Lenses Restore a Priceless Helpmate : Medicine: Telescopic bifocals will allow a San Juan Capistrano surgeon to continue his ‘missionary’ work in the rain forests of Mexico.

Since 1978, when he gave up his post-retirement gardening in San Juan Capistrano and became a part-time “missionary doctor” in the rain forests of southeast Mexico, Dr. Theodore Whittington had made do without many essentials of his trade.

Sterile needles, local anesthetics, incubators, even scalpels--all were in short supply as the Welsh-born surgeon sought to carry out what he calls “God’s work” at an eight-bed, makeshift hospital. Still, he worked with what he had. Then, about four years ago, Whittington discovered that he was losing a tool he thought never could be replaced: his eyesight.

But on Monday, through the aid of the the Center for the Partially Sighted in Santa Monica and local contributions, the 67-year-old Whittington was fitted for a pair of $1,000 “surgical telescopes” and declared himself ready to return to the operating room.

“They’re amazing,” Whittington said after testing out the lenses by picking up a needle from a table, then later reading--practically singing, in fact--from the tiny bottom line of a chart before him. “This means I can go back to doing surgery.”

After having spent an estimated $35,000 practicing medicine six months each year among the Mayan Indians in the rain forests, Whittington said he could not afford the pricey spectacles, which blend bifocals with a telescoping device that can magnify objects up to 10 times larger than they normally appear. But officials at the Center for the Partially Sighted, so impressed with his story, stepped in after hearing from Whittington earlier this year.

“As we got deeper into what he had done down there, I said, ‘We’re going to get this man some help,’ ” recalls Dr. Wayne Hoeft, a professor at the Southern California College of Optometry in Fullerton and a nationally known specialist in low-vision rehabilitation.

“When you hear about a guy dedicating his life like this to a cause, it’s impressive,” Hoeft added. And so, as a past district leader of the Kiwanis International, Hoeft called together several local Kiwanis groups--from Hollywood, Glendale and La Canada Flintridge--to help foot the bill for what is known technically as a “bioptic telescopic magnification device.”

The lenses aren’t new. They’ve been around for 30 years, said Peter Murphy, co-owner of Designs for Vision Inc., a Long Island, N.Y., firm that makes them. The company sold 7,000 pairs last year, but the telescopic lenses aren’t widely known.

Whittington, for instance, had never heard of them until earlier this year when he caught a late-night public service announcement. For four years before that, as he gradually lost virtually all sight in his right eye and much in his left because of an aging disease called macular degeneration, he struggled with remedies that proved ineffective.

He gave up surgery in the rain forest but still practiced medicine there for six months every year, searching all the while for a way to go back to the operating table. Then he found the Santa Monica center and Dr. Hoeft.

“What we have here,” said Samuel Genensky, founder of the Center for the Partially Sighted, “is a man who in any other circumstance would have been told, ‘Friend, you’re blind. You can’t function anymore.’ But he refused to accept that.”

How well will Whittington be able to see now?

Hoeft, the low-vision specialist, said: “He won’t be doing any heart surgeries, but boy, he can do a lot of things now that he couldn’t before and can see sharp and clear at a distance of 13 inches,” the distance needed to perform operations. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies with a scalpel in his hand.”

Whittington himself says the improvement in vision is, in the context of the operating room, the ability to distinguish between human tissue and a suture. By the time he stopped performing operations, he couldn’t do that, Whittington says.

The realization that he was losing his sight four years ago was a grudging one, Whittington recalls.

“You feel inadequate because your eyesight is failing. You feel that if you can’t continue (as a surgeon), you’re letting people down.”

In Whittington’s case, the people he felt he was letting down were about 50,000 Mayan Indians who live around the village of Yajalon, or “mountain of green” in local Mayan dialect, in southeast Mexico near the Guatemalan border.

There, for almost the last dozen years, during the non-rainy season from roughly December through May, Whittington has volunteered his time to deliver babies, perform operations, give out shots, and treat broken bones, hiking each day up a steep hill to a mountain-top, government-run hospital. In recent years, while he has to put aside his operating duties because of his eyesight, he has spent $8,000 of his own savings to buy land in the village, opening an orphanage there and introducing new seeds for planting to the local growers, he said.

His wife stays behind in San Juan Capistrano for those six months. Occasionally, Whittington wishes he had, too.

“You always have doubts,” he concedes. “You either have to be dedicated or a little crazy to do what I’m doing.”

Restless after his retirement from private practice in Santa Ana, Whittington started his work among the Mayan Indians after being asked to take part in a church-sponsored study in the rain forest, aimed at building a new hospital.

The project foundered, but Whittington ended up going back.

The question that Whittington repeatedly confronts--from former colleagues, from friends, from reporters--is: Why?

“The only way I can really answer that,” he says, “is for them to come with me and then perhaps they will understand--that there is more in life than making money, more noble things. There is an expression in French that mean ‘those who are gifted are obliged to help those who are not,’ and that is my place.

“If they came, they would see the daily hardships, the suffering, the poverty of my people. There are no tomorrows in these people’s lives--no hay manana ,’ ” he says. “And this is the saddest part.”