Oscar winner breathes life into new set of lungs
Oscar-winning filmmaker Alison Snowden is back home and working after receiving a new set of lungs, installed after hers were destroyed by a mysterious illness.
In the process, she was placed in an induced coma, hooked up to a machine that acted as mechanical lungs outside her body and then won big when a set of suitable lungs became available just a week after she fought her way onto the transplant list.
Snowden is among 479 people whose lives were saved by an organ donation in B.C. in 2017, a new record fuelled by a stunning threeyear rise in deceased donors. She was one of 52 lung-transplant recipients, up from 25 just five years ago and just one in 2002.
“In the end they said it was ARP, acute respiratory pneumonitis, which I gather is what they call it when they can’t find a cause,” Snowden said. “I caught a virus that just wouldn’t go away and that led to an autoimmune response that attacked my lungs.”
Her decline was so rapid that doctors placed Alison in an induced coma for a month, “to buy time,” while doctors continued to search for answers.
While she was in a coma, her husband David Fine got word that Alison was too weak to receive new lungs and that she would probably not survive. Then her intensivecare physician, Gordon Finlayson, came up with a solution, both radical and groundbreaking. She would be fitted with tubes the size of a garden hose connected to ECMO, a machine that oxygenated her blood in place of her now-useless lungs, a first at VGH for someone not yet offered a transplant.
“She was essentially in free-fall,” said Dr. John Yee, medical director of the B.C. Lung Transplant Program.
Before Snowden could get on the transplant waiting list, she would need to prove to doctors she was strong enough to survive the operation. While connected to ECMO, she performed physiotherapy with the goal of being able to lift her legs and arms off the bed, the minimum threshold for getting on the transplant list. “I videotaped her on my iPhone lifting her leg to show it to the transplant doctors,” said Fine, Snowden’s co-Oscar winner for the animated short, Bob’s Birthday. It worked.
“When she was put on the list, things happened very quickly, because Alison’s life depended on getting lungs,” he said.
On Snowden’s birthday, April 3, after a week on the list, a suitable pair of lungs became available. Fine and their daughter Lily rushed to the hospital at midnight and just three hours later — at 3 a.m. — the operation was underway.
A typical donor can provide one heart, two lungs, two kidneys, a liver and sometimes more, said Yee.
The boom in successful transplants is the result of several factors, including a successful public education campaign aimed at convincing people to sign up as organ donors and educating ICU and emergency-room doctors and nurses about how to approach the families of potential donors.
“These families are often in crisis where mom or dad or an offspring has had a devastating neurologic injury and they are not going to survive,” said Yee. “In the midst of tragedy — whether an accident or a drug overdose — some good can come from that.”
Last year, about 20 per cent of organ donors — 23 people — tested positive for the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which has virtually replaced the city’s heroin supply and fuelled a huge increase in overdose deaths. About 1,200 people died of overdoses last year in B.C.