With Wings and a Prayer, Family’s Lifesaving Dream Comes True

Gwendolyn Johnson always dreamed of coming to California, but she never expected she would have to make the trip to save her daughter’s life.

Eighteen-year-old Deborah Johnson didn’t know it, but she had blood clots in her lungs. She could barely walk a short distance because of breathing difficulties.

For five months, Chicago doctors told her she had pneumonia. Finally, last November, Dr. Robert Cohen, a pulmonary specialist in Cook County discovered she had chronic pulmonary emboli, or blood clots in the lung’s arteries.

“The blood clots were causing the blood flow to be obstructed, which would have caused her to die within a year of heart failure, “ Cohen said.

Unfortunately, Chicago had no physician who could perform the surgery. Cohen and the Johnsons chose Dr. Pat Daily in San Diego because he pioneered the procedure.

The specialized operation is performed in only a few places in the United States, and the best hospital for it is Sharp Memorial in San Diego, Cohen said.

Gwendolyn Johnson, who works as a lunch room attendant at a Chicago high school, could not afford to send her daughter to California on her salary. Cohen and his staff contacted two organizations and received $2,700 in donations for the trip. Insurance will pay the medical costs.

The Johnsons flew to San Diego Jan. 8, the first airplane ride for both mother and daughter. They left for home early Thursday.

“I always dreamed of coming to California,” said Gwendolyn Johnson, a single mother of three, “but I didn’t dream I would come this way.”

A chapter of the Starlight Foundation helped make the trip possible. Cohen called the foundation, an international organization that grants wishes to chronically, critically and terminally ill patients from the ages of 2 1/2 to 18.

The group paid for the Johnsons’ travel expenses, food and hotel, and added spending money for a total of $1,700. The Cook County Hospital auxiliary gave the family another $1,000.

According to Daily, director of cardiovascular surgery at Sharp, Deborah’s surgery, which took place Jan. 12, is rare, mainly because the clots usually clear up on their own.

“In 1984, there were only 85 of these operations that were reportedly done in the world,” Daily said. “There have been 175 performed in San Diego so far, but it is hard to tell how many have been done worldwide today.”

The operation went smoothly, he said, and took about five hours. Deborah can expect to be “doing what she wants” in six to eight weeks.

“I feel great, but I was scared during the operation,” the 12th-grader said. “I thought I was going to wake up during the operation. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. They told me it would take about 10 to 12 hours.”

“It was rough,” her mother said. “But we made it through by prayer and reading the Bible.”

“I’m glad everything is over with,” she said. “I can get my life going again. I want to become a nurse. Since I was 7, I wanted to be a nurse.”

Gwendolyn Johnson beamed with pride as she looked across the room at her daughter.

“That’s my best friend,” she said.