Doubly blessed: Mt. Sterling patient is OSU's first lung-kidney transplant

The first call came on April 27, and he was so excited that he drove all the way to the hospital by himself. Never mind that a man with two new organs wouldn't be driving home any time soon.

"It ended up being a dry run," said John "Scott" Hamilton.

Maybe that was a good thing. He headed back to Mount Sterling and waited for the phone to ring again. It didn't take long.

Hamilton, 53, started feeling bad about six years ago. Mowing the lawn left him panting. He would get winded sweeping the floor. He chalked it up to being overweight and lazy until a bout with pneumonia in 2011.

"I got one of those infamous phone calls that you never want to get," he said.

Pulmonary fibrosis, the doctors ultimately told him. His lungs weren't working the way they should. No one could really say why, only that he wasn't going to live long with scarred lungs. Three years, maybe five.

They started him on medication, and as his body failed him, he leaned more on his wife, Teri. A machine helped him breathe. He retired from his job selling truck parts on the last day of 2014 and spent the next eight days in the hospital.

He did what he needed to get on the transplant list. He lost 100 pounds and began going to pulmonary rehab three times a week. But it turned out that Hamilton would need more than a lung — his kidneys, weakened by time and the medications treating his lung disease, were on the verge of failing as well.

A lung-kidney transplant is a rare thing. There had been only 37 since 1995, and none in Ohio, according to data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. This would be a first for Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center.

"The majority of people who require lung transplants are not expected to have kidney disease," said Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer for the United Network for Organ Sharing. "I think transplant programs are cautious — combining lung and kidney ups the complexity."

But a new lung wasn't going to help Hamilton much if his kidneys were toast. He ended up on transplant lists for both organs, and two days after that first false alarm, he got a late-night call from Wexner Medical Center Lung Transplant Coordinator Tonya Yurjevic.

His wife drove him this time.

It was a bittersweet trip. He knew that his best day was someone else's worst. His new organs were coming from a single donor.

"The gift I was given, it wasn't given for free," he said. "As many people were rooting for me on this side, there were people grieving on the other side."

Surgery took about 10 hours. Cardiothoracic surgeon Bryan Whitson transplanted the lung through an incision on Hamilton's side, and when that went well, Dr. Ashraf El-Hinnawi went in with the kidney though the front.

All organ transplants are important, the surgeons said, but this one was decidedly more complex, requiring backup plans should the surgeries not go as expected. Kidneys only last as long as 72 hours, and they quickly degrade even in that time.

Doctors were anxious. "There were a lot of moving parts," Whitson said.

But it worked. Hamilton awoke to a new life. He could breathe without a machine. He could do a lap around the hospital halls without wondering if he might die.

"I just got a new path laid out in front of me," he said.

So did the transplant surgeons. With a successful lung-kidney transplant in the books, El-Hinnawi said he foresees teams being more comfortable doing another and expanding to more complicated surgeries as well.

This week, Hamilton sat in a chair beside his hospital bed and told his doctors that he wouldn't be here without them. He said he's looking forward to fishing with his grandsons, and maybe in time he can sweep the floors and do the dishes and give poor Teri a break.

After all, no one's telling him he's going to die soon anymore. Not in three years or five or any.

"There is no expiration date now," he said.

lkurtzman@dispatch.com

@LoriKurtzman