Family seeks living lung donors
BY JANET LAVELLE, UNION-TRIBUNE

Suzanne Pohlman hopes two people can give her the ultimate gift before she retires in August as executive director of Interfaith Community Services, a social service agency she founded in Escondido 32 years ago.

Doctors tell Pohlman that her adult daughter, Katrina Bichoff-Howell, is in need of a double lung transplant immediately. Bichoff-Howell has been awaiting a cadaver lung transplant for nearly two years without finding a match. The desperate family is now seeking two people each willing to donate a lobe from their lungs.

Bichoff-Howell is in the final stages of cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that causes thick, sticky mucus build-up in the lungs and digestive tract, often leading to an early death.

She has been hospitalized for much of the last three months, and will celebrate her 41st birthday Sunday at Thornton Hospital in La Jolla. She was put on a ventilator Thursday, which now makes her eligible for a transplant for only two weeks.

Donors must be identified by Monday, said Jason Coker, director of development at Interfaith. The nonprofit agency serves about 36,000 people annually, providing help with housing, counseling, job services, and substance abuse.

“One donor has passed through several qualifying hurdles but has yet to be finalized,” Coker said.

Howell graduated from Carlsbad High School and San Francisco State University, said her sister Tamara Pohlman Chow. Howell’s husband, Philip, also has cystic fibrosis and received a double-lung transplant in 2005. The couple met at a cystic fibrosis camp and live in Oceanside.

A living donor must be at least 5 feet, 9 inches tall, age 18-55, with type A or O blood.

Living-lung donations are rare, with just 155 done on adults since they were first performed in 1990, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. USC University Hospital in Los Angeles has done the majority of the transplants and a team there would do the procedure on Bichoff-Howell.

Anyone interested in getting information about being a possible donor is asked to call John Pohlman, (760) 579-8275. The family has set up a Facebook page called “Katie needs a lung donor. NOW.”