El Salvador Mission Trip 2012 - Part 4 -- Eye problems

Eye damage from a chemical spill

Something that has struck me on previous trips to El Salvador (this was trip 3) is the number of eye problems we see. Sometimes we arrive too late to make a difference. This gentleman worked in construction and was applying a chemical to a ceiling (without safety glasses). A drop of the solution fell into his left eye. Miraculously, he can still see from some parts of that eye








Nevus in eye

  I saw a lot of congenital nevi in the eye (see the one in the right eye lateral to the iris in this little boy. Interestingly, I have seen more eye nevi in the eyes of my hispanic patients even here in Wisconsin.


















Another Nevus in the eye

  Here is a close up of another patient's eye showing a nevus there. In all these cases, the nevus was present since birth and did not cause any visual changes.


bilateral pterygia

  Every year we go to El Salvador on these trips, we see a lot of patients with pinguecula and pterygia. Here is a middle-aged lady with bilateral pterygia (see the white stuck-on appearing growth spreading from the medial canthi towards the iris). If this continues, it will cut off her vision -- and we have seen examples of that too. Since surgery was not possible (we did not have an ophthalmologist with an operating microscope and operating room), we did the next best thing. A simple was to prevent spread of these is to protect the eyes from the sun. We took as many sunglasses as we could and gave them away, prioritizing patients with pingueculas and pterygia.


pterygium in left eye

  Here is another example of a middle-aged man with the pterygium in the left eye.


spreading pterygium

 In this example, the pterygium had already spread to the pupil and vision was being obstructed.

pterygium in left eye

Yet another example of a pterygium in the left eye.

cataract in right eye in a 90-something year old

Okay, to end on a slightly cheerful note, I had this spry 90-something year old female come in with complaints of decreasing vision in her right eye. She had a cataract, but hey, she had no other complaints. She was feeling just fine! Just because you live in a third world country in poverty does not necessarily mean you can't make it to 90.