Ophthalmology: A Living Memorial In Strangers’ Eyes

It was mid-July, just two days short of Willard R. Gilliland’s 39th birthday, when he left his home in Peters Township, south of Pittsburgh, to take his mother-in-law, his wife June and their five children to visit his mother in Pittsburgh, 15 miles away. The family had a typical three-generation reunion. When it was over, June Gilliland left first in one car to take her mother home. Willard Gilliland gave the kids another hour for ice cream and cake, then piled them into his new Volkswagen Microbus. He never got home. Only four miles short of his house, a car approached in the wrong lane. Gilliland swerved but could not escape. In the crash, Gilliland was killed, along with his son Raymond, 15, and his daughter Julia, 12. The three younger girls were badly injured.

What had started as a happy family get-together had become a nightmare of death and injury. But thanks to Mrs. Gilliland’s clear thinking and firmness of purpose, five people who never knew the Gillilands had sight restored to their blind eyes.

Family Planning. Mrs. Gilliland was called from her home to one hospital to learn that her son was dead, then to another hospital to learn that her husband and a daughter were dead. At the second hospital, the widowed and triply bereaved mother was eventually allowed to see her battered surviving children. Nancy, 9, had (among other injuries) a deep gash over her eye. Says Mrs. Gilliland: “I noticed that her eyelid was cut, and I wondered whether there was an eye under that lid. Then I remembered our plan.”

The Gilliland family plan had been made 18 months earlier, after hearing Dr. John H. Galbreath, pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church, preach about corneal transplants as a way “to live on usefully after death.” Willard Gilliland, a solid, civic-minded man (he was safety and security director for Aluminum Co. of America) talked it over with his wife and elder children. They agreed to donate their corneas to the Eye Bank of Pittsburgh.

But when Nancy’s injured eye reminded Mrs. Gilliland of their pact, eleven hours had passed since the accident. Was it too late? June Gilliland sent her mother to phone the Pittsburgh Eye Bank from the hospital lobby. There was another call to the undertaker. Within 20 minutes, an eye bank officer arrived with forms for Mrs. Gilliland to sign. In another half-hour, the corneas were removed.

Living Memorial. One of the six corneas had been damaged in the accident and was unsuitable for grafting, but it went to an eye research laboratory. All five others were grafted that same day, at Pittsburgh’s Eye and Ear, and Montefiore hospitals. One went to a nun, 30, herself a hospital aide. One to a water pollution expert, 42, whose eye had been blinded by lye. Two were donated to needy housewives. Another to a man of 52 whose own cornea had become overgrown with scar tissue after an injury. All of the operations were what ophthalmic surgeons call “penetrating transplants” or “full-thickness grafts,” for which fresh corneas must be used within 72 hours of the donor’s death. When only the outermost layer of the cornea is needed, for a split-thickness graft, an eye can be used after it has been frozen and banked for weeks.

Of the three Gilliland children surviving, Beth, 10, is still in a toes-to-shoulders cast. Nancy will go back to school next month, but in a wheelchair. Ellen, 4, has recovered well from a fracture of the pelvis, and will start kindergarten. Remembering the members of her family whom she has lost, and thinking of the sight restored to the cornea recipients, June Gilliland says simply: “Isn’t it a wonderful living memorial?”