Here are some Lung Transplant Patient Stories from Barnabas
Health.
The veteran teacher calls the day she got her double-lung transplant
her second birth, because the surgery gave her
a new lease on life. “For
me, it’s definitely life-changing,” Nina said. “I
say July 3rd is my first birthday, and August 5th is my second
birthday, a gift from God. Really, I'm getting
chills just saying that.”
Lung Transplant Program at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center has performed
12 life-saving lung transplants since the program began in 2008. It
is the only lung transplant program to receive approval from the New
Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.
Before her bilateral lung surgery this summer, Nina’s health
had deteriorated rapidly. She had to stop working as a fourth-grade
teacher in Jersey City and was at home on oxygen therapy. An act most
people take for granted, breathing, became progressively more difficult.
All that has changed now, she happily reported.
“It just kept getting harder and harder to breath, and just to
function,” said Nina 53. “You don’t know how it is
until you can’t breathe. Just the simple task of breathing and
what is does, it’s just amazing.”
The Lung Transplant Program at Newark Beth Israel offers New Jersey
residents access to lung transplantation for the treatment of severe,
non-malignant pulmonary disease.
About eight years ago Nina was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis
and asthma. She used an inhaler and took medication, and led a pretty
normal life for several years. Her condition worsened during the last
three years, and rapidly deteriorated last fall. “From September
on, I was really struggling,” she said. In January, Nina pulled
into the parking lot of the elementary school, but she was too ill to
go in. “I said I can’t breath, what am I doing here?” she
recalled. “I really need to go to the hospital. So I called in
sick and I rode right back home and I said enough is enough. I can’t
do it anymore.”
In February, Nina was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary
Disease (COPD) with emphysema and doctors told
her she needed a lung transplant. While she waited for a donor, everyday
chores required special arrangements.
“I would do my shopping, but I’d have to take the little
tank with me,” she said. “I’d have to limit myself
to like two hours. When I’d visit my mother, I'd have to arrange
for a bigger tank to spend the day there.”
That has all changed now for Nina. Within 24 hours after her
surgery, she was up and walking around the hospital unit. She spent
20 days at Newark Beth Israel, and when she came home she was able
to discard her oxygen tanks and begin to resume the activities she
had performed before her illness.
“The best thing is I’m regaining my normalcy of
life. I don't have the oxygen. I don’t have all the inhalers
and all the other medicine. I traded that for
the anti-rejection medicines, which is no trade-off at all for me.”
Her daughter and son even saw a difference in their mother's
appearance after her lung transplants. “My children
said, ‘Ma, look at your skin,'” Nina said. “Because
it was pasty, it was sunken in a little bit before, and now it’s
full. It has color. And Nina’s mother and father
are elated. “My parents were devastated before. But now, forget
it. They love seeing me, and they love seeing
me happy like this.”
Nearly three months after her surgery,
Nina is taking special care to eat right and
exercise, too.
She has been able to resume, and pump up, her cardio
exercise regimen, using a treadmill that she said used to just collect
dust. “I was always pretty healthy,” Nina said. “I
would run, I would walk. But now I get a good workout on the treadmill.”
After nearly 30 years teaching, Nina decided to submit her papers to
retire and is mulling what to do next. She would like to travel,
or pursue interests such as cooking, painting, or perhaps starting
an Internet business. “I got a second chance at life,” she
said. “I’m in a good place right now and I know I’m
just going to keep going on.”
She returns to Newark Beth Israel each week for post-operative testing,
and often sees other lung-transplant recipients. “Monday mornings,
a lot of us have the appointments, so we run into each other, in the
waiting room, or on the stairs,” she said. “And every chance
we get, we trade our stories.”
Nina raved about the “great team” of physicians and nurses
in the Lung Transplant Program, who gave her normal life back to her. “They
are very passionate, they’re dedicated to their field. I used
to be afraid of hospitals,” she said. “But now I see it
as a positive. I don't mind going because I know I’ll be taken
care of.”
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