The Barefoot Surgeon by Ali Gripper

Author:Ali Gripper
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

13

FAREWELL TO A FRIEND

Business was almost non-existent for the few years of Ruit’s small private practice in New Road. Hardly anyone sought him out. He didn’t even have his name on the door.

‘I used to call it “catching flies”, sitting there in the evening, doing nothing, just waiting for patients to turn up,’ he says.

But by the late 1980s, Ruit’s reputation had grown so much that there was a long waiting list to see him. Patients travelled long distances to go under his knife.

The French Buddhist monk and writer Matthieu Ricard, who had been bringing monks to him for treatment, was so impressed by Ruit’s surgical skills that he arranged for his 93-year-old mother to fly into Kathmandu. ‘Everyone said, “Are you crazy? You want your mother to be operated on in Nepal?” But I already regarded him as the greatest artist in the world when it comes to operating on cataracts, so I told my mother I would definitely prefer [she have it done] in Kathmandu rather than in Paris,’ Ricard says. ‘When we got back to France, her doctor said, “Wow, this is impeccable work!”’

When Swiss-French public health expert Dr Nicole Grasset, known as ‘Mother Teresa in a Dior dress’, needed cataract surgery, she refused to see any other surgeon than Ruit. She flew all the way to Kathmandu from Geneva for Ruit’s finesse.

But, just as Ruit’s career was about to take off, his world came crashing down around him. In 1992, he learnt the devastating news that Fred Hollows had terminal cancer. Ruit was at an eye camp at Nuwakot, a picturesque village about an hour north of Kathmandu. Film maker Catherine Marciniak took him to one side as the team sat around the fire one evening, enjoying a drink. She pulled her chair up close. ‘Dr Ruit, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Fred has been diagnosed with cancer.’

Ruit sat there in stunned silence. Hollows had been having treatment on his kidney when his surgeon discovered he had cancer that would probably spread quickly to his lungs. There was nothing really that could be done to control it. Each word felt like a physical blow to Ruit’s chest.

His mind was reeling. Hollows was only 62. He had smoked all his life. But why did he have to go now? They had so many plans: building an intraocular lens factory, and a new hospital, for a start. They had such a long way to go together.

‘He and Gabi were my surrogate family. I felt I wouldn’t be able to continue on with my work if Fred was not there. I wasn’t sure how I could go on. My sister Yangla had died far too young—that was devastating—but the news that Fred was dying too now came as such a terrible shock. I was devastated in an entirely new way.’

Ruit rang Gabi when he got back to Kathmandu, deeply concerned about her.

‘I knew she wasn’t working and the children were still so little and needed her so much.

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