After historic triple transplant, Santa Monica doctor doing well, celebrating new marriage

CHICAGO (KABC) -- It's a medical story that's off the charts. Surgeons have successfully performed a combined lung-liver transplant on a patient who had advanced lung cancer.

And the patient is a doctor himself.

As a pulmonologist, Dr. Gary Gibbon listens to other people's lungs, not usually his own. But today is an exception.

"Sounds beautiful," he said.

A far different sound than a year ago when this Santa Monica physician was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. After undergoing chemo, radiation and immunotherapy at UCLA, Gibbon learned the treatments had led to irreparable damage not only to both his lungs, but to his liver as well.

"I was told that sadly and terribly, there were no other options for me and I should be considering palliative care or hospice care," Gibbon said.

Then, his wife remembered hearing on the news about the Double Lung Replacement program at Northwestern Medicine known as the DREAM program.

"We got him on a plane, a medical flight here, a four hour flight from California to Chicago," said Dr. Satish Nadig, director of the Northwestern Medicine Transplant Center.

Within 12 days of being on the transplant list, two lungs and a liver became available from one donor. Doctors say patients with the most dire conditions are given priority.

"The sicker you are, the higher you are on the list in general. And so Dr. Gibbon was as sick as they come," he said.

After the team procured the organs, Gibbon entered what would become an historic surgery.

"On a scale of 1 to 10 this was off the charts, never been done before," Nadig said.

A first for a patient with active cancer. As anticipated, surgery to remove all the cancerous cells from the chest cavity and his airways and to replace the diseased lungs went well into the night.

"So the question was, how do we keep the liver alive while we completed the double lung transplant part of the procedure?" said Dr. Ankit Bharat with Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute.

The team used a perfusion machine which pumped body temperature blood into the liver to keep it alive for 17 hours. Long enough for surgeons to complete the triple transplant.

"All three of us sort of knew we rewrote the textbooks in medical history at that time," said Nadig..

Six months after the landmark liver and lung procedure, Gibbon is cancer free.

He's celebrating his 69th birthday - and being a newlywed.

The remarkable medical achievements were only made possible thanks to organ donor awareness.

"I'd like to express gratitude for my donor and the family for the gift of life," Gibbon said.

A new life. And a second chance.