Dr Sneh's diary: Two adventures

I notice that whenever I approach this particular time - this pre-departure imminence, this tempered excitement of forthcoming adventure - I tend to become incredibly practical.

So now, faced with two adventures in immediate succession, my pragmatism has reached new heights. I am an organisational wonder, whipping around my various tasks with lightning speed and frightening efficiency. I’ve just got back from the Bupa Cromwell hospital, well stocked up after a pharmaceutical raid (an approved one, of course).

What about my travels? They are varying in nature, to say the least, but both with a similar vein of charity and medicine running through them.

First up is Iceland, for which I depart on Saturday; six days of trekking across this beautiful, financially troubled and intriguing land. £90,000 is the sum that my fellow trekkers have raised for their various charities, and I will be there to support them as the expedition doctor. What could befall them? Experience tells me to predict at least one round of gastroenteritis, which, given the camping and generally difficult-to-maintain-good-hygiene (thank goodness for alco-gel), will spread around the group like wildfire. The rest is usually a mixture of psychological distress and varying levels of physical trauma.

Completing a distance close to a marathon for six days running takes its toll – on ankles, hearts and spirits. One of our participants has had a heart transplant, and so my feelings of admiration for them even undertaking this challenge is tinged by a degree of well-deserved medical apprehension.

And then there’s often the tough, tall burly men whom you suddenly stumble across on some windy mountainside, shrouded in a cold cloud, balling their eyes out as they find their only avenue of release for 40 years of pent up tension from always being the one who never cries.

I depart Reykjavik a day before the others so that I can hot-foot it back to London where I have a four-hour turnaround, before I’m back at Heathrow in time for an early flight to Vietnam. This is where the second round of action starts.

Preparing for Vietnam

Have you heard of World Nomads? Well, neither had I until a meeting with them back in January that sparked off this whole episode. They are one of Bupa International’s leading travel agents, and being all Generation Y and millennial, they take eco-tourism very responsibly indeed. So much that the people who buy their travel insurance each donate a small amount of money to a good cause, which cumulatively goes to making a great cause.

In this instance, the great cause is a series called Footprints(http://footprints.worldnomads.com/). The latest instalment in the series is what I’m involved in. Twenty doctors are trekking up to the northern foothills of Vietnam to set up health clinics for the remote hill tribes, who very rarely get to see anyone who knows about health.

We’ll be setting up three clinics in total in different villages, and over the eight days or so that we’re there, we’ll be examining about 250 adults and children a day. I hear the group is excited to have me along as they’ve never had an ophthalmologist (eye surgeon) with them before, and apparently I’m going to be in demand.

Trachoma, the world’s leading cause of blindness, is a big issue in Vietnam. A bacterium, Chlamydia trachomatis, gets into the eyelid and scars the inner surface of it, turning it in so that the lashes rub up against the cornea (the clear surface of the eye) and cause such significant scarring that it quickly blinds. The glory and the tragedy? Glory – it can be treated with one small single antibiotic tablet; tragedy – it is still the leading cause of blindness in the world.

But I’m not the first to go out there to treat it. A chap called Fred Hallows thought it was such an important issue that he set up a foundation that concentrates on trachoma in Vietnam, although not in the hills I’m off to; the World Health Organisation has also moved in to help distribute donated antibiotics to those in need.

And now I’m back round to where I started – busying away with my supplies from the Cromwell Hospital, where one of the unsung heroes of the modern hospital, a charming lady called Ann, had meticulously picked out the necessary medications for me to take, and donated them to me in a good cause.

Antibiotics – check; ophthalmoscope – check; Bupa International goodies for the kids – check….packing continues long into the night…. After all, isn’t the trick in always being prepared?