Opinion
Twelve years ago, I wrote a letter thanking a family I will never meet
Claire Heaney
WriterTwelve years ago, I wrote a letter to a family I will never meet.
I received a donor cornea and was given the opportunity to write anonymously to the donor’s family. I was grateful, as I would be able to honour the donor and their family’s commitment to follow through with their wishes.
It was challenging to know that for my surgery to proceed, someone somewhere had to die.Credit: Tanya Lake
Soon after the surgery, I started the letter many times. It brought me to tears, which irritated my eye, which had tiny stitches embroidering the new cornea in place.
What are the right words? It became clear there were none, and I had to press on. I’ve lost parents, a nephew and others close to me. The silence from people who couldn’t find the right words and avoided the issue was worse than any sometimes hamfisted words from those who tried.
I began, “I might not get the words right, but I am hoping that in this period of immense sadness that you, the donor family, can draw strength, comfort and hope from the selfless act of organ donation.”
In the months before my surgery, I often thought about my future donor. My specialist had given me a surgery date three months in advance, based on the expected supply of donor corneas.
It was challenging to know that for my surgery to proceed, someone somewhere had to die. That guilt and anxiety about the procedure kept me awake at night.
In my letter, I told the family that I recognised that what was a gift for me came at a huge cost for them. At that time, I had three young children, and it was a lot to take in.
Transplants using the cornea, the clear window in front of the eye, are quite common. In 2023, there were nearly 2500 corneal transplant recipients in Australia. My graft was to treat keratoconus, a condition in which the cornea thins over time and the round shape becomes conical. The distortion means light does not reach the retina, causing blurry vision.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on my good fortune to receive a transplant. Early in my primary schooling I struggled to see the blackboard. I was initially prescribed glasses, but because of the nature of keratoconus better correction is achieved by hard contact lenses.
As time went on, my eyesight continued to worsen. You don’t go blind with keratoconus, but the very blurry vision, unable to be corrected, is limiting. While I was legally allowed to drive, I was not confident and stopped driving at night, which was challenging with three busy kids.
After the surgery, when my eye patch came off, there was no moment of miraculously restored vision. Slowly, it improved, and my eyesight sharpened.
While many people support the idea of organ and tissue donation, only one in three Australians are registered as organ donors. In this country, you are required to opt in on the Organ Donor Register, but the deceased’s family will still be asked to agree. Hence, the need for end-of-life conversations before it’s too late.
There are 7.7 million people registered on the Australian Organ Donor Register, and four out of five families say yes to donation if their deceased loved one is on the register. This drops to two out of five if families don’t know what their intentions were, or they never registered.
Among my friendship circle, I am aware of tensions that have arisen between divorced parents about donating their child’s organs, causing even more stress as they were coming to terms with life support being turned off.
In my case, my gifted cornea finally failed in 2020, and I went through the entire process again. The stitches stayed in for the best part of 2½ years, removed a few at a time in the chair at my specialist’s rooms. Numbing drops were inserted before my specialist gently extracted the stitches with a tiny scalpel and tweezers.
When my first graft failed, my initial thought was that I wouldn’t go through it again, but sitting in the specialist’s room during one of those reprieves between lockdowns, I figured I had nothing better to do. ”Book me in,” I said, half thinking the procedure would be cancelled due to another COVID outbreak. But go ahead it did.
I’d like to say I can see clearly now, but it’s not a magic bullet. I still increase the size of the text when I read, reach for my binoculars at the footy and take photographs of things I can’t read so I can digitally zoom in. But one thing I’ll always be grateful for are the donors and those families who were willing to give me a chance.
Claire Heaney is a Melbourne writer.
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