Surgeon, patient decry 5-year wait time for cornea transplants in N.L.
CBC
A Conception Bay South man says an estimated five-year wait time for cornea transplants in Newfoundland and Labrador — one of only two provinces without an organ bank for eye tissue — is far too long.
His doctor, the only ophthalmologist currently performing the surgeries in the province, flies from Toronto every two months with a cooler filled with eye tissue obtained from organ banks in mainland Canada and the United States.
“If you're a donor and you sign your donor card, you don't mind giving up your eyes, right? Well, the province won't take them because there’s nowhere to put them,” said Pierre Kusters, a 67-year-old patient who needs two cornea transplants.
A cellist with the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, Kusters can no longer drive at night, meaning he can no longer attend rehearsals and concerts.
“I miss that,” he said in a recent interview at his home in Upper Gullies. “I need to be able to see my scores properly. You know, that’s not happening now.”
Kusters’s dominant eye — his left — underwent a cataract surgery last fall. After the operation, when his vision didn’t return to normal, he learned he suffers from Fuchs dystrophy, a condition that is hampering his healing and requires a partial cornea transplant.
Kusters — whose vision was already poor in his right eye, also requiring surgery — has been placed on an emergency list for surgery and hopes to be seen within the next year.
But his surgeon, Dr. Nour Nofal, said she can only perform a maximum of five transplants per visit. She comes to St. John’s six times a year and has access to an operating room one day per trip.
“That's 30 grafts a year,” she said, adding that the number of surgeries per visit depends on the number of corneas she can get her hands on. “There's 150 eyes of patients on the waitlist, so it would be an average of five years.”
“Five years is definitely too long,” said Nofal, whose partner is originally from Newfoundland and Labrador and who started conducting cornea surgeries in the province a year ago.
“The patients waiting for cornea transplants, they're legally blind, they are in significant pain. It impacts their quality of life,” she said, noting wait times in Nova Scotia are about a year long.
For years, transplant patients have travelled out of the province, mostly to Halifax and Toronto, for cornea replacements. The surgery is paid for by MCP, but travel costs are significant.
Nofal said patients need to have someone accompany them and they need to wait about two weeks before flying home.
Nofal said there are obvious ways to reduce the waitlist, chief among them the creation of an eye bank in Newfoundland and Labrador, which would allow for corneas to be donated locally and for surgeries to be scheduled more frequently and more reliably.
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