NBC NEWS – As a pulmonologist, Dr. Gary Gibbon never expected to be diagnosed with lung disease himself, much less be in need of a new set of lungs.
“I had no previous medical history of any significance. I was on no medication at all on a regular basis,” Gibbon, of Santa Monica, California, told NBC News.
When he developed a cough and then lost weight, Gibbon got a chest X-ray and CT scan of his lungs. The results were shocking. In spring 2023, Gibbon, who recently turned 69, was told he had advanced stage lung cancer.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. by a long shot, accounting for about 1 in 5 cancer deaths every year, according to the American Cancer Society.
After months of aggressive treatment with chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy Gibbon’s cancer shrunk, but his lungs were sustaining irreversible damage. His doctors determined that Gibbon had exhausted his treatment options.
“I would have to throw in the towel,” Gibbon said. “I would have been on palliative hospice care from July 2023.”
That’s when he remembered a news story he’d seen, one he thought could save his life.
Last year, NBC News reported on a groundbreaking treatment for late-stage lung cancer patients: the first-ever double lung transplants, which were successfully performed on two patients.
When the story aired, Gibbon’s wife, Nola Roller, pulled her husband into their living room to watch it. He had already been diagnosed with lung cancer, but “it didn’t even register with me that this is something we were going to need,” Roller said.
According to conventional treatment, the fact that Gibbon had late-stage lung cancer disqualified him from being a transplant candidate. But in the NBC News story, doctors at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago were doing precisely that …
