2024 News and Stories

Pat McIntosh lives a busy life in Dunkerton, Iowa. She lives on a farm that has been in her husband James’ family for seven generations, growing corn, beans, and hay, and raising beef cows. McIntosh has lived on the farm for 43 years and raises hogs and sheep for show as well.

It's uncommon to need a transplant for even a single part of the body, let alone three. But for John Riehl of Iowa City, receiving cornea, kidney and pancreas transplants not only saved his life but also profoundly enriched it.

Eye Donation Month is observed each November, and this year's theme is "We Can See Clearly Now."

Jennifer Konfrst, who is a professor of public relations at Drake University and has been the Minority Leader in the Iowa House of Representatives since 2021, received an academic scholarship from the Johnston Lions Club during her senior year in high school.

My wife Lori has always been a giving person. She had started this as a teenager doing mission work outside the USA in Mexico at the age of 16. She later went to college as a nursing student at the University of Iowa while joining the Iowa National Guard in 1989 as a Combat Medic receiving her training at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas.

Acanthamoeba keratitis is a rare parasitic eye infection that can damage the cornea and cause blindness. Often, people will contract it from water, while swimming in places like lakes and ponds. According to the Cleveland Clinic, contact lens wearers make up at least 90 percent of the cases.

David Miller loved to hunt and fish. “Some of our best memories were of him and my husband out fishing,” says his sister, Peggy Hember, of Missouri Valley.

When asked to describe her brother John Luallin, Mary Strait uses terms like “wild, wooly, silly, kind, smart and ornery.” Those “are just a few of the words that could be used to describe such a complex man,” Strait says.

Jerry and Connie Inman of Mechanicsville were married for 56 years after meeting on a blind date while they attended the University of Northern Iowa, where both studied education. They shared two children and five grandchildren.

When she was six months old, Stephanie Goese was diagnosed with congenital glaucoma.

Alma Drake is a musician and a sound healer and spends a lot of their time listening with their eyes closed.

When she was in college, Crystal Ellis struggled with a lack of depth perception due to a giant cloudy scar on her right eye.

Bonnie Thomas was “the rock” of the emergency room at UnityPoint Health-Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines.

Although a few of Myrl Holida’s loved ones have been cornea donors, Holida never thought he would be on the other side of the process.

It’s a bright, clear January morning in Sidvokodvothe, Eswatini, approximately 250 miles east of Johannesburg, South Africa. A large group of people have gathered at the tan prescreening building on the Miracle Campus of The Luke Commission, which provides free medical care to some of the kingdom’s most isolated and underserved citizens.