War Experience Helps Eye Surgeon Back Home
A letter to Adopt-a-Soldier Platoon on 24 March 2008
from LTC Scott D. Barnes, MD
Chief, Warfighter Refractive Eye Surgery Clinic
Fort Bragg, NC
I cannot say thank you enough for all you have done to help organize this endeavor. I was the eye surgeon with the 86th and then 10th CSH at Ibn Sina during the end of 2005. In the spirit of your Easter message and all that day means for a tremendous outcome after significant devastation, I have an interesting case in which I have told others a young child can be “thankful” for the War in Iraq.
Not many people stop to think that a little 9 year old girl in Fayetteville, NC is a beneficiary of the war, but Ashley is. She had an unfortunate accident, almost a year ago, where her friends were playing around after school and she was horribly stabbed in the eye with a pen. She had, probably, the most significant eye trauma that I had seen here in the US … tore her cornea into three pieces, torn her iris, and caused a traumatically dislocated cataract. However, because of what I had seen and been through in Iraq, I was comfortable in having an idea of what to do and how to stage the repairs of this devastating injury.
Initially, she could only see if a hand was moving or not about 6 inches from her face but after 4 trips to the main operating room and one minor surgical procedure in our clinic, Ashley can now read the 20/40 line without glasses (20/40 is considered legal driving vision). Interestingly, her uninjured eye has only 20/70 vision without glasses (she didn’t realize she needed glasses until we started measuring the “uninjured” eye after the initial trauma repair). So, without glasses, her traumatically injured and surgically repaired eye in actually her “better” seeing eye!!
She and I have developed a relationship which allows me to “tease” her a bit, so when we found this out … I said to Ashley and her mother, “You know what we have to do now, right? ... we need to poke the left eye so it can see better after we fix that as well!” Of course she knew I was kidding.
It is easy to complain about being deployed, staying up all hours day and night working to repair the results of incredible disrespect for innocent lives, sacrificing birthday parties, anniversaries, and first days of school, giving up the comforts of our homes, a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, and a steaming bratwurst at Lambeau Field during a December game. But isn’t it amazing how our Lord works? He knew that one of His little ones (Ashley) would need some special skills one late night in May 2007. He knew that I needed to ask my colleague to change on-call dates with me so that I, unknowingly, would be on the night that Ashley came in … and here I thought it was just because I wanted the next weekend off to attend a conference with my wife. Was it a coincidence that a year and a half before Ashley’s accident, I was operating seemingly non-stop on war induced eye injuries; I saw more trauma in 4 months than I will ever see the rest of my ophthalmology career if I practice until I am 70.
The work in Baghdad was horrible and incredible at the same time … the devastation in eye injuries was something I had never seen or even imagined and early on, left me overwhelmed with wondering how to approach these injuries. I leaned on everything I had been taught in residency and fellowship but, more importantly, I found my comfort asking for the Lord’s help in every case. One of the anesthesiologists asked what I was doing when I closed my eyes and placed my hands on each side of the patient’s head both before and after the operation … I told him I was asking the Lord to guide my hands during the case and asking that He would continue to work His healing after we were finished.
It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes … but there are relatively few atheists in combat support hospital ORs as well. Most of the days, I chose not to complain about my deployment; rather trying to see that God had a greater plan in the matter. But missed birthdays and holidays were a bit more difficult to be thankful for dining on another piece of some type of brown meat, picking sand out of my hair while waiting for another MEDEVAC helicopter to bring more business. If I had known then, what I know now … I would have realized that even on those special days, the Lord was preparing me to be His instrument for one late night 18 months in the future. He knew what I needed, so that I could be what she needed. Preparation and training can often be quite difficult, but we don’t always see the whole story do we? I still don’t think I have much appreciation for that funky type of brown meat but I feel privileged that He felt me worthy of the preparation in the desert which allowed me to be an instrument to achieve a purpose in a young 9 year old’s life.
I have shared this story with Ashley and her mother and told Ashley that the Lord must think of her as someone very special to go to such lengths to work out this wonderful plan; I have encouraged her to never forget her value and to be excited to find out what wonderful plans the Lord has in store for her.
In last week’s visit, Ashley told me that she wants to become an ophthalmologist when she grows up.
Thank you for the role you and the whole Adopt-A-Soldier Program has continued to play in allowing those of us serving in harm’s way to positively impact others. Keep us the tremendous work …it is making a difference.
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