In 2025, Iowa Lions Eye Bank will celebrate its 70th anniversary. To celebrate, we are posting occasional features about people who have either had an impact, or been impacted by, the eye bank over the years.
Bob Rush of Cedar Rapids began having issues with his vision while playing intramural softball as an undergraduate at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
“I saw a doctor or two there in Chicago, and they said, well, you’ve got some of the best doctors in the country there in Iowa City, so that turned out to be a draw for me to come to law school at the University of Iowa.”
Rush was diagnosed with keratoconus, a condition where the cornea, the clear, dome-shaped part of the eye, thins and eventually bulges outward into a cone shape, causing blurred vision and light sensitivity.
In Iowa City, Rush consulted with Dr. Alson Braley, the first executive director of Iowa Lions Eye Bank, who told Rush his prognosis was tough to predict.
“He said, ‘well, you might not need surgery for years, or it may come on rather quickly,’” Rush says.
However, after his first semester of law school at University of Iowa in 1969, Rush says he had lost sight in his left eye, so he received a cornea transplant. A couple of months later, though, Rush developed a staph infection in that eye, which he says was maybe the most painful thing he has ever been through. A second cornea transplant rid the eye of the infection, but that second transplant ultimately failed as well.
Dr. Braley performed a third transplant on Rush’s left eye, just before Rush left Iowa to start his career in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Rush says while he was working in Washington, Dr. Braley referred him to a colleague of his, who performed the first and only cornea transplant on Rush’s right eye.
Rush returned to Iowa in 1976 and served two terms in the Iowa State Senate before starting his own law firm, Rush and Nicholson, in Cedar Rapids. During this time, he had to have a cornea transplant on the left eye once again, which this time was performed by Dr. Jay Kratchmer, Dr. Braley’s successor at Iowa Lions Eye Bank.
“Braley was just such a warm-hearted man,” Rush recalls. “You’d want him to be your uncle or your grandfather or something. He was just that kindly figure. I had great confidence with him and Dr. Kratchmer as well.”
Since 1977, Rush has been returning to University of Iowa Health Care for periodic checkups and hasn’t needed another transplant.
“Anybody at Iowa City, in the cornea department, I’ve never wavered, never doubted the skillset of these guys,” Rush says.
