I stumbled across this article in a blog posting for the Mississippi Hospital Association’s “Hospitals and Hospital Employees in the News Around The State”…
Forty-five years ago, on June 11, 1963, Dr. James D. Hardy performed the first lung transplant ever…
Dr. Martin Dalton Jr (pictured here), now the dean of the School of Medicine at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, completed his general and thoracic surgery residencies at University of Mississippi Medical Center under Dr. Hardy… There he would assist Dr. Hardy in the first lung transplant in 1963…
Although Dalton said he is unsure why Hardy decided to concentrate on lung transplantation, an announcement he remembered his mentor make in 1962 turned prophetic within a year.
“He said . . . ‘cautious attempts to achieve permanent survival of homologous lung transplants is morally justified at the present time.’” Dalton said. “Dr. Hardy thought it could be done and should be done, and he made a moral case for it.”
Like many firsts, the first lung transplant was not long-lived, but it showed that it could be done… The patient survived for 18 days, and succumbed to malnutrition and renal failure – they believe he would have lived longer, if not for those conditions. At autopsy, there was no infection, no evidence of rejection and the transplanted lung was “grossly normal”… It proved that lung transplantation was technically feasible…
“This experience opened the way for further human lung transplants,” Dalton said. “It attracted the curiosity of thoracic surgeons and future transplant surgeons that this was something that could be done and should be done.”
Over the next 20 years, however, only 40 lung transplants were reported. In 1982, cyclosporine, a potent immunosuppressive medication Dalton called a “miracle drug,” became widely available, and the following year, the first long-term survivor of a human lung transplant lived for more than two years. Successful lung transplants began to become much more common.
We’ve gone from performing 40 lung transplants between 1963 and 1983, to a few hundred a year in the United States in the early 90s, to about 1,400 lung transpants each year for the past few years…
Who would have thunk that 45 years later, I would have benefited so much from this work?
This was me in 1963 – also 45 years ago… I was happy, though maybe not as healthy as I looked. (Laura loves the diaper pants…)
In 10 years Mom & Dad & I would learn that I have cystic fibrosis and might not have that long to live – that I might not live past my teens… In 34 years they would watch me, on oxygen, struggling at the end of my rope. In 37 years they would watch something an amazing man pioneered… And in 39 years I would learn of the beautiful girl who let me hang around on this planet a little longer – a beautiful girl who threw me a little more rope…
Who would have known that this would be me today?!?!
Thank you Dr. Hardy, Dr. Dalton, Dr. Addington, Dr. Garrity, Dr. Bhorade & Dr. Hinkamp – and everyone who came between all of you. And thank you Kari... I’m really diggin’ this breathin’ stuff…
Has anyone else noticed that my posts usually become all about me?!? (Or at least all about Kari…)
