One year ago, Lynn Stanczak received an “amazing gift” — a new pair of lungs.
The Waukegan resident underwent a lung transplant last July after suffering from bronchiolitis obliteran, a very rare disease that attacks the lungs’ airways.
Stanczak first developed what she thought was an upper respiratory infection and sought treatment from her doctor in 2009. She received medicine but never recovered.
“From that Sunday, I had the shortness of breath, I was never able to breathe normally again,” Stanczak said. “It got worse and worse and worse.”
As the disease progressed, Stanczak could barely speak more than a few words at a time and could not stop coughing. She had to leave her job at Abbott Nutrition and struggled to make plans to see friends and family because she never knew how she would feel.
“The five years before the transplant, my quality of life was just really deteriorating,” Stanczak said. “So it was getting where I couldn’t walk very far, I couldn’t breathe very well if it was cold out or humid out or many of those kinds of things that interfere with day-to-day life.”
In 2011, a local pulmonologist referred Stanczak to the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sangeeta Bhorade, who then evaluated her for a transplant. Stanczak followed Bhorade when she moved to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which started a lung transplant program last year.
Once Stanczak was on the list to receive a pair of lungs, she knew she would eventually receive them but did not know when. It was the morning of July 23 when Stanczak received a call that the hospital had her new lungs.
“It was 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, and my husband was getting ready for work, and I started screaming, ‘I got lungs! Oh my god!'” Stanczak said. “As you can imagine, every kind of emotion was going through me: delighted, excited, sad of course for the person that lost his life and his family going through such a sad time.”
Dr. Malcolm DeCamp, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said there is typically a six-hour window to transfer the lungs, so Stanczak underwent surgery later that day and became Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s second lung transplant patient.
The ease of breathing once the surgery was complete amazed Stanczak. Her surgeon, Dr. Ankit Bharat, surgical director of lung transplants at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, recalled the happiness that followed each of Stanczak words.
“So from that standpoint, I just felt so great and just so optimistic at living life again and regaining, taking charge of my own life and not having to worry logistically about everything,” Stanczak said.
Bharat compared receiving a lung transplant to buying a brand new car. It will drive very well if its owner takes care of it, but it will break down if he or she does not.
He called Stanczak’s recovery “spectacular” and credits it to her motivation and dedication.
“The fact she wants to do this, she wants to have a better life,” Bharat said. “The dedication she demonstrated was absolutely critical for her coming this far. And she’ll continue to go far.”
Regaining her energy and ability to breathe has allowed Stanczak to get her life back, too.
She said her husband Bill, family and friends have been “just amazing” at helping her around the house and providing her with endless encouragement.
Since Stanczak’s surgery, Northwestern Memorial Hospital has continued to give patients new lungs. Since the program began last year, it has served 15 patients including Stanczak.
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DeCamp hopes to eventually serve about 40 patients a year at the hospital. Worldwide, he said, numbers for lung transplants are increasing as the medical community is being aggressive about managing potential lung donors.
“The biggest problem is we’re limited by donors,” DeCamp said. “And by increasing awareness of the possibility of doing this operation and increasing the public’s awareness of the wonderful gift of organ donation is going to allow us to do even more.”
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