The Gift of Sight
After Carl Cooper of Concord died unexpectedly Jan. 15, his widow had an unusual question..
“Is there any way I can get his corneas?” Carol Cooper asked while arranging to donate his organs. The surprising answer was “yes.”
Cooper, 70, attended her husband’s funeral with his transplanted cornea in her left eye.
“I think this is all God’s plan,” she said.
Medical people describe the case as a first, and probably last, for Jackson.
“We deal with donor tissue all the time, but I’ve never seen a case of direct donation from the next of kin,” said Karissa Naylor, surgical counselor at TLC Eyecare in Jackson.
“I almost think it will never happen again,” said Dr. Kevin Lavery, the surgeon who performed the transplant.
Carl and Carol Cooper were married 52 years ago and raised four children. He was a retired machine operator for Hayes-Albion. “He was one in a million,” Carol Cooper said. “He would do anything for me.”
Carol Cooper has an eye disorder that causes cells behind the cornea to deteriorate and swell, distorting her vision, Lavery said. Transplant surgery was scheduled before Carl died, but the Coopers canceled it for financial reasons. Money was tight, Carol Cooper said, because Carl’s pension was cut in half after the corporate owner of Hayes-Albion went bankrupt in 2001. It bothered him to delay his wife’s surgery. “Because he was such a good provider, he felt like he let me down,” she said.
A day after her surgery was canceled, Carl collapsed of an aortic aneurysm and died at Allegiance Health. His donated organs and tissue provided transplants to 50 people, Carol Cooper said, including a teenage boy critically injured in a car wreck.
When she requested his corneas, the odds looked slim.
A representative of the Gift of Life transplant organization called TLC to ask if it was even possible.
Luckily, Naylor was there at a time when the office is normally closed. Medical people were touched by Cooper’s wish to see through her husband’s eyes and scrambled to grant it. “They worked all weekend making it happen,” Cooper said. “Everyone pitched in,” Lavery said. Money was no object this time because medical fees were waived. Cooper did not have to pay a penny. “They treated me like the queen of England,” she said.
Cooper received her husband’s cornea — actually the cell lining from the back of the cornea, which heals much faster that transplanting the whole thing — on Jan. 20. His funeral was the next day.
The same surgery will be done on her right eye when the left one heals completely, typically a matter of months. Her husband’s second cornea cannot be saved that long. It has presumably been transplanted to a stranger.
Cooper hopes her husband’s story will encourage more people to donate their organs.
“I was so excited part of Carl would always be with me,” she said. “He found a way to take care of me in life and in death.”
Jackson Citizen Patriot
214 S. Jackson St.
Jackson, MI 49201-2282
517-768-4905
By Brad Flory
bflory@citpat.com — 768-4925
February 1, 2009
