A New Lease On Life

WAITSBURG - Jana Moser embraced her grandson once more.

The four-year-old Daniel came up to nuzzle and kiss her again. It seems like he can't get enough of her affection and she can't get enough of his.

It wasn't just because Moser and her husband, John, live in Ellensburg and it had been a while since they have visited their son, the Rev. Bret Moser, his wife Bethany, and their five children in Waitsburg. Rather, it's almost as though grandmother and grandson never had the experience of close physical contact before.

That's true in a way. Just a few months ago, 66-year-old Jana Moser was wearing an oxygen mask at all times and Daniel doesn't even remember kissing her without it.

Just a few months ago, his relatively young grandmother was essentially bedridden with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (the most common lung disease of which emphysema, for instance, is a type) and no one in the family knew exactly how much longer she would be around. Her sister Trina, who was seven years older, died from pulmonary fibrosis in late 2009.

Now, there's little question Moser may well live long enough to kiss Daniel at his college graduation. Thanks to the only transplant program in the Northwest at the University of Washington Medical Center, Moser has received the lungs of a 23-year-old female organ donor and feels like she has a new lease on life.

"I wanted to be around for my grandchildren," Moser said on her first visit to Waitsburg since her surgery last year. "It makes me feel 20 years younger."

Moser would not have lived much longer without the organ donation. The disease her old lungs had make them small and rigid, no longer able to absorb and process oxygen effectively. She could go nowhere without an oxygen bottle in tow.

Double lung transplants are still relatively uncommon, but their success rate has increased in recent years. Just one specialist, Dr. Michael Mulligan, 47, performs the risky but life-saving procedure on patients twice a week at the University of Washington Medical Center.

The first successful double lung transplant was performed barely 25 years ago by Dr. Joel Cooper in Toronto, Canada. The body's rejection of the new lungs was one of the biggest challenges overcome only with the development of the heartlung machine and better immunosuppressive drugs.

In the past several years, the success rate has gone from 50 percent to nearly 90 percent. The successful double lung transplant for another area woman, 27-yearold Alicia Foss of Kennewick, has been documented in the Tri-Cities Herald. Foss got her surgery on April 14 and was scheduled to leave the hospital just before this weekend.

Moser, whose parents smoked indoors and raised their girls near an Ellensburg apple orchard sprayed with near-equally suspect pesticides, was on the waiting list for donated lungs and the $500,000 surgery for three years (the procedure was covered by Medicare and Medicaid). Patients can't live further than two hours from Seattle because once the donor's lungs are available the window for successful surgery closes quickly.

Mulligan flies a Lear Jet down to the medical center where the donor's body is stored (often in California) and "harvests" the lungs himself because the careful, precise way in which that needs to be done can make or break the surgery back in Seattle.

The Mosers got the call on Memorial Day a year ago.

After the two-and-a-halfhour surgery came a very tough recovery for Moser, who came to a point of wanting to give up. The family held their breath when physicians had a hard keeping Moser's heart rate under control. After she left the hospital, she had to be rushed back because she needed an operation on her colon which had apparently been damaged during the transplant, her son said.

Bret Moser, the pastor at Waitsburg's Presbyterian Church, described the sixmonth rehabilitation process as "a marathon," starting with two months in the intensive care unit, a month in rehab and a month in a hospital

apartment in Seattle with visiting physical therapists. His mother was taking 23 different drugs. It would take her husband the better part of his waking hours just to keep up the care routine.

But in the end, needless to say, it was all worthwhile, the Moser family said. Her rapid decline has turned into a rapid revival.

Jana Moser, who once owned a quilting store in Ellensburg, has resumed her favorite sewing pastime now that her hands no longer shake from all the drugs - something her son thought he would never see again.

Meanwhile, the family is also planning a summer gathering at a cottage in Long Beach on the Washington coast so she can once again lay eyes on the ocean - the first time in a decade.

"It's amazing to see mom without a nose piece," said Bret Moser, who thinks of his mother's transformation as nothing short of miraculous. "It brings tears to our eyes. We thank God every day. She's thriving instead of just existing."