Dennis Deer woke from surgery in utter disbelief that he was breathing normally.
He’d been on supplemental oxygen for two years, and “I didn’t know what it was like not to have something on my face,” says Deer, 51, a Chicago-area politician and psychologist.
“I immediately said, ‘Where is my oxygen?’ And my wife said to me, ‘Well, you don’t need the oxygen anymore,'” Deer recalls.
Deer wasn’t buying his wife’s reassurance. “I said, ‘Give me my oximeter.’ So I put the oximeter on my finger. It was 99%. And I was like, ‘Wow.'”
Deer, a Cook County commissioner, is one of two patients who recently received a rare double-lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.
Deer and the other patient, Yahaira Vega, both have a rare genetic condition where the organs in the chest and abdomen develop in a reversed, or mirrored image, from their normal position.
This was the first time these sorts of transplant surgeries had been performed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to doctors.
“It’s an important milestone for us because it’s rare enough to do one lung transplant for this condition, forget about doing two in the span of one month within the same health system,” says Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine.
Mirror images
The condition, situs inversus, made both patients’ lung transplants an “interesting dilemma,” Bharat said during a media briefing, which also happened to be a shared birthday for Deer and Bharat.
“The inside of the body is essentially a mirror image of itself, so the right lung is where the left one should be and the left lung is on the right side and the heart is flipped,” Bharat said. “So when we take the old lungs out of an individual, we have to tailor the new normal lungs to fit into this chest cavity, which is essentially a mirror image of itself.”
Surgeons had to perform on-the-fly modifications to place and attach the