Grateful cornea recipient thanks donor's family

Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Libby Lausch was jittery as she sat with her husband in a penthouse room at a Geary Street hotel on Monday.

She joked about sitting on her hands so she'd stop fidgeting. A plastic container of cookies was on the floor near her feet, and a photo album was tucked next to her hip. They were gifts for a stranger she was about to meet for the first time - the man whose vision was restored because Lausch's son, Matthew, donated his corneas when he died last year.

When Marty Sanchez finally walked into the room, Lausch had him engulfed in a hug before either of them had said a word. "It's so awesome to meet you," she said, her words muffled against his shoulder. "Welcome to the family."

Sanchez said, softly, "Thanks, Matt."

Sanchez and the Lausches agreed to make public a very private meeting to highlight the importance of organ donation, and in particular cornea donations.

There are 44,000 cornea transplants done in the United States every year, roughly 2,000 in the Bay Area. But the need for corneas far outstrips the supply in the Bay Area, which means that most corneas are imported from other parts of the country.

In fact, the Bay Area has notably low levels of corneal donations - only about 500 corneas a year - compared with other parts of the United States. It's not necessarily because of a lack of willing donors, but because there hasn't been a strong infrastructure for harvesting corneas and storing them, say transplant experts.

"We really are very poor in the Bay Area. We harvest among the lowest rates of donors in the country," said Dr. Douglas Holsclaw, a cornea transplant surgeon with Kaiser Permanente Northern California.
Bay Area eye bank

With that in mind, the nonprofit group SightLife moved into the Bay Area last year with plans to develop the first cornea-specific eye bank in the region. Already the group has started working with Kaiser to harvest corneas. SightLife hopes to open an eye bank sometime next year in San Francisco and start working with other major hospitals.

Eye banks like SightLife, which is the largest provider of donated corneas in the country, handle the entire donation process - from meeting with a donor's family shortly after death to removing the corneas, storing them and finally delivering them to the transplant recipient.

Corneas are the thin, dome-shaped tissues that lie over the top of the eyes. In a cornea transplant, a stripe of tissue about 11 millimeters wide is cut out of the donor's eye and then stitched into the recipient's eye.

Because corneas are not attached to any blood vessels, it's not necessary for the donor's blood type to match the recipient's, so donated corneas are much easier to attain than hearts or kidneys or other tissues. But without a cornea-specific eye bank in the Bay Area, people in need of a transplant had a longer waiting time than in other parts of the country, and they didn't necessarily get the best, healthiest tissues, Holsclaw said.

Cornea transplants typically are used to treat forms of blindness that occur when the cornea becomes clouded, scarred or misshapen, usually by injury or disease.
In debt to a young man

In Sanchez's case, he has a disease called keratoconus, which causes the cornea to become thin and disfigured over time. His left eye is still in good shape, but he was blind in his right eye before receiving the cornea transplant from Matthew Lausch last year.

"When they told me there was a cornea for me, I cried. I couldn't talk," said Sanchez, 57. "I was totally aware of a person who'd died and a family. I was so aware that somebody, somewhere, was not able to hold somebody that was important to them."

Matthew Lausch, 20, died on May 5 last year in a car accident in Montana. He'd been going to college in Fremont - by coincidence, the same city where Sanchez has lived for decades and where Matthew's corneas would eventually end up - and had gone home to visit his family for the summer.

His parents hadn't known he was already an organ donor, but his mom said she wasn't surprised when she learned he'd signed up when he was just 15 and got his first driver's license.

"He was just such a loving, caring young man," Libby Lausch said. "I don't know how else to put it. He was always trying to help someone else out."

One of Matthew's kidneys went to a 79-year-old man, who wrote to the Lausches to say he felt like a "young man again" and was now able to play with his grandchildren. His liver went to a laboratory technician who lives near Seattle. His heart went to a 24-year-old man with two children.

"Whoever got his heart, he got a big one," said Matthew's father. "We're just so proud of him."