Double-lung transplant by Northwestern team saves life of Chicagoan hit by COVID-19, cancer

Arthur “Art” Gillespie thought he had run out of options when doctors told him that both of his lungs were badly damaged — one by COVID-19 and the other by cancer.

After beating COVID-19 and undergoing chemotherapy, the fitness buff could barely speak a full sentence without losing his breath last September. Doing chores and getting dressed became strenuous. The pressure in the 56-year-old’s lungs was also likely contributing to eventual heart failure.

“I felt like I was plateauing with my [recovery] efforts. Then I felt a decline. That's when I sought a second opinion,” said Gillespie, a 30-year law enforcement veteran, most recently as a captain with the University of Chicago Police Department.

The longtime Beverly resident was connected with doctors at Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, who in January successfully performed lung surgery. Doctors said it was the first-ever double-lung transplant at Northwestern on a set of lungs that had been independently damaged by COVID-19 and cancer.

The surgery was performed by Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute's Double Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Care Program. The DREAM program has touted a number of successful double-lung surgeries in recent years. But Gillespie's case is also a sign of COVID-19's less-apparent long-term effects on people who are diagnosed with another illness.

Although lung transplants are rarely needed for damage from COVID-19, doctors are starting to see patients with lung fibrosis, or hardening of the tissue, due to moderate or serious cases of coronavirus, according to Rade Tomic, medical director of the lung transplant program.

The scarring of lung tissue is worse in patients who are recovering from COVID-19 and get another respiratory infection such as RSV or influenza "because it compounds the original damage that COVID caused," he said.

“Four years after the start of the pandemic, COVID still has an impact on patients, but in a different way,” Tomic said in a news release.

Gillespie said his diagnosis and recovery have been an “emotional roller coaster.”

In the early days of the pandemic, COVID-19 led to the deaths of his father, uncle and a cousin.

He caught the virus himself when he and his dad visited the uncle at a nursing facility in February 2020. He was hospitalized for 12 days. During that time, doctors examining X-rays of his lungs identified Stage 1 lung cancer.

He underwent chemotherapy and had two-thirds of his right lung removed.

For the next three years, he did physical therapy and worked out at his home gym, but his body continued getting weaker. He needed supplemental oxygen daily and was hospitalized while waiting on a list for the transplant that he got on Jan. 6.

Four months after the lung transplant, he's still recovering — though he’s unsure if he’ll be able to return to working in law enforcement.

“I can breathe much more fully,” he said. “That was the biggest thing for me. ... From having gone from that to news of the cancer diagnosis, to a point where it was treatable, I recognize that that was a blessing.”