Eyeing New Challenges

Lesley Forman Fishelman '65, M.D., has a lot of explaining to do. How does a psychiatrist who is head of the mental health department at the Kenmore Center of the Harvard Community Health Plan in Boston come to serve as medical director of a camp performing eye surgery in India?
Two reasons. She's rigorous, says Fishelman, about doing yoga daily and meditating at least 45 minutes a day, and in 1990, while looking for a group to meditate with, she found the PRASAD Project, a charitable organization doing volunteer work in India. Over the last nine years she has studied and consulted in ways to improve health care delivery. After twice declining the job of chief of staff at the eye camp, she put her background to work during January 1996.
"There's probably a backlog of more than two million cataract patients in India, and the process of serving them is immensely complex," said Fishelman, whose job was to manage logistics for the two-and-a-half-week camp northeast of Bombay.
Planning took up most of 1995. Village high school students screened people for severe eye problems, and those with cataracts were invited to come to the camp for surgery. A total of 7,700 showed up. More than 950 suffered severe but treatable cataract blindness.
The equipment showroom of a farm supply company "turned into a state-of-the-art operating room with donations of equipment and lots of elbow grease," said Fishelman. A dozen U.S., Canadian and Indian surgeons, six at a time and two tables per surgeon, operated in assembly-line fashion. One day, six surgeons did 251 high-tech interocular lens transplants.
Setting up the entire system of health care delivery meant "a lot of puzzle solving, a lot of thinking through," Fishelman said. Her younger son, Mark, currently a senior at the University of Delaware and one of 250 Western volunteers, worked as a transporter of patients in the operating room.
When Fishelman went from Colby to Yale for her M.D., she had pediatrics or radiology in mind, but she says she realized that people she treated often were "troubled beyond their illnesses." Today, as head of the Kenmore mental health department, one of the 14 centers of the Harvard Health Plan, she has responsibility for the equivalent of 19 full-time clinicians. She also heads HPH's pain program, working with patients who have chronic problems. A general psychiatry practice at the Kenmore Center and a private psychiatry practice in Newton account for the other half of her time.
"So I work a lot," said Fishelman. "But," she said, recalling that she was a history major at Colby who fit in courses as diverse as biology and Russian, "I'm still a jack of all trades."
"And I still play bridge, which is what I did in college . . . but I didn't sit in the Spa every night, because I was pre-med. I was a kind of grind when I was in college," she admitted. "I learned a lot of discipline. But I don't think I was ever angry about it. I enjoyed it. I think one of the greatest gifts is to enjoy what you do.
"But the thing I value most is being able to give back. That's how I got to India--the reward for giving back speaks for itself."--Robert Gillespie