Earlier this month, St. Joseph High School senior Jessica Bonilla traveled to Tecate, Mexico, to assist Surgical Eye Expeditions (SEE) ophthalmologist Jeffrey Rutgard as he performed cataracts surgery on people living in the region. Members of the expedition were able to perform 12 sight-restoring surgeries.
Bonilla recently volunteered at the fifth annual SEE International MSICS training, where she learned how doctors treat cataracts, a leading cause of blindness worldwide. MSICS stands for “manual small incision cataract surgery,” a groundbreaking and relatively simple procedure. It’s typically performed in developing countries that can’t support the transportation and maintenance of more sophisticated and expensive equipment.
At the clinic in Mexico, Bonilla did vision screenings and dilated eyes prior to surgery.
“Some of them were so blind that they could only detect light,” Bonilla told the Sun.
Bonilla has volunteered at Marian Medical Center since she was a freshman, and she also participated in the National Youth Leadership Forum on Medicine at UCLA. She said she wants to study ophthalmology at UCLA.
“I knew I wanted to be a cardiologist or an ophthalmologist,” she said, “but now I know I want to do what Dr. Rutgard does. You can’t do cardiac surgery in the field.”
Since it was founded in 1974, medical nonprofit Surgical Eye Expeditions International has completed more than 400,000 cataracts surgeries worldwide, with a record 15,463 surgeries performed in 2010.
“We don’t have a lot of interns who are high school students. Most of them are UCSB students,” said Tim Durnin, SEE International’s chief operating officer. “[Jessica] is a remarkable young woman. She was driving down to Santa Barbara once a week over the summer to intern with us.”
Durnin said the medical field has yet to determine what causes cataracts, a calcification of the lens.
“It is seen in countries where there’s more sunlight because they’re closer to the equator,” he said. “Doctors see cataracts that they rarely see in the United States. Hard, dense cataracts that come out like rocks.”
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2011.
