On the morning of September 25, the Tissue Bank - Hanoi Eye Hospital 2 received a phone call informing that a son wanted to donate his mother's cornea to bring light to a blind patient. The cornea donor was an 80-year-old woman who passed away at 5:18 a.m. on September 25. The person who called the Tissue Bank to express his wish to donate his mother's cornea was a military doctor, Dr. Nguyen Le Trung, Vice Chairman of the Ophthalmology Department of Military Hospital 103.
In the moments of grief, the son calmly called the Eye Bank - Hanoi Eye Hospital 2, deciding to donate his mother's corneas.
Everything was done quickly, the old lady's corneas were collected by technicians from the Eye Bank - Hanoi Eye Hospital 2. During the entire collection process, the old lady's son just stood quietly observing from a corner of the room. Only when the technicians had finished removing the corneas, did the son come closer, stroked his mother's head, then hugged her and burst into tears...
Dr. Trung's mother is Captain Le Thi Hong Minh, former employee of the Pharmacy Department at Military Hospital 103.
Before she died, she expressed her wish to donate her corneas to help blind patients. Her son, an ophthalmologist, suppressed his grief over the loss of his mother to fulfill this noble wish.
It is estimated that Vietnam currently has over 300,000 people who are blind due to corneal disease and need corneal transplant surgery to regain their sight.
According to statistics from the Ministry of Health, since the first cornea donation in April 2007 by Mrs. Nguyen Thi Hoa (in Con Thoi, Kim Son, Ninh Binh) who donated her cornea after her death, the whole country has recorded 963 cornea donors, mainly concentrated in Ninh Binh province (437 donors), Nam Dinh (332 donors). To date, more than 20 provinces and cities nationwide have had people donate their corneas after their death...
Although corneal transplant surgery in Vietnam has reached an advanced and modern level, and the number of surgeons is increasing, due to the extremely scarce corneal resources, the number of corneal donations in recent times has only met a very small number compared to the actual demand, so hundreds of thousands of patients are having to accept living in blindness, waiting for the only source of corneas from donors after death.
