A man close to death had his life saved at the eleventh hour – by a pair of double D breast implants.
David Bauer, 34, was in urgent need of a lung transplant after his own were swamped by a drug-resistant bacterial infection and began to liquify.
However, the infection was so bad doctors were not able to swap the organs for a donor pair in one move – instead they needed to keep him alive without lungs while the body’s immune system got to work clearing the last of the bacteria.
This posed the problem of how to fill the gaping hole left in his chest – a hole his surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago realised could be padded with a pair of breast implants.
‘Someone who is actively dying and was so sick like David, generally, will have no option of transplant, and they just die,’ said chief thoracic surgeon Ankit Bharat, speaking to CNN.
‘We had to come up with a strategy to do something that we’ve never done before.’
Mr Bauer, a landscaper, had smoked since his early twenties, swapping cigarettes for vaping in 2014.
‘I thought it was the healthier alternative,’ Bauer said. ‘But, in all honesty, I found it more addicting than cigarettes.’
When a case of the flu struck in April, his lungs were unable to cope, and a secondary lung infection took hold.
Arriving at a St Louis hospital, he was quickly put on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) system, which took over the lungs’ job of keeping his blood oxygenated.
‘The day after he arrived, he basically coded. His heart stopped. They’re doing CPR on him. That’s how sick he was,’ said Mr Bharat.
Mr Bauer was both in need of a lung transplant and too sick to undergo the procedure.
It was then the team came up with the pioneering solution, needed because no such things as prosthetic lungs exist and the body could not cope without the pressure provided by the lungs – not least the heart.
‘When the patient turns, it can fall on one side and so forth and kink everything, so we had to create a mechanism to just keep the heart in the centre,’ said Mr Bharat.
They needed something that could be moulded to fit the chest cavity and wouldn’t cause a reaction inside the body. Breast implants fit the bill perfectly, and the procedure could begin.
‘When we opened the chest, it was full of pus, just yellow, nasty smelly things,’ said Mr Bharat.
But within days – rather than weeks, as expected – Mr Bauer’s body cleared the infection and he was ready for a lung transplant.
In an extraordinary turn of luck, the day after his old lungs were removed on May 26, a donor became available. The transplant took place on May 28.
Now, five months on, Mr Bharat said: ‘David’s on track for full recovery, and it’s kind of really amazing for us to see.’
Mr Bauer will spend the next year in Chicago for monitoring, but is looking forward to his new lease of life – and a new nickname.
‘I plan to get a t-shirt made that says “DD Davey” on it and change all my gaming profiles,’ he said.
‘But in all seriousness, I’m so proud to be the first Northwestern Medicine patient to undergo this innovative procedure, and I hope this medical first paves the way for more critically ill patients to receive lung transplants in the near future.’
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