My new hero: Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy

This is word for word out of a neat book Gina just found for me and got from the library called Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters. There are a lot of amazing stories in the book. I think this is my favorite one so far. The bolds are my own.

Govindappa Venkataswamy thought he had found purpose in life when three cousins died in the las three months of their pregnancies. His broken heart drove him to devour his medical school training, bent on becoming an OB-GYN. His intent was to rescue people like his cousins, but he never got the chance. Fresh out of medical school rheumatoid arthritis crippled him, making it impossible for him to deliver babies. He was hospitalized for years and suffered pain that still grips him to this day.

“You don't spend your life helping people just out of sympathy. You know that the sufferer is part of you,” said Dr. V., as he is known today. Not only does he have great empathy empathy for the pain that his patients endure, but he did not let his permanent disability limit his ambitions. He started over, this time studying opthalmology to confront a different need. In India, there are nine million blind people—most of whom suffer from cataracts, which are curable with surgery. Dr. V. opened an 11-bed eye hospital in his brother's home in Madurai to perform free or low-cost cataract surgery. He even designed instruments suited to his crippled hands, and these tools enabled him to perform 5,000 surgeries in his first year.

Today, his clinics perform over 200,000 surgeries annually and are among the largest single providers of eye surgery in the world, having given sight to more than one million people in India. Dr. V. made the process of conducting operations so efficient, it could be done as fast and almost as cheaply as making a burger.

He believes that it may be possible to 'franchise' his operations throughout the world, recruiting people and resources to his dream as if it were McDonald's. They sell billions of burgers through thousands of stores, he tells everyone he meets. “We can sell millions of people new eyesight, saving them from starvation.” The clinics run a profit even though 70% of the patients pay nothing, or close to nothing, and the clinics do not depend on donations or government grants. With his hands hopelessly crippled, you would think he had earned the right to give up. Instead, Dr. V. refused to let that interrupt his commitment to save lives. He could not change his condition, but he could change the way he thought about his goal and, as a result, he is changing the lives of millions.