Sweet Breath of Life : Louisiana Woman Is First Lung Transplant Patient at Sharp Memorial

As 38-year-old Pat May’s lung condition worsened to the point where she had to stop for a breather during a 10-foot walk from her house to the car, her 3-year-old son Donovan only wanted the answer to one question.

“When is Mama getting her new lung so she can play?” the little boy asked his father, Don May.

The answer came last Saturday, when the mother of three from Baton Rouge, La., became the first lung recipient at Sharp Memorial Hospital in Kearny Mesa. The operation to replace her right lung took four hours.

“It feels good to breathe and not be gasping for air,” May said in an interview from her hospital bed Wednesday.

A smoker for about 14 years, May suffers from emphysema and a genetic enzyme deficiency called Alpha 1 anti-trypsin, a condition that results in a shortness of breath and can be fatal. May, who said she was diagnosed with the enzyme deficiency in 1986 when she was pregnant with Donovan, lost her 35-year-old brother to the same disease two years ago.

The enzyme that May lacks is a protein that protects the lungs from being eaten away by other chemicals present in the body. The effects of the missing enzyme were heightened by May’s years of smoking and she was afflicted with emphysema in her 30s, rather than later in life as most smokers are, said Dr. Clinton Lawrence, a pulmonologist and medical director of the Heart and Lung Transplant Center at Sharp.

Emphysema destroys many of the lung’s air sacs, making it impossible for oxygen to get into the blood, Lawrence said.

“So you just keep getting more short of breath,” he said.

Without the transplant, May had about a year to live.

“I was just getting worse and worse,” May said. “I’m not living, I’m existing, so I decided I was going to have the transplant.”

The team of doctors from the hospital’s heart and lung transplant center has been ready to do a transplant since February, waiting for a donor for any of the three women on the hospital’s waiting list.

The transplant team, of three doctors and two anesthesiologists, was put in place last July after Dr. Mark Grattan came to Sharp from Stanford University Medical Center, where he had been doing transplant surgery.

In the San Diego area, Sharp and UC San Diego Medical Center are the only two hospitals that do heart, heart-lung and lung transplants. Since February 1990, UCSD has done one heart-lung transplant, one single-lung transplant and seven heart transplants, said Becky Robert, the hospital’s transplant coordinator.

At Sharp, 73 patients have had heart transplants since October, 1985.

May found her way from Baton Rouge to San Diego when Lawrence, the doctor who first evaluated her for the transplant at a hospital in Houston, relocated to Sharp last month and added May’s name to the hospital’s list of two other women. One has waited for a lung since March, the other for a heart and two lungs since January.

May, whose name was on the donor list for only about a month, got lucky when the donor, found at a local hospital last week, proved to match her blood type and the size lung she needed, Lawrence said. Doctors refused to release any information about the donor.

The number of suitable lung donors is low because the lungs are the first organ to deteriorate after brain death.

Sharp doctors are evaluating five people who might be added to their list to wait for lung donors.

Worldwide, 237 single-lung transplants have been done since 1985; 111 of those were performed last year with a survival rate in the first year of about 70%, said Dr. Michael Kaye, director of the registry of the International Society for Heart Transplantation. Kaye heads up the registry from his UCSD office.

The numbers of double-lung transplants are much smaller, with only 52 done since 1987, with three of those done last year, Kaye said. Too few of those operations have been performed to calculate a survival rate.

The next few days are critical for May to see if her body accepts the new organ and wards off infection.

“Then things calm down, and the lung eventually gets better,” Lawrence said.

Doctors said they are not worried about May’s new lung being affected by her unhealthy one because emphysema is not a communicable disease. But, over the years, her genetic enzyme deficiency might have some effect on the new lung.

With her new lung functioning at full capacity and her other lung still affected by the emphysema, doctors say May can expect to live a relatively normal life.

A normal life is all that May is after. She wants to take walks with her children and be able to read books to her 3-year-old without running out of breath.

“Whatever time I’ve got left, at least I’ll be breathing,” May said. “Nobody knows what it’s like not to be able to breathe.”