“This is horrific,” says Dr Bashir Ahmad, as he talks about the massive load of trauma cases that he saw this season. “Never ever have I encountered such a load and I doubt if there are references anywhere that would suggest that it has happened earlier anywhere.” The man who as a senior professor in the Government Medical College, Srinagar has handled hundreds of “combat injuries” says he was depressed by the magnitude and the lethality of the “non lethal” systems in vogue. “In 2008 summer when there was massive agitation over the land row, we did not get any case (of serious eye injury) at all,” he said, adding, “I was in Iran at the time of revolution (1979) but I could not see anything like this even when millions were on roads.”
In the last few weeks he got as many as 40 youth including girls with severe eye injuries. They were hit by pellets or by targeted stones probably thrown by slingshots. His Eye Centre is perhaps the only facility offering eye-scan (not available in SMHS or SKIMS run JVMC), so he knows of many cases that came to avail the facility.
The doctor sits on a machine and opens the high resolution pictures that the scanner has saved of examined patients. Shuffling the pictures, he talks about the details of the unfortunate eyes of the youth during the nearly-four months old crisis.
“This is the eye of a 23-year old boy. He was from Bejbehara and was referred to us from SKIMS,” says the doctor, “He had received pellets in both his eyes and lost them and then doctors were treating him for the pellets he was still carrying in his belly.”
“This picture is the eye of a Pulwama girl whom I saw on August17. She said she had gone to fill her examination form when a stone hit her eye. It (eye) is totally damaged and she will have to survive with one eye only,” he said.
In between the doctor informs that he has seen three youth who were still carrying pellets in their eyes. “I had given them time for operation but they never reported back,” he said, “Curfew restrictions were a major problem because those days even I was not permitted to come to my hospital.” There are cases in which stones have hit the eyes and made them burst. “No repairs possible anywhere across the world,” he asserted. Of the patients he saw, he said in one case there was some probability of repairs.
Dr Bashir upgraded his clinic to a full-fledged, hi-tech, Eye Centre after he retired from government service in 1999. With a 10-bed facility and all the systems that a modern centre would require, his centre would usually get 100 patients a day besides he would perform 40 surgeries a month. While eighty percent load is about the cataract, the balance twenty percent comprises many visual complicacies including glaucoma, squint, pterygium, watering of the eyes and managing inner layer of the eye – a super-complicacy that is now being handled locally. “But never ever would I imagine that we will have this much of trauma load,” he said adding that most of the load, however, went to the SMHS.
“I am still at loss to understand why a pellet goes directly to the eye if it is just a small part of the whole body,” Dr Bashir asked. There are people, he said, who can afford spending good money and there could be a possibility of the government or charities willing to invest in these young men and women.
“But the tragedy is they cannot see at all, not from the eyes they have lost,” he added.
