By Tiffany Lai September 12, 2023
It was a routine hip replacement surgery, but this poor man had bled badly on the operating table. He was a Jehovah’s witness by faith and therefore, declined to receive blood transfusions both during and after the surgery was over. By the time I saw him, he had had several days of severely low hemoglobin levels and his chart stated that he had multiple watershed infarcts.
When I first met him, his wife was in the room sitting dutifully at his side. The hemoglobin and hematocrit reading I had to go off of was a few days previously. They had decided to limit blood draws due to his condition. He had swiss cheese vision with black holes in his visual field, characteristic of watershed infarcts. He had lost his focal vision and was relying on spotty peripheral vision to see.
PT and I teamed up to work with him. Despite being fit and healthy previous to his surgery, he was needed two person assistance for mobility. The reason was because he was so scared. Its hard for someone who has had vision all his adult life, to not have that visual input when moving around. He can’t see where people are about to touch him, where the edge of the bed is, where the chair is… He would lean back heavily and resist us out of fear. We did as much as we could but he required additional therapy at a skilled nursing facility.
A few days before he left, I was talking to him about my upcoming wedding and how I was looking for a photographer. He became animated and gave me a bunch of tips; how to interview people, types of photography styles, how to find a great deal on a photographer, contacts of people he knew. He was obviously an expert on this subject and was excited to tell me what he knew. I found out he was a wedding photographer by trade. It was at this moment that the reality of his situation sunk in. Losing vision is horrible enough, but I can’t imagine how much more horrible it is as a photographer.
There are a lot of opinions out there about this man’s choices, but I’ll remember him as a person who sacrificed a precious thing for his faith. And that takes guts.