DONATE LIFE HOLLYWOOD - "BOSTON MED"

NH Woman's Transplant Story Told On ABC Show Woman Says She Was Close To Death Before Transplant


NEWBURY, N.H. -- The new ABC show "Boston Med" premiering Thursday night features the story of a New Hampshire woman who needed a lung transplant.

Mary Ann White lives with her husband in Newbury. She said that when she and her husband rushed to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston on Palm Sunday in 2009, they were greeted by a team of transplant doctors and a television crew.

"All of a sudden, this surgeon walks in and behind him comes this man with a camera and another young woman who has papers for me to sign," White said. "She's explaining at the same time, and I'm thinking, 'I really need to get my lung. I really do.'"

White was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, or scarring of the lungs, in 2004, but when her shortness of breath worsened, her doctor biopsied her left lung. Tests showed that unless she got a transplant, she would die. White said she was alone when she got the news and had to wait for her husband, Ed, to return from the store. "He came home and I just melted in his arms," she said. "I started crying and I looked at him and said, 'I have the bad kind.'"

White was immediately put on the transplant list. Newbury has no cell service, so White said she stayed in the house, unwilling to leave and miss the call that a lung was available.

"It was a small price to pay," she said.

As her condition worsened, White was "hot-listed" -- a medical term meaning doctors would take any lung, even if it wasn't perfect, because the patient might die any day. After months of waiting, White said, she was losing hope. "When I went to bed, I scooted up the stairs on my bottom, and that's with oxygen," she said. "I felt like I could not breathe. And I told Ed, 'I don't think I'll make it to the morning.'"

The next morning, White got the call she had been praying for. "My doctor, Dr. Anne Fullbrigi, called and said, 'We have a lung,'" White said. "And I said, 'What?' And she said, 'That's not the reaction I usually get.'" During the two-hour drive to Boston, White called her four children to let them know. One of her twin daughters was on a date, but she and the date dropped everything to get to the hospital. The producers of "Boston Med" used the couple's storyline in the show.

"They did ask us several times, "So, this is really your third date?' And you're laughing, but it's true," said Angelo Kapos, of Concord, who was on the date with White's daughter. "I certainly wouldn't go back and change anything. It's been a wonderful ride. I have learned so much from this family."

White's daughter, Mary Kanavos, said the event taught her a lot about Kapos. "It makes me know without a doubt at all that he will stand by me and support me and get through anything with me, and that's amazing," she said.

Kanavos and Kapos are still together and are vocal proponents of organ donation. Kapos even offers an incentive program at his Bellisimo Salon & Day Spa in Concord in which customers can show a donor designation and receive a free haircut. Kanavos said she is still overcome with emotion when talking about her mother's transplant. "The fact that she was given this gift and we were given this gift, I'm tremendously grateful for," she said. "'Thank you' doesn't seem sufficient, but thank you."

White has 16 bottles for pills she must take daily, but she said they're a minor inconvenience for knowing she'll still be around to spend her days with her husband. Ed White said he's not sure how he feels about all the television exposure, but he is absolutely certain about the importance of organ donation. "You should probably do that right now. You should become a donor," he said. "You never know what might happen. There might be an accident, and someone could really use those organs."

It has been more than a year since the transplant, and despite a small setback when a blood clot in her new lung required another surgery, Mary Ann White said she has never felt better.

Her new lung is 14 years younger than she is. She calls the lung Phil because she said it fills her with hope and life and oxygen.