However, just when Priya Nath was recovering, Shri Nathji’s eyes got worse. The cataract developed rapidly in them and the vision in his right eye almost gone. Shri Nathji could see only a little with his left eye.
Priya Nath called many eye surgeons to the house, but did not find them to be suitable. He did not wish to take Shri Nathji to a hospital and wanted the operation done at home as most people in Delhi were doing.
He purchased a book which was like a thesis, entitled: “Stellard’s Eye Surgery” and began reading it assiduously. He began looking for eye surgeons who used cryo-surgery for removal of the cataract rather than the conventional forceps, which could prove dangerous if improperly used, but he found few doctors in Delhi who were well versed with the new technique.
Whenever he discussed Shri Nathji’s cataract with eye surgeons they mistook Priya Nath for an eye doctor himself because of his extraordinary knowledge of the subject.
There was even a time when he fixed a date with Dr. Hari Mohan, the top eye surgeon of Delhi at the time, to come and operate on Shri Nathji’s right eye. However, one night before the doctor came to the house, Priya Nath had a bad dream in which he saw the doctor come chasing after Shri Nathji with forceps in his hands, and he cancelled the operation.
Pran Nath in London contacted a certain Dr. Hruby in Vienna who said he would be willing to operate on Shri Nathji at Vienna.
Priya Nath contacted Dr. Harry Zeltzer and the Harvard Medical School. He was seriously thinking of taking Shri Nathji abroad if he had to.
When Harry Zeltzer wrote that surgery would be more advisable in familiar surroundings, Shri Nathji said: “Blindness knows no national boundaries and that all surroundings are alike in blindness.” Dr. Zeltzer never forgot that profound phrase.
Priya Nath’s friend, Dr.Kopr Kritayakirana, found an eye surgeon in Thailand and said the surgery could be done at Thailand, and offered to bear the entire costs of the operation at Thailand himself. Although Shri Nathji never went to Thailand, but he never forgot the noble gesture of Kopr, whom he had often described as an angel in human form.
It was common knowledge that one eye of Dr. Radhakrishnan, the President of India, had been operated upon in India, at the AIIMS, and had been spoiled. Priya Nath could not afford to take such a risk with Shri Nathji. The right eye of Shri Nathji posed a problem for the surgeons because of the orange sign in it. They would either have to remove it during the operation or else have to cut around it. None of the eye surgeons appeared to have performed such an operation before. Priya Nath even contacted a Dr. Saroj Aggarwal who was in America and who was passing through New Delhi. Her words sounded cryptic to Priya Nath: “There are no guarantees in surgery.”
As the days passed by, Shri Nathji began leading a life of semi-blindness groping his way even to the bathroom. Priya Nath could not eat his food, so miserable had he become at the thought of Shri Nathji’s blindness and his own indecisiveness in the matter.
It was a strange leela to enact, he would say to Shri Nathji again and again – for whom and for what? Only to give some eye surgeon the chance for Divine Service.