — to the island’s capital, Kingstown, from May 27 to June 3. Two surgeons worked out of the operating room of Milton Cato Memorial Hospital, and a separate team conducted eye exams and distributed glasses at the nearby Arnos Vale Sports Complex with the help of the local Lions Club.
The mission, which has been held annually for about the last 30 years, is a life-changing opportunity for the local patients and rewarding for the volunteers who provide services, according to Cathleen M. McCabe, MD. Her husband, Dave McCabe, organizes the trip.
“[Patients are] just extremely grateful. ... They’re sending up prayers and asking for blessings for the team,” Cathleen McCabe said, adding that when patches are removed from eyes that had been blind, “it is an emotional time. It’s quite touching.”
“Ophthalmology is a great specialty where you can make that impact,” Dave McCabe said. “Taking out a cataract really cures blindness, and you can do that all week long.”
Ahead of the team’s arrival, local eye care providers identified around 150 patients with advanced cataracts, glaucoma and other conditions, but at the end of the week, there were “probably another 30 or 40 patients that were still outside the building,” Cathleen McCabe said.
Cathleen McCabe, along with longtime mission volunteer, Eric P. Purdy, MD, operated on two patients at a time in a facility not designed for such rapid turnaround, she said. The hospital’s lengthy sterilization methods caused delays, equipment was not ideal, and one day, a blown fuse left the operating room without air conditioning.
“We had to open the doors, and flies were coming in,” Matossian said. “You do the best you can, but fortunately, we made sure they didn’t land on the patients.”
Matossian described her role as that of a circulating nurse: putting in dilating drops, moving patients in and out of the operating room, and doing whatever it took to move along the process. The schedule stretched from around 7 a.m. to as late as 7:30 p.m.
But Matossian said the trip was worth it because “you get so much out of it — as much, if not more, than you give.”
“What it teaches you is you have to think very quickly and be able to adjust to circumstances that you’ve never encountered before while always keeping patient safety as the primary endpoint,” she said.
Cathleen McCabe said that operating in a low-resource environment can even help sharpen a surgeon’s abilities back at home.
“There are always things I learned by being creative and flexible during a mission that ... help me even taking care of more complex cases in my practice, where I ... wouldn’t necessarily have the drivers or the pressure to think about something in a new way,” she said.
Moving forward
Purdy first invited Cathleen McCabe on a mission in 2003, and over the years, the McCabes took on a greater role in directing the mission.
The transition in leadership has brought changes in the distribution of glasses.
For years, the mission worked through a stockpile of around 40,000 glasses donated by the Lions Club. Now, the clinic uses a “pop-in lens system” in which lenses with a patient’s prescription can be fitted to several frames, Dave McCabe said.
All the lenses are spherical, so there is more work to do to address astigmatism. But the system has allowed patients to get brand-new glasses rather than used ones, and its portability has enabled outreach to more remote parts of the island, he said.
“You can carry an eye clinic in a couple of suitcases now,” he said.
In addition, the mission is evolving to have a more permanent footprint.
In 2020, the team purchased a former clinic owned by Dr. Cecil Cyrus, who trained in Ireland and spent his career as the island’s medical jack-of-all-trades.
Dave McCabe said Cyrus’ son is now working as a general contractor on the building, which is getting a new roof and windows and updated electricity, among other projects. Construction is expected to be done by September, with the building ready for the mission next spring.
Cathleen McCabe said the team is “actively looking for people who want to make a difference,” whether that means donating equipment or money or participating in the mission.
“We’re happy to have people come, and if we are able to have more frequent missions, we’ll have more opportunity for that as well,” she said.
For more information:
Cynthia Matossian, MD, FACS, founder of Matossian Eye Associates, can be reached at cmatossianmd@icloud.com.
Cathleen M. McCabe, MD, of The Eye Associates in Florida, can be reached at cmccabe13@hotmail.com.
Dave McCabe can be reached at dmccabe22@hotmail.com.
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