DONATING HER TIME … Dr. Kollarits performs a postcataract surgery eye examination on a patient assisted by Nurse Mills.
By: Bill O’Connell
On June 30, 1925 the Lions Clubs International organization held their annual international convention at the Cedar Point Resort on the shores of Lake Erie in Sandusky, Ohio. One of their featured speakers stood at the podium and implored the Lions members to take up the cause of relieving the plight of the visually impaired.
Her name was Helen Keller and she asked the Lions Clubs to become “Knights of the Blind” and direct their benevolent efforts to that mission. Today, while Lions Clubs around the world have expanded their scope to include many other deserving causes, they continue to champion the fight to improve the lives of those with all types of vision problems including with what Helen herself was afflicted, blindness.
Doctor Carol Kollarits, a long-time member of the Swanton Lions Club, has devoted her entire adult life to helping people who suffer from a myriad of diseases and disorders that affect their vision, both on the job and off. Currently, Dr. Kollarits is a board-certified eye surgeon at the Cataract & Laser Institute in Maumee.
She graduated cum laude from Ohio State University (OSU) in 1970 and did a pediatric internship at Columbus Children’s Hospital followed by an ophthalmology residency at OSU. Dr. Kollarits was a senior staff fellow at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and during that time, she completed a fellowship in vitreoretinal surgery at the Wilmer Institute of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Dr. Kollarits’s highly accomplished career includes bringing the first A and B scan ophthalmic ultrasound unit to the Medical College of Ohio where she provided intraocular lens power calculations for other ophthalmologists’ cataract surgery patients.
She opened one of the first Medicare approved ambulatory surgery centers in the state of Ohio in 1985 and purchased the first Selective Laser Trabeculoplasty (SLT) lasers in Northwest Ohio for the treatment of glaucoma.
In addition to her volunteer work with the Swanton Lions Club, Doctor Carol, as she is known to her fellow Lions members, has also gone on medical missions to the African continent.
In 2016 she traveled to Zambia, located in the Southern-Central area of Africa and performed 72 phakoemulsification cataract surgeries in approximately 10 days. This past January, she spent the last two weeks of the month on a medical mission in Ghana, the former Gold Coast in Western Africa.
She was accompanied by retired nurse Barbara Mills from Toledo and Cataract and Laser Institute of Maumee optician Beth Cole. The trip was sponsored by SEE International, an organization that trains ophthalmologists in manual sutureless incision cataract surgery (MSICS). SEE International provided sterile supplies from Alcon so that indigent patients who were blind from cataract could have surgery performed at no charge.
Dr. Kollarits performed 60 surgeries under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Baah at the Save the Nation’s Sight Clinic in the capitol city of Accra. Nurse Mills served as the circulating nurse for Dr. Kollarits’ surgery patients.
Seeing how lacking the Clinic’s sterilizing techniques were, Barbara and Beth conducted an in-service on sterile techniques for Dr. Baah’s nurses. Beth also assisted the optometrists in the clinic and brought several hundred pairs of glasses to be given to patients in need.
The glasses had been collected by Swanton Lions Club members and refurbished by Volunteer Optometric Services to Humanity (VOSH) in Pandora, Ohio. Dr. Kollarits is looking forward to her next medical mission. “I hope to do more mission trips,” she said. “I will probably contact SEE International or the Himalayan Eye Care Project, and find out where the greatest need is.”
In the meantime, she will continue her work here, treating diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration among the many other vision issues people have to deal with as well as what she does with the Swanton Lions Club. Without a doubt, Hellen Keller would be proud.
Bill can be reached at publisher@thevillagereporter.com