The doctor is in... and he is blind

November 2003

Doctor Has Choroideremia

But patients heap praise on Montefiore's Dr Wainapel

NEW YORK - Stooped in her wheelchair, the patient grumbles about the pain, the cold, her age, her world.

'Some nights I'm screaming in agony,' says Mrs Myra Edelstein, 71.

Dr Stanley Wainapel, 54, sizes up the problem immediately.

Arthritis has eaten away one knee and is gnawing at the other and the prospect of surgery terrifies her.

The doctor checks the movement in her arms and legs and prods the left knee until it hurts.

'You're made of pretty sturdy stuff,' he says.

'You should come through the surgery fine.'

His voice is reassuring, but he is looking in the wrong direction.

'Hey, doc,' Mrs Edelstein yells. 'I'm over here.'

The doctor straightens his gaze with a slightly embarrassed smile. As the patient leaves, she notices a thin white cane propped in the corner.

'He's blind!' she exclaims.

'My doctor is blind.'

He cuts a striking figure as he strides through the Montefiore Medical Centre hospital, white coat flapping, white cane tapping out a path past bewildered onlookers who step quickly out of his way.

Sometimes he bumps into patients. Sometimes he bumps into walls.

And some days, the hospital's clinical director of rehabilitation has to reassure himself that he was right to choose medicine as his career.

'You need a lot more than eyes to be a good physician,' he says.

Montefiore, with its swirling human mass, is overwhelming, even for those who can see.

Inside is the doctor many have come to see, the blind piano-playing doctor who introduces patients to Mozart and Chopin even as he prods joints, listens to hearts and diagnoses disease.

Some patients swear the blind doctor 'sees' their pain better than anyone.

'He doesn't judge you from the outside, because he can't see the outside,' said Ms Maria Asuncion Diaz, 42, a nurse who is being treated for complications related to Lyme disease.

'Because of his blindness, I think he really hears what you have to say.'

Dr Wai- napel knew from childhood that he would eventually go blind.

He has choroideremia, a rare inherited disorder that causes progressive degeneration of the retina and of cells in the back of the eye.

He knew he had to fill his 'memory library' before his eyes stopped working.

So he travelled. He read. He took photographs. He played chamber music.

And, although his parents tried to persuade him that life as a blind piano player might be easier than life as a blind physician, he went to Boston University School of Medicine.

It seemed an obvious choice for the son of a doctor and nurse.

He specialized in the healing and rehabilitation of patients with all sorts of ailments: back pain, hip replacements, carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic fatigue.

He sees up to 200 patients a month. Not once has a patient been unnerved enough at his blindness to request another physician. --AP