Transplants don’t stop runner.
Shorewood — Run your own race. We say that, but sometimes it doesn’t stick, does it? We run our races and check our times and hold ourselves to high standards, or compare ourselves to races in the past (or the runners around us) and sometimes we forget the big picture.
So we need a reminder: each race is different for every runner.
Admittedly, the runner in Jesse Pagels, the competitor, finds his race pace a little tough to accept these days, because he was once a blur, running 6-minute miles on his way to completing 10 marathons.
But the cancer survivor in him, and the organ donor recipient, knows that he is now running with his sister’s bone marrow. And with another man’s lungs.
“Just keep going,” said Pagels. “Each day. Every day. That’s how I’ve always taken it.”
Breathing was never a problem for Pagels before. He was a trumpet player, first as a music major at Northwestern University (class of 1998), then as a member of the Wichita, Kan., and Kalamazoo, Mich., symphony orchestras.
When he wasn’t a musician, he was a distance runner. He ran the Chicago Marathon on a dare in college, and did so well he figured he should come back and try it again after a little training.
He did, and even qualified for the Boston Marathon, and then he ran the Twin Cities Marathon in 2002 in his personal best time of 2 hours 41 minutes and 51 seconds.
It was when he moved back to Chicago in 2003 and was preparing for another marathon that he started having trouble.
“I was setting 5K PRs at 15:32. I was going for sub 2:40 in the marathon,” said Pagels. “All of a sudden, I can’t run.”
After two or three blocks, he was short of breath. As a freelance musician in Chicago, 27 years old and healthy, and the son of a doctor, he wondered, was it allergies? Pollution? Walking pneumonia?
He ran the Park Forest Scenic 10 on Labor Day that year and after the first mile, “I was dying.”
He had leukemia, and within hours of the diagnosis he was getting chemotherapy treatment, one month on, then off. Yet he continued running on the off-months.
In April of 2004 he received a bone-marrow transplant from his sister Rebecca that gave him a new immune system.
In the spring of 2005 he started running again. He even ran the Park Forest Scenic 10 in 1:20. The finish line was like no other.
“That was where everything kind of came out,” said Pagels. “I remember finishing and I burst into tears.”
For a while, things were good.
Then he started having trouble running again. A chest X-ray and then lung biopsy showed he had graft-versus-host disease. Pagels’ new immune system from the bone-marrow transplant was attacking his lungs.
He had moved to Milwaukee for his wife’s job by this time and was put back on the immunosuppressant drugs and a steroid to slow the progression of the disease, but his lung function was compromised and getting worse.
He could no longer play the trumpet and his running days dwindled.
By 2011, the stay-at-home dad was hauling around his infant daughter with one arm and the oxygen tank to help him breathe with the other.
He’d walk on a treadmill at 2 mph for a half-hour. He couldn’t walk up stairs. The cold Wisconsin air in the winter made breathing difficult.
“My attitude was just keep going, something maybe I just took from running,” Pagels said. “Every day I would get up, and I would keep going.”
Pagels had to find a hospital that would perform a double lung transplant and then, unfortunately, wait for a donor.
He said two Midwest hospitals didn’t accept him as an organ candidate because of his cancer history. But the University of Minnesota Hospital saw him for weeklong comprehensive testing and evaluations in April of 2012.
More than a year later, on Aug. 12, 2013, he got the call. Minnesota had donor lungs, from a young man, that’s all Pagels knows about him. Jesse went from putting his daughter Hannah down for a nap to jumping on an airplane an hour later for Minneapolis.
The eight-hour surgery required an incision from armpit to armpit. They cracked open his sternum. Marshall Hertz was Pagels’ pulmonologist at University of Minnesota Hospital. Pagels was in good hands. The first lung transplant was in 1981 and the first one in Minnesota was in 1986 – and Hertz was there.
“There’s something about that surgery that, no matter how strong you were before, it takes everything out of you,” said Pagels. “I remember barely being able to do one stair.”
Now? He’s running again. Five days a week, three to six miles at a time, with one day of cross training. His posttransplant 5K PR was 38:30 at the Ann Arbor Turkey Trot. The time doesn’t matter. He will turn 40 in a month. His wife, an attorney, remains at his side, just as she has always been.
It’s remarkable. His doctor supports his love for running and activity (only mud runs are discouraged because of the risk of infection). He just wants to make sure the expectations are not too high.
“I often tell lung transplant patients about Brett Favre,” said Hertz. “If Brett Favre could still do what he used to do, he’d still be playing football.”
Wanting to help others, Pagels started the Cream City 5K, which will be April 23 in Greenfield Park, with the help of the Road Runners Club of America. The run will support organ and tissue donation.
He said that any profit will be donated to the Wisconsin Donor Network, the organ procurement organization run by the Blood Center of Wisconsin.
“The need is enormous,” said Hertz. “When you hear there are 200,000 people on the waiting list — even that is low. If we put all the people who really could use a new organ on the waiting list, it would be millions. We have to be very selective about the people who can be considered for any kind of organ transplant because the supply of organs is so low.”
Donors should not only check the box on their driver’s license but also let their family know their wishes. Someone saved Jesse’s life.
Run your own race. Sometimes that means a fast time for yourself. Sometimes, it means that you still can run.
For more information, go to www.creamcity5k.org
Lori Nickel writes about health and fitness for the average person. You can read more in her Chin Up blog at jsonline.com/blogs/chinup.