The specialists are members of ORBIS International, an organization that fights blindness worldwide.
The interior of this DC-10 airplane that sat on the tarmac at O’Hare International Airport Wednesday resembles no other.
Surgical supplies fill the overhead compartments where luggage would normally be stored. Operating and recovery rooms replace rows of cramped coach seats. And video screens do not transmit blockbuster hits, but rather live images of eye operations occurring at another end of the plane.
Board this aircraft and you’ve stepped onto a fully-equipped eye surgery hospital and training center.
And though it travels around the world, its passengers are not tourists. They are eye specialists who visit countries like Bangladesh, Mali, Swaziland and Peru, teaching doctors about the latest surgical techniques and preventive eye care, and treating patients.
The specialists are members of ORBIS International, an organization that fights blindness worldwide.
“It’s a mission of goodwill,” said Dr. James Martone, medical director of ORBIS. “It provides a mutual forum for doctors to come together, across cultural and political boundaries.”
The medical team stopped at O’Hare Wednesday to promote its partnership with United Airlines, which donates technical assistance and fuel to ORBIS. Its next stop is Bucharest, Romania. Three weeks there and it’s off to Lithuania and Latvia.
On each mission overseas, the team of 25 doctors and nurses educate local health care professionals using the ORBIS aircraft as a large classroom. Seminars aboard the hospital-aircraft run the gamut, from proper surgical handwashing to performing cataract operations.
Aboard the airplane, an ORBIS doctor and a local doctor may perform a cornea transplant on a patient who might otherwise have no access to such care.
Meanwhile, other doctors view the operation live on television monitors in the airplane’s 52-seat classroom or laser room.
Suzanne Gedance, of Schaumburg-based Prevent Blindness America, called the traveling hospital energizing and motivating when she toured it Wednesday.
“When you see that all the people are coming together to make this possible, you can’t help but be moved,” said Gedance, deputy director of Prevent Blindness America.
Other than being a bit more compact than a typical eye clinic, ORBIS volunteer Edward O’Malley hasn’t one complaint about the “flying hospital.”
“I find it to be real satisfying, and I’ve always felt that I’ve gotten a lot more out of it than I’ve given,” said O’Malley, a pediatric ophthalmologist from Detroit who has gone on seven missions with ORBIS.
Since its first flight in 1982, the ORBIS team has circled the globe four times, worked with doctors from 70 countries and treated 18,000 patients. The nonprofit organization operates with funding from various organizations, including United Airlines, which donated the first DC-8 plane used by ORBIS.
