One of those coordinators is Kristie Green, who has been an employee at the Mississippi Lions Eye Bank for three years. She is passionate about working to help others. Green said she 48 hours on call, then 48 hours off. In a month, all three coordinators typically recover 15-25 corneas for donations.
“A typical 48 hours would consist of me taking calls from the Mississippi Organ Recover Agency, paperwork before a recovery, traveling to hospitals and funeral homes to recover corneas, the recovery process, and paperwork after recovery,” she said. “After recovery, I send blood off for serology testing. The cornea recovery process begins by doing full physical assessment of the body, followed by an ocular penlight exam.”
Upon recovery and transfer back to the office, the corneas then undergo a slit lap exam that examines four layers of the tissue. These layers include the epithelium, stroma, descemets, and the endothelium.
“Tissue then goes through a specular microscopy exam,” Green said. “This is where it counts the number of endothelial cells. There has to be a minimum of 2,500 cells for it to be suitable transplant tissue.”
The Mississippi Lions Eye Bank website said a corneal transplant is a surgical procedure which replaces the disc-shaped segment of an impaired cornea with a similarly shaped piece of healthy donor cornea.
For the doctors to receive a healthy cornea, the corneas have to be delivered to the hospitals within 14 days. Coordinators deliver the corneas locally in the Jackson, Mississippi area while they sometimes ship the corneas internationally.
If corneas do not meet the requirements for transplant, coordinators transfer them from an antibiotic solution to a long-term storage of glycerin. Once preserved in glycerin, they have a one year preservation.