When I came out of the elevator at the Lighthouse, I wasn't expecting a giant sign over the reception area reading "Eleanor E. Faye Low Vision Service." I shouldn't have been surprised. Faye has worked there since 1956 and is a pioneer in the rehabilitation of people who are visually impaired.

Greeting me warmly in her small, cluttered office, Faye told me about growing up in Hawaii, where her father was a sugar broker. Mail arrived by ship only twice a week and there was no transatlantic phone, so the isolated child read every book she could get her hands on. "My uncles all married school teachers, so they had me in their clutches," Faye recalls, smiling at the memory.

Three months after she arrived at Stanford University as one of two women in a class of 60. Pearl Harbor was bombed. "They gathered us together in a room and said, ‘You are a different generation. You are a war generation, and you can't just sit around and be housewives." To her English professor's regret, Faye went pre-med, eventually settling on ophthalmology and becoming the first female Resident in Ophthalmology at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. Faye then entered private practice and began offering low vision therapy. The field appealed because it involved "people who were neglected, who'd been told, ‘There's nothing we can do for you.'" she explains. "We made house calls, we went out and brought people in. That's why my name's on the wall, because I built up all this rehab."

Faye also turned out to be an excellent surgeon, which she loved because "you do wonderful things for people. They get their sight back, and sometimes a new lease on their lives." Her youngest patient was three hours old, her oldest age 103. During her career she mastered astonishing advances in areas like cataract surgery. "We used to have a long thin knife that we stuck through the eye, and sawed up to open the eye and pull the cataract out. Now we insert an ultrasonic probe into a 3-mm incision, vibrate the cataract out, and the person goes to lunch with implants in. Now they're doing bifocal implants, which is new since I retired."

Faye stopped performing from surgery in 2002, at age 79. "One day, after a very successful cataract operation on a woman, I was walking on 64th Street towards my office and I suddenly said to myself, ‘That's the last case I'm going to do.'" Leading up to the decision was the occasional query from a patient asking whether she was still operating. "The underlying question of course related to competency and age, and no one can conceal their age any more. Also, I can remember World War II, which is a giveaway," she observes wryly. "I had a stellar career, and I thought, ‘I'm going out when I'm still on top.'"

Ever since, Faye has been happily assisting her associate and taking care of her patients' post-operative needs. Aside from moving her first appointment of the day up to 10:00 AM, the doctor's schedule remains unaltered: two days at the Lighthouse and three seeing patients in her office, never spending less than 30 minutes with each. Faye lives off investments because her practice barely breaks even, largely because she often undercharges or charges nothing at all. Sometimes she regrets being so busy, but she can't even imagine retiring. "I keep people going, I really do, and I take pride in that," she declares. The ophthalmologist has had many of her patients for 40 or 50 years, "and when they ask if I'm thinking of retiring, they're glad that I say no."

Faye has no doubt that she's more competent than ever, not just because of her medical knowledge but because she knows what questions to ask. "Every person with an eye problem has a story. So I do psychotherapy too - my version of it - which is learning everything that they care to tell me or that I can get out of them." She doesn't figure that her age affects the way patient and colleagues treat her, perhaps "because I don't consider myself old. Mentally I feel maybe in my early 60's - older middle age." So much for ageism. As for sexism, Faye sees herself as going after what she wanted rather than blazing a trail: "I worked hard and I did my share. I enjoy the company of men, and I truly never felt that I stood out as a woman." Never married, she describes herself as "very fortunate in my relationships" and is glad to have been spared the struggles of her married-with-children friends trying to juggle it all. "I've really led the most interesting and exciting life, and I have people close to me."

What's the doctor's one regret? That she didn't learn Spanish, because "it is so useful." One more? That she couldn't study Ancient Greek in high school, in 1936. The Latin teacher was game to teach Faye and her friend, " but when we asked the principal, he said, ‘You can't. You will overstretch your brains.'" Faye's been overstretching her brain ever since, and thousands of visually impaired Americans have reaped the benefits.

You can see Faye's picture at http://www.stayingvertical.com/?q=node/133, and hear her describing the encounter with New York socialite Aida de Costa Breckenridge that got her in the door at Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, and how it feels to "keep people going."

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posted at 08:30:20 AM