Milford eye doctor takes medical mission to Macedonia

Eye specialist helps hundreds, trains doctors in two-week stay

Dr. Severin Palydowycz readies for surgery in a Macedonian operating room.

A fortnight in the less-developed southeast European country of Macedonia seems an unlikely summer agendum for a highly skilled and successful ophthalmic surgeon.

But Dr. Severin B. Palydowycz, founder of Tri-State Eye in Milford, has, for the past five years, devoted at least two weeks each summer season to medical mission work.

In August, he traveled with his daughter, Katya, to the town of Stip — about 90 minutes from the republic's capital city of Skopje — to perform pro bono cataract surgery. Some of the town residents in need of ophthalmic care, he says, had been waiting as long as three years.

"In Macedonia, everyone has health insurance, but no one gets medical care," Palydowicz said. "You have to be critically ill or have dire needs before you can actually get in to see a doctor."

Palydowycz's office assistant, Sylvana Paunova, a Macedonian national, first brought the plight of people in her homeland to the doctor's attention.

Palydowycz, who had previously made altruistic trips to perform surgeries in Haiti and Ukraine, readily agreed to help. But it was a daunting undertaking.

Aside from the three-year patient backlog, lack of health-care funding in the Republic

of Macedonia had created a dearth of medical equipment and supplies. Palydowycz would have to purchase and ship the necessary equipment himself, including the modern phacoemulsification machine essential to the delicate cataract surgical procedure.

Paunova worked fervently for more than six months before the scheduled trip, procuring, organizing and packing equipment. "She went (to Stip) two weeks beforehand," says Palydowycz, to "contact different physicians, directors, the Minister of Health ..." and to act as a liaison with customs officials.

Day one: 119 patients

On the first day, in just one afternoon, Palydowycz evaluated 119 patients. "Even in going to other countries with indigent populations, I did not see as much pathology ... the anatomy, the density of the cataracts, the advancement of disease, the amount of blindness; it was worse (in Stip) than anywhere else."

Palydowycz operated on close to 70 patients — 20 of them in a single afternoon — including two members of Paunova's family.

"I taxed myself physically," the surgeon says. "Some patients had severe problems with the back part of the eyes, nerve issues, other forms of blindness that couldn't be helped. There was only so much I could do in the time frame allotted."

One elderly man, says the surgeon, "had such advanced nerve disease and blindness from optic nerve atrophy that he wasn't significantly improved (by surgery)."

Palydowycz's daughter, who acted as surgical assistant, still talks about the patients who were poor candidates and could not benefit from the high-tech surgical procedure, he says. "Katya was heartbroken."

Worlds apart

Macedonia, says Palydowycz, "has been left behind in technical advancement." Operating "under extreme pressure and difficult conditions," he says, "you're forced to perform at the highest level possible."

Patients, says the surgeon, opted to undergo the procedure fully conscious, without anaesthesia, their eyes merely numbed. In contrast, he notes, "in the United States, every cataract surgery is performed with an anesthesiologist. The patient's heart, breathing, vitals are monitored.

"It speaks to the level of care that we give people here. It gives me an appreciation and a thankfulness that I have the privilege to live and work in this country."

Palydowycz trained a team of Macedonian doctors in surgical techniques, and in the usage of the state-of-the-art surgical machinery, which he donated to the region.

"I got a lot of satisfaction from this trip," says the surgeon. "I really feel that in that part of the country, I had a hand in changing the future of ophthalmic surgery. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime."