SPOKANE – A former Marine with terminal cancer has donated his diseased but still functioning eye for blindness research in Utah.
The John A. Moran Eye Center in Salt Lake City received the right eye of Terry Stidman, 52, of Spirit Lake, Idaho, more than eight hours into a 10-hour window before it would have started to deteriorate, said Victoria Ladd, technical director for the Utah Eye Bank.
“We were close, but we did it,” Ladd told The Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane on Wednesday.
Reasons for the shipping delay were not immediately clear. As originally planned, the transfer was to be completed within six hours.
Dr. Kang Zhang, a University of Utah clinician and geneticist, said earlier that genes and proteins from the eye would dramatically enhance his research and efforts to develop a blood test that would show an individual’s level of risk for macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in older people in the United States.
A living donation is very rare, said Zhang, who last received one about three years ago.
“It’s obviously due to the unselfish nature of the donor,” he said. “We certainly are grateful.”
“It has to be super-fresh, and it has to be processed properly,” Zhang said. “From the eye we’ll take probably 1,000 sections and we’ll use it for five or six or seven years.”
Stidman was recovering Wednesday from the disfiguring 15-hour operation in which the eye and cancerous tissue in the eye socket and cheekbone were removed at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Seattle and replaced with a tissue flap taken from his thigh.
“He was in excellent spirits when he learned his eye got to the Moran Center,” said Evelyn Clark, a friend of Stidman. “He smiled the best he could in his swollen face and a tear came out of his (left) eye.”
Because of the progression of the cancer, doctors couldn’t rebuild Stidman’s face enough for a bone replacement, so there was no place to anchor an artificial eye, said Dr. Eduardo Mendez, a head and neck surgeon at the VA hospital.
Before the operation, Stidman had spent more than a decade supporting vision projects as a Lions Club leader.
“It may mean they can shut down macular degeneration in elderly people,” he said before the operation.
Stidman was diagnosed with rare adenoidal cystic cancer in 1994, and four years ago was told he’d likely be dead by May 2006.
“Every day’s a freebie,” he said.
When he learned in December that the progression of the cancer would cost him his eye if he didn’t die first, he contacted the Northwest Lions Sight and Hearing Foundation, which operates Sightlife, an eye bank in Seattle, where officials told him about Zhang’s work.
Stidman’s main concern going into surgery was how two grandchildren, both toddlers, would react to his new face.
“It’s going to be shocking,” he said.
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