Melissa Benoit’s lungs had been weakened by cystic fibrosis and ravaged by bacterial infections for three years. Then, last February, a bout of swine flu sent her spiraling toward death.
By April, she gasped for air with every breath. She had coughing fits so intense her ribs fractured. Her lungs were as hard as a football and filled with pus, mucous and blood. Benoit could barely walk to the bathroom, let alone play with her 2-year-old daughter, Olivia.
The bacterial infection had become resistant to the strongest antibiotics, and sepsis was shutting down her organs one by one, according to her doctors at Toronto General Hospital.
She was dying — and so were her chances of receiving a lung transplant that could save her life: Too sick, she was dropped from the transplant list.
Several times on that Sunday in late April, doctors brought family members in to say goodbye to the then-32-year-old mother. “We had reached the end of the road,” said Shaf Keshavjee, one of three surgeons attending Benoit. “There was nothing we could do to keep her alive.”
Quietly, though, her team of doctors had been mulling a procedure that could extend her life but had never been tried.
They could remove both lungs and let machines do the work. If everything went right, the devices could keep her alive until donor lungs became available.
The machines they wanted to use had served only as a crutch for people with lung disease. The doctors didn’t know whether they could work long-term, or whether Benoit would succumb to infection or other complications from the tubes running in and out of her body. At that point, they didn’t even know when donor lungs might become available.
What they did know was that if they did nothing, Benoit would be dead by morning. So they went to the family and explained the risky procedure. “The family understood the risks and explained that Melissa had often told them she would want to try everything possible to live for her husband, Chris, and 2-year-old daughter, Olivia,” the hospital announced later.
Chris Benoit said in that news release that “things were so bad for so long, we needed something to go right, and this new procedure was the first piece of good news in a long time. We needed this chance.”
In a nine-hour procedure in late April, doctors removed Melissa Benoit’s lungs, and she was placed on “the most sophisticated life support possible for her heart and lungs,” according to the hospital.
A small, portable artificial lung known as a Novalung was connected to her heart, oxygenating her blood and removing carbon dioxide. Another device helped her heart circulate the oxygen-rich blood throughout her body.
Doctors put Benoit in a medically induced coma and rolled her into intensive care. Less than a week later, the transplant was a success.
She still faces hurdles as a lung transplant recipient, doctors said. But she is now increasingly able to keep up with her daughter.