As Herb Armishaw sat in a waiting room at the hospital in Williams Lake one day last fall, he began chatting with others who had joined him there.

Herb is from Forest Grove, a community of about 300 people near 100 Mile House. He learned that others came from places such as Clinton and Hathaway, other nearby communities in the Cariboo region. No matter where they came from, they all had one thing in common: they were waiting for cataract surgery on the first day it was offered at Cariboo Memorial Hospital (CMH).