Transplant recipient wants to help others like herself

Shoreline Times | Robert C. Pollack

MADISON – Deirdre Barry lay on an operating table at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, her heart racing, knowing that if things went well in the next nine hours, she would wake up with a new set of lungs.

And knowing too that if she hadn’t agreed to this double lung transplant – one she had refused just a year earlier – she would almost certainly die. For Deirdre was born with cystic fibrosis, an inherited, chronic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system, clogs the lungs and pancreas with mucous and leads to lung infections that are all too often fatal.

Now, at 4 a.m. on Christmas Eve of 2001, just before she slipped into an anesthetic-induced coma, her mind wandered backward in time to when it all began.

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