Ocularist John Pacey-Lowrie, who you may remember from our blog on prosthetic eyes, discusses his own journey with a different eye condition, and his training of a man who had retinoblastoma.
I have been extremely fortunate during my lifetime in Ocular Prosthetics as it has allowed me to travel the world, or a good deal of it, treating patients, training Ocularists and attending international meetings and events. Some of the “events “more memorable than others !!
What follows is a true story, names of characters have been changed to protect privacy.
One day in the middle of winter I received a call from a very dear lady that had been under my care for several years for cosmetic shell treatment, she found it very difficult to handle the prosthesis and preferred me to remove, clean and re-insert the device on a regular basis, but this day she had suffered a fall and badly broken her ankle and was pretty much stuck at home so she asked if I could visit her at home to service the prosthesis, no big deal, however home was in Switzerland!!
We sorted out travel details and I prepared to fly out to complete a 20-minute procedure that would take two days! This was the first time I had been asked to do an international domiciliary visit but not the last by an exceptionally long mile!
The same day I received another desperate emergency call from one of my very long-standing clients who had moved from England to Spain to escape the politics around fox hunting and other blood sports ( eye’s closed at El Toro” then !!!).
As the conversation developed clearly this lady needed a new prosthesis urgently having accidentally broken her most recent eye and now wearing a patch over an empty socket. She refused to travel to the UK as she was convinced some activists were trying to kill her!!!
So, a trip to Spain and Switzerland, sounds good to me until the second patient revealed that the Spanish also had it in for her so she moved to a “safe place”…………….safe place wow sounds like this will be a bigger trip than I thought (!!), and it sure was………she now lives in Beirut Lebanon!!!!!!!
After a bit of thinking and debate with my wife I decided I had to see these ladies and hope I was in safe hands.
Everything booked I headed for Heathrow and flew to Cannes, picked up and taken to my first call which was all good and a success, back to London next day for a flight to Beirut which was a bit scary but fine once I was up and away.
On arrival in Lebanon, I was met by my patient and her driver who invited me to sit in the back of his twenty-five-year-old four door Ford that only had three doors, two front, one back and all in a very war-torn mess, never seen anything like it other than on the TV News. The driver was massive and had no English and was to be my driver for the week!! The hotel was like a badly appointed school dormitory with the very basics, even the towel for drying after showering “cold only” was in fact a small tea-towel.
I ventured to the bar looking for strength only to be told “closed, come back 5pm happy hour “ it was 16.50 then so I quietly waited for ten minutes when the hotel doors burst open and about 50 men crowded the bar buying one bottle of gin with one free “happy hour” indeed and most of them were non-drinkers, this hour lasted from 5pm until 1am ………………….. I didn’t join in.
Somehow we managed to make a new eye using materials I had taken and borrowing a dental laboratory for equipment, the lab owner put out a red carpet for me when I arrived, fame at last.
What an eye opener this whole experience had become, red carpet for the UK Eye Dr. but most of the local kids were eating from the dumpster/waste bins and none of them have shoes and yet at the end of the road it was rich boys’ paradise with multi-million dollar yachts and fancy bars and restaurants, total inequality right in your face, sickening and shocking.
My dear patient there in Lebanon eventually returned to the UK after being robbed of every penny she had by her representatives in Lebanon and forced to leave the country. She got as far as Dubai where she stayed for three months trying to decide her fate, as she was unable to pay her Dubai hotel bill she had her passport confiscated and was jailed for non-payment. After several desperate phone calls, I eventually managed to get her released and returned to England where she lived a very lonely existence both on the streets of London and eventually a refuge for women.
I was devastated to receive a phone call in 2020 from the police to inform me that my friend had died peacefully ….alone , I was the only person ever named in her belongings as a “friend”.
That’s the strange but marvellous thing about being an Ocularist you’re more than a person that can make an eye. You become a friend, confidant, kind of part of the family if you like, what would you otherwise expect when you’re dealing with such a personal, emotive, and important aspect of people’s lives and of course some of those incredibly young lives become long term friends.
More ( happier ) stories to follow, take care.