A MIRACLE EVERY WEEK

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30413, 11 April 1964, Page 5

A MIRACLE EVERY WEEK

[By MARGARET JONES in the “Sun-Herald,” Sydney. Reprinted by arrangement.] QNE day, a blind peasant in Ceylon may see again through the eyes of the Prime Minister, Mrs Bandaranaike. Or a village child in a world of darkness may find the light through a priceless bequest from the Governor-General, Mr William Gopallawa. These two distinguished names head a whole list of V.P.P.’s—ministers of state, judges, doctors—who have volunteered their eyes, after death, to bring sight back to Ceylon’s blind thousands. In Australia, the need is not so urgent, with a blindness rate far below Ceylon’s one in every 1000. But in Sydney alone, in a week, nine people—including a husband and wife—came forward as potential eye donors. Rising Interest Gestures like these show the mounting public interest in the problems of blindness.

And the donors will be vital some time in the future when the new Sydney Eye Health Medical Centre establishes its eye bank. From the eye bank, eyes will be sent out all over Sydney for corneal grafts. Packed in vacuum flasks, with ice, they can even be air-freighted to country hospitals for sight-saving operations.

With corneal grafts, speed is all important. The eyes must be taken from the donor within an hour of death, and the corneal transplant done within four days. “In America, corneas are kept for months under refrigeration,” a doctor at Sydney Eye Hospital said. “These won’t restore sight but they are useful for operations to prevent ulceration or deterioration of the eye. “We don’t do these operations yet, because we have no facilities for keeping corneas over long periods. “But we plan to make all

this part of our new centre.” The Sydney Eye Health Medical Centre will grow out of the Sydney Eye Hospital, the rambling, out-moded, building in Woolloomooloo, where doctors and nurses have been struggling against heavy odds for years to solve the problems of sight loss. Sometimes the outpatients’ queues flow out the front door on to the footpath. Often men and women whose sight is fading have to wait months for operations.

£250,000 Centre The planned new centre —its first stage alone will cost £250,000 —will put an end to all this. A handsome, glassfronted eight-storey building, it will provide world-class facilities for treatment of eye diseases and defects. It will train surgeons, nurses and recearch workers; and it will be the headquarters of the professor to be appointed to the new chair of eye health and ophthalmology at the University of Sydney. Meanwhile, doctors at the old hospital cope with 60,000 out-patients a year, perform 1100 operations, and watch over 1000 bed patients. One of the miracles they perform every week is the corneal graft, that exquisite refinement of modern surgery, which allows the living to see through dead men’s eyes.

The star patient when I was at the hospital was 13-year-old John Thiele, from Ingleburn, whose right eye was splashed with lime during the school holidays. Without a corneal graft, the sight of one eye would have been permanently lost. With it, he will be able to see perfectly—and no-one except a doctor using ophthalmic instruments, will be able to tell the cornea he looks through is not his own “The cornea graft is an operation of incredible delicacy. The needles used for stitching are so small they are almost invisible, the pure silk surtures, finer than human hair, have to be dyed blue so the surgeon can see them.

“First,” said the doctor who showed me round, “we get our patient into hospital. Then we have to wait for healthy eyes from a donor. “We usually take the eyes from donors between 20 and 65. Curiously enough, corneas from older donors seem to give the best result. “Our eyes come from Sydney hospitals. They are removed surgically, within an hour of death, examined thoroughly for disease, then put in an antibiotic solution. “We keep them in the refrigerator until the surgeon is ready to operate.” The kit the surgeon needs for corneal grafts is surprisingly simple. His main tool is the trephine, a small punch with edges sharper than the finest ground razor. The piece he punches out from the “donor” cornea will be as thin as paper, and probably no more than onefifth of an inch in diameter.

From the patient’s eye, he punches out an exactly similar segment, and replaces the damaged cornea with the sound one. Handling his minute needle with long tweezers, he rapidly stitches the cornea into place. This, to the lay eye, is the miracle. It seems incredible that human hands could manage tools of such fineness. They are like the weapons of Lilliputians—but last year, at this one hospital, they brought back sight to 50 patients with damaged corneas.

One of the hospital’s most entertaining sections is the orthoptics department, which copes with patients from six months old to over 70. Using the synoptophore, a delicate instrument for measuring eye deviation, a trained orthopist can tell the surgeon whether an operation for a “turned” eye would be worth while. For children—and even for adults—the synoptophore is almost as entertaining as home movies. Through its eyepieces, you can watch a lion popping in and out of a cage, a girl with a teddy bear split in two, then merge again, a series of circles become three-dimen-sional. “Turned” Eyes “Turned” eyes are usually childish complaints, but the Orthopitics Department can also help adults with the disorder of increasing age, latent muscle imbalance. This can come mysteriously in middle age, manifesting itself with nausea and headaches. Its connexion with the eyes is not always plain. The lucky one come to the Eye Hospital—but undiagnosed, it can cause permanent damage. These services—and others like them—will be bigger and better when the new Eye Health Medical Centre is translated from a dream to a reality. “But first we must get the money,” a hospital official said.