A former Aiken resident’s long battle against cystic fibrosis isn’t over, but a recent surgical procedure has given her the opportunity for a longer life.
Jen Eisenmann received at double-lung transplant Dec. 14.
“We’re not counting down the days until she’s going to die anymore,” her husband, Pete Eisenmann, said on Monday. “We’re counting the days forward that she is going to live.”
And, so far, everything is going well.
“She is a good patient, and she’s very excited about having her new lungs,” Pete said. “She is walking about three times a day in the hospital, and today, she had a swallow test that showed her esophagus is doing the right things, which means she can start to eat and drink rather than just get IV (intravenous) fluids.”
Pete used to work in property management for Meybohm Realtors, and Jen was an accounting assistant at Dogwood Stable.
In 2015, the Eisenmanns left Aiken and moved to North Carolina because Jen would be able to get the more extensive care that she needed at the University of North Carolina Cystic Fibrosis and Pulmonary Diseases Research and Treatment Center.
“It has been an arduous process,” Pete said. “The way I describe it is that Jen was climbing the sheer face of El Capitan. Jen would climb a little bit and climb a little bit, and then she would just hold on.”
In July, Jen went on the waiting list for a transplant.
Three times, she heard the good news that a suitable set of lungs might have been found.
Three times she heard the devastating news that, no, it wasn’t going to work out.
“It was discouraging,” Pete said. “We knew more than a handful of people with cystic fibrosis who had died waiting on lungs, and she had only about 200 days to live. She was on 7 liters of oxygen a day, so she was getting oxygen constantly.”
Then, at around 11 a.m. on Dec. 13, Jen received another phone call about the possibility of a transplant. The Eisenmanns, however, didn’t immediately leave their home in Durham and rush to the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill.
“From having been through those three dry runs before, we knew it was going to be hours before they were ready because there is a whole process they go through,” Pete said. “They have to check the donor and do other things.”
The Eisenmanns arrived at the Medical Center about 1 p.m.
Then at 1 a.m. on Dec. 14, “they rolled Jen into surgery,” Pete said.
The transplant took less than five hours.
“They put her into the intensive care unit, which she is still in now, and I got to see her a little bit after 8 o’clock in the morning,” Pete said. “By 1 o’clock in the afternoon, she was sitting up in a chair. And by 9 o’clock the next morning, she was taking her first walk in the hallway.”
Jen might be able to leave the Medical Center between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
On Jan. 1, she will celebrate her 46th birthday.
According to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the median predicted survival age for a person with the disease is close to 40.
“A transplant doesn’t cure cystic fibrosis,” Pete said. “That’s still in every cell of Jen’s body because it’s genetic. But the transplant survival rate after one year is 80 percent, and the survival rate after five years is 50 percent. There are some people that have lived for 15 or 20 years, so we’ve got some more time.”
