“Now that we’re talking, it’s spring outside. As Elitis says, in the spring, flowers grow every night and trees climb the slopes. However, last year at this time, I was not able to enjoy the most beautiful time of the year. How can you be happy when you see almost nothing? However, this year is different. This year, I feel like I’m reborn like spring.”

OUR Chrysavgi Dialio he suffered from a special condition called “Fuchs endothelial dystrophy”, which caused him to see everything blurry with both eyes. Since she was diagnosed in 2014, her vision has been deteriorating more and more over time. While her doctor Nikolaos Ziakas, Second Director of the University Eye Clinic and Director of the Cornea Transplant Center at Papageorgiou Hospital in Thessaloniki, announced to her in 2017 that the only solution was a corneal transplant. But it took four years to find a suitable transplant. These four years were the most difficult in her life, and they were enough to completely change her daily life.

“I am currently retired. However, this condition appeared when I was still at school as a philologist, so it also created significant problems for me at work. I read some texts with difficulty, and in recent years, before I retired, I reached even to the point of asking for help from colleagues,” says Ms. Vyacheslavovna Dialio.

“Over time, my daily life became more and more difficult. It was difficult for me to cross the street, to climb the stairs. I needed my husband’s help a few times. In addition, at night I avoided going out and generally had to be careful in my every movement.

Knowing that the list of Papageorgiou hospitals was long and that at the same time a suitable transplant had to be found for her condition, the only thing she could do was to wait.

“I forgot what pleasure is”

“My main problem was that I couldn’t clearly see the faces of my children and husband. This was my great wish. To see their faces and their expressions clearly again. Besides, I forgot what pleasure is. I stopped going to the sea for summer holidays because everything was blurry. In addition, I was deprived of my other two great hobbies – theater and cinema. All this affected my psychology. I could not rejoice at what ordinary people rejoiced at. I felt bad for not admitting it to others. I was sad and wanted a solution to be found,” says Ms. Khrysavgi in “K”.

Having now learned to live in the “cloudy world”, she herself did not lose her faith.

“I blindly believed my doctor. That was one of the reasons I didn’t lose my faith. However, I cannot forget that, especially in the last year, my condition has worsened.”

“When they told me that they found a transplant, I froze”

As he tells us, the cornea transplant operation took place on December 8, 2022, that is, a few months ago. The phone call informing her that a donor had been found was made two days ago.

It was a phone call he will never forget. Not because he felt joy.

“When they told me on the phone that they found a transplant, I was numb. I was told that I should immediately give a positive answer and go to the hospital the next day. However, I was never ready for this moment. It’s another thing to know that you want it, and another thing when they call you to immediately say yes. At that time, my husband was by my side. We answered positively, and after a while I called to tell my children. The next day, I will do pre-op and post-op checkups.”

Admission to Papageorgiou hospital took place on December 7th. The next morning, Mr. Ziakas performed a corneal transplant on Mrs. S. Golden Dawn She herself spent the night in the hospital with a bandage over her eyes. He could take them off the next morning.

“I am still grateful to my donor family”

“As soon as I took off the gauze, everything around me was so clean. I looked like this for years. What I longed to be able to see my own faces clearly is now a reality,” Ms notes. Hrisavgi added that she immediately felt the need to know who the person who gave her back her sight was.

“I wanted to know who gave me my light. However, I was told that it would be better if I did not find out about it right away. I decided to listen to them, but that day I was so grateful. Even now, I will be grateful to my donor family. It was like a find for me.”

After Mr. Chrysavga’s transplant, all she had to do was follow her doctor’s instructions to get well.

“At first I visited him regularly, then less often and followed the treatment. For me, my doctor was a little god and my husband was my guardian angel. He was not only my companion when I couldn’t see, he was my travel companion,” concludes Ms. golden dawn

Lack of information

“Life Goal: Raising Transplant Awareness”.

However, Mr. Ziakas in no way feels like a little god.

“The life goal is to draw more attention to transplantation. I think the main problem in our country is that there is not enough information,” says the director of the Cornea Transplant Center at Papageorgiou Hospital in K.

Explaining to us the situation with corneal transplantation, he points out that such transplantations have been carried out in Northern Greece for the last 30 years.

“What has changed is that in recent years we have new methods in the field of corneal transplantation. In particular, until recently, two eyes were taken from one donor and transplanted into two recipients. Now we divide the cornea into two parts, and with one donor we can have four recipients. Therefore, we are talking about both partial and total transplants,” he says, pointing out that the ophthalmological clinic at the Papageorgiou hospital was established in 2018.

However, Mr. Ziakas emphasizes that in our country there are many difficulties associated with the increase in the number of corneal transplants.

“In order to increase the number of transplants, it is necessary to increase the number of donors. Unfortunately, we are one of the last countries in Europe where a cornea is transplanted.

“It’s a shame, because we are talking about a transplant with the fastest recovery. An endometrial transplant patient can go home the next day and return to work within 48 hours. To give you an idea, at Papageorgiou Hospital we had 30 total and 15 partial corneal transplants last year. Our goal is to reach 50-50 like abroad.”

In addition to insufficient information, another reason that keeps us from transplantation is the complexity of the procedure.

“To donate a cornea for transplantation, the consent of all the next of kin of the deceased is required. Even if someone during their lifetime became a donor to the National Transplant Organization, if there is no consent from relatives, the process cannot continue,” says Mr. Ziakas.

The third reason – and a very important one – is that there are not enough transplant coordinators who are involved in the search and distribution of proposed transplants.

“Everywhere I worked abroad, there was a transplant coordinator everywhere. There are only three of them in the whole of Northern Greece,” he said, adding that he hopes that solutions will be found with the new bill of the Ministry of Health.

“We must remember that there are practically no contraindications for corneal transplantation for those who want to become a recipient or donor, as in other categories. The procedure is simple and the chance of the graft being rejected is very low. In addition, surgery in public hospitals is free. The problem I repeat is the lack of information,” concludes Mr. Ziakas.