by Dean Vavra

This is my thirty-seventh official year as an eye banker, but in a way eye banking has been a part of my life much longer than that. A genetic eye disease called granular dystrophy type 2 afflicted my grandmother, my mother and four of my brothers. (I was lucky enough to escape the condition.) This is a particularly cruel form of blindness that causes lesions to grow on the cornea, and even after a corneal transplant these painful opacities grow back into the graft tissue. So, my mother, grandmother and siblings all required multiple corneal transplants. In fact, in the early 1950s, before I was born, my mother and grandmother had two of the first corneal transplants performed in America. (more…)