Overcoming Cystic Fibrosis

Not too long ago, Heather Beadle was able to go up a mountain range with her father for the first time in the 31 years she's been alive.

That's because, until six years ago, she said, "I was on oxygen 24/7. I couldn't walk five feet without coughing."

Beadle, who has cystic fibrosis, had her lungs fail on her in 2003. She became one of a few people lucky enough to get a successful lung transplant at a Dallas hospital late that year, Southwest Transplant Alliance spokeswoman Pam Silvestri said.

The Transplant

Beadle was diagnosed when she was 4. According to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's website, the disease causes the body to produce thick, sticky mucus that clogs the lungs and interferes with the pancreas' ability to produce several enzymes. Today, a typical CF patient has a life expectancy of 37 years, but many will need lung transplants by their 20s.

That was the case with Beadle. She said her doctors told her that her lung function dropped from 70 to 30 percent the year before the transplant.

"She didn't have the energy to do even the normal things," her husband, Brandon, said.

She moved from Lubbock to Dallas in January of 2003 when she was put on a lung transplant waiting list at St. Paul Medical Center. Brandon stayed in Lubbock to work.

Silvestri said Heather had to wait for a transplant donor to die with undamaged lungs. The lungs then also had to match her in terms of size and blood type.

"Lungs are the very hardest organs to transplant," Silvestri said.

Heather's donor was a young man who also donated his liver to another woman just before Christmas in 2003. Heather's operation lasted eight hours.

Through Another Man's Lungs

One of the first things Heather and Brandon remembered when she woke up from the operation was a major change in her appetite.

"I would not eat hamburgers," she said. "When I woke up, I kept craving Fuddruckers. The donor's mother told me he craved hamburgers ... I think you get part of the donor's soul."

Silvestri said there's a lot of anecdotal cases of people getting tastes for different foods after a transplant and often traces of the donor's DNA can spread to the rest of the body.

She instead suggested her change in appetite had more to do with the steroids and medications they're taking, along with their improved health after a successful transplant.

"Once they feel well again, they want to go out and taste everything," Silvestri said.

Heather said she did run into several problems since the transplant, however. Just after the transplant, she became a diabetic and now uses an insulin pump to keep it in control.

In 2006, she had surgery to drain fluid that had built up in her lungs. She said a complication after that surgery was a series of strokes that temporarily paralyzed half of her body and ended up affecting her memory, causing her to leave her job as a tax consultant. Then last summer, she had a rejection that had to be treated by a photopheresis, which is similar to a dialysis only the blood is treated with drugs that are activated by ultraviolet light rather than filtered.

Still, she and Brandon said they have been able to spend a good amount of time raising a foster child and their three Jack Russell terriers.

"I try to walk them every day," she said.

Her father, Houston resident James Fitzgerald, said he thought both of them were "tougher than boot heels" for being able to handle the CF for this long. And he says this as a man who was in a coma for two months after a plane crash near Ransom Canyon.

"They (coped) better than most people would have," Fitzgerald said.

 >> Heather Beadle was honored at Friday's Odessa Jackalopes game by the Southwest Transplant Alliance with a hockey stick and a shirt autographed by the team during the Jacks' Healthcare Night.