Transplant saves Luke before eye explodes
DO not sneeze, or your eye will explode.
Those were just a few of the words Darwin man Luke Johnson, 27, heard from doctors before he was flown to Melbourne to have emergency eye surgery where he received a transplant cornea.
Mr Johnson has had keratoconus, a progressive eye disease, since he was 19 but a boating accident two days after surgery and an unfortunate nightclub assault meant he’s had constant trouble with his eye.
“I suppose I didn't look after my cornea as much as I should have,” he said.
“You don’t really appreciate it back then but now I’m older, I look back and wish I looked after it more but when you’re 17 and 18, I was just like, whatever.”
He said his vision got back to 70 per cent after his first transplant but an assault damaged his iris and lens.
“It’s been good up to the infection a couple of weeks ago,” he said.
Only a month ago, while camping remotely, dirty water caused an infection in Mr Johnson’s eye, causing it to leak and become infected.
“I got a really bad infection from the water then went and got it looked at but they didn't pick anything up,” Mr Johonson said.
“Two weeks later, it pretty much ate away at the whole cornea and the whole eye started leaking.”
The pressure of an eye usually sits about 20 but the infection caused Mr Johnson’s eye pressure to drop to just two.
“The doctors thought the pressure machine was broken and were checking it again and again,” he said.
“Darwin doctors were going to rip it out just because they don’t have the specialist but I’d been through 10 years of pain and eye drops every day so I didn’t want to just lose it all after all that,.
“So I went to Melbourne and I was operated on three hours after flying in.”
He hopes in a couple of years, his vision will be almost fully restored with contact lenses but there’s a long way to go.
Now, Mr Johnson is encouraging everyone to become a donor because something as simple as a cornea saved his vision.
“You’ve been given another chance at vision and thanks to someone else’s cornea, I don’t have a glass ball in my head,” he said.
“Darwin doctors were going to rip it out “