Five lives restored in day of lung transplants

CHICAGO — One patient is a judge. Another is a 21-year-old whose medical odyssey was chronicled in a documentary. A third is a teacher.

They are among five people fortunate to have received restored lives through lung transplants, during a record-breaking day for the procedure in Illinois.

Over about 25 hours on May 8 and 9, teams at Loyola University Medical Center performed a staggering five lung transplants, including a double-lung transplant on one woman and the second transplant in three years for another patient. No other medical center in Illinois has performed that many lung transplants in such a short time.

Five is the average number of lung transplants performed every day in the U.S., according to statistics from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The surgeries occurred as a result of the spontaneous availability of the organs and Loyola’s capacity to handle that many transplants, said Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, Loyola’s surgical director of lung transplantation, who performed two of the five surgeries.

“This was unique, just with the sheer volume and the number of surgeons involved,” Schwartz said last week. He called it “a real monumental effort, but Loyola’s open 24/7, so they’re used to working through the night.”

Schwartz’s rough estimate was that the schedules of 31 doctors, nurses and other specialists — many who were not on call — had to be coordinated to perform the surgeries. Four of those surgeries occurred simultaneously in two operating rooms.

“When you see these patients in clinic and they’re on oxygen and they’re gasping, just conversationally short of breath,” Schwartz said, “that’s when you appreciate just how desperate these people are for a chance to have a normal life again. For us, it’s easy. An offer comes (and) you feel compelled to give them any chance that they may have to improve their quality of life.”

That sentiment ratchets up the adrenaline and suppresses fatigue, said Schwartz, who went home for three hours of sleep between his surgeries.

Julie D’Agostino, 21, of Elmhurst, was one of the two patients Schwartz operated on. Suffering from cystic fibrosis, a thick, life-threatening buildup of mucous in the lungs, D’Agostino received her first lung transplant in 2011 at Loyola. Her ordeal was told in a 40-minute documentary, Miracle on South Street.

One year after that surgery, her body began rejecting the lungs and she was placed on a waiting list. Experts said her immune system would reject 99 percent of donor lungs.

But a lung match was found two weeks ago, and she had surgery on May 9 to replace one of her failing lungs. On Wednesday, doctors said she was doing well. D’Agostino was encouraged because, she said, she felt much better after this surgery than after her first procedure.

“I feel good, really, really good,” said D’Agostino, seated in her hospital room. “It feels like me, like that’s how things were supposed to be and that’s how lungs should work. They seem normal to me again.”

In addition to D’Agostino, the other patients were Robert Senander, 68, a Social Security administrative-law judge from Oak Brook, Ill., who received a single lung; Karen Emerich, 56, a seventh-grade special-education teacher from New Carlisle, Ind., who received a double-lung transplant; and Linda Kern, 65, of Princeton, Ill., and Springfield resident Roderick Beck, 67, executive director of the Township Officials of Illinois Risk Management Association, both of whom eceived single lungs from donors.