Real life stories
Mr. Belcher: experience of a donor family and how to donate to research
There are many reasons why people become eye donors but each one that does fulfils a vital role at Moorfields Eye Hospital. Here Peter Belcher tells us why his wife donated her eyes to research.
A simple night out on a family holiday in Sicily led to the beginning of a devastating discovery for one London family,
Esther: a recipient's storyEsther Elliot was diagnosed with Keratoconus by an optician when she was a child and has struggled with her sight ever since.
Her keratoconus – a condition which produces a cone like progressive bulge of the cornea and restricts vison - was always extremely severe in her right eye. After losing her vision completely in that eye aged 13 she...
“It was like shop shutters coming down then opening again. I would get bars across my eyes for a couple of minutes and then the bars would lift but week by week my vision was getting more and more blurry. I was getting headaches. I couldn’t see people’s faces unless they were very close to me. Glasses didn’t help. I relied on voice recognition when people knocked at the front door. It was getting very frightening.”
That’s how pensioner Mrs Ayse Hassan describes the state of her deteriorating sight in both eyes before she underwent an operation...