Toronto doctors removed young Ontario mother's diseased lungs to buy her time for lung transplant
A woman who underwent surgery to have her lungs removed was kept alive artificially for six days until she regained enough strength to receive donor lungs, doctors at Toronto General Hospital said, calling the life-saving effort a world-first success.
Melissa Benoit, 33, was born with cystic fibrosis — a genetic disease that can cause phlegm buildup in the lungs and affect the digestive system. Last April, the Burlington, Ont., resident had a bout with influenza that required her to receive oxygen and then go into intensive care.
"They pulled me back from the dead," Benoit said, also thanking her family at a hospital news conference on Wednesday.
She encouraged organ donation, saying it gave her a second chance to be a mom, daughter and niece.
"Foremost I have to thank my donor and my donor's family. Without them, whatever procedure the physicians would have performed would have been useless."
While risky, taking out her lungs removed the source of her sepsis problem, said Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, director of TGH's lung transplant program.
"It was her only option," Keshavjee said. "For the first time ever, we had a patient in our intensive care unit with no lungs. In fact, she technically was on an artificial lung, an artificial heart and an artificial kidney for six days."
On a ventilator and in an induced coma, the mother of a three-year-old daughter had been unaware of how close she had come to dying or what doctors had done to save her life.
Before the transplant, the medical team put Benoit on two machines:
A woman who underwent surgery to have her lungs removed was kept alive artificially for six days until she regained enough strength to receive donor lungs, doctors at Toronto General Hospital said, calling the life-saving effort a world-first success.
Melissa Benoit, 33, was born with cystic fibrosis — a genetic disease that can cause phlegm buildup in the lungs and affect the digestive system. Last April, the Burlington, Ont., resident had a bout with influenza that required her to receive oxygen and then go into intensive care.
"They pulled me back from the dead," Benoit said, also thanking her family at a hospital news conference on Wednesday.
She encouraged organ donation, saying it gave her a second chance to be a mom, daughter and niece.
"Foremost I have to thank my donor and my donor's family. Without them, whatever procedure the physicians would have performed would have been useless."
While risky, taking out her lungs removed the source of her sepsis problem, said Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, director of TGH's lung transplant program.
"It was her only option," Keshavjee said. "For the first time ever, we had a patient in our intensive care unit with no lungs. In fact, she technically was on an artificial lung, an artificial heart and an artificial kidney for six days."
On a ventilator and in an induced coma, the mother of a three-year-old daughter had been unaware of how close she had come to dying or what doctors had done to save her life.
Before the transplant, the medical team put Benoit on two machines:
- A Novalung to take the place of the lungs in infusing blood with oxygen while removing carbon dioxide.
- Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, to helped her heart pump blood through her body.
When she was first told she had lived without lungs, Benoit, a nurse, "thought it was a piece of science fiction."
"I did not believe my mom or my husband, the people that I trust the most that I had had a lung transplantation and I lived for six days on life support with an empty chest cavity," she said in an interview.
Her muscles essentially became paralyzed from lack of use. As part of her recovery, Benoit had to relearn how to hold her head up, sit, move her hands, sit, stand and then walk.
Her husband, Christopher Benoit, said the family had come to accept her continuous coughing from cystic fibrosis as something in the background. Now when she coughs, "that's strange," he said.
Burlington woman spent 6 days without lungs thanks to new, life-saving procedure - Health - CBC News
