At the age of 21, this Social Work student released her organs and life due to a rare disease. She is one of the 1,002 people who received lung transplants at La Fe, one of the seven centers in Spain that perform this intervention. This is his story
At 21 years old you are thinking about what you are thinking. Hopefully in studies, in having some money to go out and travel with friends, in the weekend party, in the last crush… Júlia had to think about other things. An exhaustion that was getting worse, an unexpected income in the UCI, a wheelchair, a oxygen machine and a zero code launched from the La Fe Hospital in Valencia, the highest national alert for those who need an organ. This is the story of Júlia and her lung transplant, one of the 1,000 that have already been carried out in the center of Valencia, the only one in C. Valenciana that does this technique and one of the seven that does it in all of Spain.
The summary, which saturates anyone who reads it, covers barely a year of the short life of This Social Work student that now, months after the intervention, she admits that her twenty-something concerns were little less than banal and that, if she had touched, I was at peace to die. “In the end, life doesn’t owe you anything either, right? She gives you things and you decide how to take them,” she says. And her He decided to take it as a key to overcoming. With two lungs.
Those thoughts came to him when he was at the most critical moment. Lying on the bed of La Fe, with some lungs that no longer allowed him to breathe and dreaming that the next helicopter that arrived would bring him new ones. “I had no idea what a code 0 was. They explained it to me and every time we heard the helicopter we imagined that it was coming and it was for me,” she recalls.
“I had no idea what a code 0 was. They explained it to me and every time we heard the helicopter we imagined that they were coming and they were for me”
Twice he prepared to go down to the operating room and she was composed and with her braids done – “a ritual that she had” -. She went to the third. “When they took me on the stretcher and I stopped seeing my parents around the corner, I thought I was very lucky to have had them. but that I was not going to die. I was going to see them again.” And so it was, after six hours of surgery.
From having a hard time climbing stairs to a wheelchair
That is the end of the story but the beginning was not easy either. “It all started with Erasmus. One day we were hiking. I had done it all my life but I had a hard time climbing a mountain. I’m eating poorly, I told myself”, reminisce. On the return to Valencia, the fatigue increased. “It was difficult for me to walk up the three floors to my house despite the fact that I have always exercised”, but it never crossed his mind that a rare disease (pulmonary hypertension as well as the worst type) was undermining his life.
July arrived, the festival left. “And she couldn’t even dance. I thought she was the covid because she couldn’t stop coughing.” From there to the emergency room of Doctor Peset where she went directly to the ICU and the pulmonologists saw that she was not covid but this pathology that left her at the gates of the transplant. He left in a wheelchair, connected to oxygen and trusting that the medication was enough but it was not.
“Every month it got worse, I needed more oxygen and soon they told me I was going for a transplant.” His father next to him, livid. “You always fear what you don’t know, don’t you? This transplant just it has been going on for 30 years and I asked about life expectancy and if I was going to die. They explained to me thatI could live many years and that I could have a future and I wanted to have a future”.
“In the end, life doesn’t owe you anything either, right? It gives you things and you decide how to take them”
Got on a waiting list there are usually between 25 and 30 people knowing that in one average of four months could breathe again on her own but her condition deteriorated rapidly. She got code 0. It was 10 days, yes, ups and downs.
A thousand lung transplants in La Fe
Because there were previous opportunities, two, but not everything is so easy in a lung transplant. “Not only are the compatibility criteria as such, they are also takes into account the age of the donor and the recipient and also the size”Explain Gabriel Sales Head of Thoracic Surgery at La Fe Hospital in Valencia. Sales directs the team of surgeons who at La Fe make this possible miracle of breath who is left without him, a average of six transplants per month and rising.
Now, the center has just sexceed the milestone of 1,000 lung transplants after making them for 31 years. They started in 1992 and since then they have been able to reach that thousand people, among whom there have been 120 minors, also children who are less than five years old. In these last surgeries, more complicated, are only done in La Fe and in another hospital in Spain. Hebron Valley.
Julia does not give the profile of what a lung transplant recipient is. At least for the collective imagination since you always think of an older person, usually a man and who has been a smoker. “Yes, that’s the profile. A man of about 55 years of age,” acknowledges Sales, but only because seven out of ten transplants are done because of emphysema or Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) or due to fibrosis. Seven out of ten, but one left ample remaining 30% into which they enter, in contrast, young people because of problems like Júlia’s or congenital diseases.
In La Fe they now make a average of six transplants of this type per month, with better results than at the beginning. “This year we already have 26 events,” the specialist recaps. The number continues to grow thanks to the fact that every day more organs are obtained after incorporating the donation technique in cardiac arrest (asystole) and not just from people who had reached brain death. “We operate more but the waiting list is stable at 25-30 people. It is not going down because more people are now going for transplants,” explains Sales. For example, there have been extreme covid patients who have had lung transplants.
“I will take care of what they have given me”
Júlia is now part of that milestone of 1,000, being very aware of what it means. She proudly shows the scar that runs along the lower part of her chest. He says that every day he caresses it and give thanks to that donor and to that family who said yes to the donation “even in their worst moments. Wherever they are, I thank them every day. I will take care of what they have given me”.
For now, he is thinking of getting a tattoo that involves the scar, hoping that the postoperative period will pass quickly and he will be able to “get on a bus” or go back to university, take advantage of that extra time that someone has given you: “I already wanted to travel, but now I want it more. I want to do something big with my life.” With two (new) lungs.