Quoted Text

ROTTERDAM
Donor’s lungs mean more than borrowed time
BY BETHANY BUMP Gazette Reporter

    John Drexler was finally waking up, three and a half days after his surgery. He could hear Maureen’s voice.
    “It’s all over,” said his wife of 35 years. “You’ve been transplanted and everything’s good.”
    When he went to sleep five days earlier, he had no real expectation the lungs would come through in just 24 hours. Last he knew, his doctors and wife were telling him he’d made the transplant list. He would wait. He was on a full face mask and ventilator. He was drowsy and he would talk about a DNR once more with his wife.
    “I never got a sense that that was going to be our last conversation,” Drexler said Friday from his Rotterdam home, nearly a year after he received a healthy pair of lungs. His had been ruined by an advanced case of idiopathic pulmonary fi brosis.
    What happened to Drexler in barely two weeks in April 2011 was a rapidfire succession of life-altering discoveries and reactions. He and his family to this day don’t know if he was just really lucky, or if he was granted four small miracles that allowed him to attend his son’s wedding and spend more time with his grandchildren.
    He saw his doctor on April 14, his 55th birthday. It was his third visit for what he and his doctor no longer suspected to just be bronchitis. Drexler saw a pulmonologist.
    Five days later, he was much worse. He was hospitalized. And three days later the diagnosis was confi rmed and a heavy dose of reality fell like a ton of bricks. The IPF had been caught too late. The only thing standing between the otherwise healthy man and certain
death was a double lung transplant.
    By the time he was flown out of Schenectady to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, he was already on 100 percent oxygen.
    One of the clinic’s hallmarks is its willingness to take challenging cases. And here was Drexler, a man who had unknowingly lived with this disease for years, was fi nally diagnosed and deemed a 93 out of 100 on a scale from “can wait for new lungs” to “my time is running out.”
    “I was labeled emergent,” he said. “I was living on 10 percent of my own lungs and otherwise in reasonably good health. So they took a chance on me.”
    That was the fi rst miracle.
    The first order of business: “Call your insurance company before you get your hopes up too much,” the doctors all said.
    “Cleveland Clinic had to push them, too, and say, ‘We need a medical decision. We can’t wait a week to make a decision. We need a decision now,’” he said.
    Drexler was approved, but now he faced a transportation problem. The air transport that had been approved couldn’t fly that day because of inclement weather. So the clinic got involved again, this time requesting approval to send its own all-weather aircraft from Cleveland to Schenectady and back to Cleveland.
    Drexler was flown out Tuesday night at 8.
    He was tested all day Wednesday. Was he otherwise healthy? What was his likelihood of survival with a transplant?
    He went on the list Thursday night. Miracle two. Twenty-four hours later he would be the recipient of miracle three and not even know it.
    Maureen Drexler recalled, “On Friday, almost 24 hours to when they listed him, the doctor came out and told me that they had lungs for him.” ............................>>>>.......................>>>>............................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01102&AppName=1