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In November of 2003, The Maine Campus published a two-part series detailing two brothers’ fight to end a life-threatening degenerative disease. Both would have to undergo risky and complicated surgeries in order to make this dream a reality. One would receive a gift that would change the course of his life, the other would give his love, support and so much more – a lung.
Aaron Sterling was diagnosed with the degenerative disease cystic fibrosis when he was three months old. CF is a disease that makes the mucous produced in one’s lungs extremely sticky and dense, causing severe breathing problems. Most people die of complications caused by CF before they reach the age of 30.
So after waiting for more than a year for a donated set of lungs, Aaron and his family decided to go through with a living donor program. Two people would each donate a lobe of their lungs, which would be transplanted into Aaron and, because of the lung’s extreme elasticity, they would essentially function as a new set of lungs once inside him. Aaron’s brother, Tyler, said he didn’t have to think twice about donating a lobe to his brother. The other donor came seemingly out of nowhere, offering to donate the other lobe to Aaron.
Marc Crouch, a fraternity brother of John Sterling, Tyler and Aaron’s father, made the call from Richmond, Va., saying he would step up and undergo a risky surgery to donate a lung to a man he had met only a few times before.
Tyler and Aaron still marvel at Couch’s remarkable generosity.
“I’d do it again,” Tyler said. “It’s different because he’s my brother. There’s no burden of responsibility. For Marc to hear about it and just go do something like that, that’s more amazing than anything else.”
The three men were admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital in mid-December, where they would be operated on for a combined total of about 26 hours. The brothers’ parents watched as their two sons and family friend were taken into surgery on Dec. 17, 2003.
“Everyone was there,” Aaron said. “My parents, my godparents, Tyler had some friends there … I’m sure they were all on pins and needles. Seeing both of their sons wheeling into surgery at the same time, I can’t even fathom. It must have been extremely hard for them, I’m sure it was.”
Aaron’s girlfriend, Kellie Pelletier, was also at Massachusetts General when the three men were taken into surgery, and waited with Debra and John Sterling while the surgeries were performed.
“It was kind of scary … We weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Pelletier said.
Pelletier first met Aaron two-and-a-half years ago, while she was working at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, and Aaron was admitted as a patient. Pelletier, who is a native of Lewiston and is now a first-year pre-med major at UMaine, said Aaron was always in good spirits, even while in the hospital.
Crouch was the first to be released from surgery. There were no complications and he was expected to make a complete recovery. A few more hours passed and Tyler was released from surgery, alive and well after a frightening complication. Tyler’s heart actually stopped beating for about four and a half minutes toward the end of the surgery.
“They shocked me once and [my heart] didn’t start,” Tyler said. “They shocked me again and it started back up. It happens about one in every 200 surgeries. It’s not normal, definitely unexpected.”
After Tyler’s heart was back in working order, his operation was completed successfully.
But Aaron would not be released into the surgical intensive care unit for about another five and a half hours. The hours and days immediately following both Aaron and Tyler’s surgery, are “a little hazy,” according to the brothers. Both men were medicated on a significant level of antibiotics and painkillers to help ease the transition for their recovering bodies.
Aaron was incubated in a positive pressure room, isolated from air exchange between his room and the rest of the hospital. He was placed on paralytic drugs to keep him immobile from the neck down so his body would not reject the tube in his trachea and lungs.
After regaining much of his memory and cognitive skills, Aaron first wanted to know what day it was. Then he asked how Tyler and Marc were doing, meanwhile isolated and speaking to his brother through a pane of glass.
“The first conversation I had with him I wanted to know how he was doing,” Aaron said. “I wanted to make sure he was doing OK, feeling OK, wasn’t in a whole lot of pain and that he was comfortable. That was at the top of my list.”
“He was concerned for our well being from the start,” Tyler said. “For him it was a survival thing. For Marc and I it was something we wanted to do.”
The Sterlings celebrated Christmas before Aaron and Tyler were admitted into the hospital, knowing that Christmas Day would come while the brothers were still in recovery.
“My dad showed me the contents of my stocking through the pane of glass,” Aaron said. “[The hospital] was very careful about what was brought into my room.”
Aaron had already given himself a Christmas gift, by fulfilling a goal some may have deemed unrealistic. Aaron managed to prove to doctors he was breathing well enough to be taken off his ventilator only six days after surgery.
“He went into that transplant with the goal to be off the ventilator by Christmas, and he was,” Pelletier said. “He broke some records down there I guess. [The doctors] said he was the healthiest patient transplant they had ever seen.”
“As far as his recovery, he blew everyone out of the water,” said Tyler. “Most people are on the ventilator for three weeks. He was on it for six days.”
Aaron said he was happy to be free of the ventilator, which can be restricting.
“It’s like breathing through a very big straw,” Aaron said. “It’s tough because normally your muscles take care of your breathing. When you have a tube down your throat, you have to consciously think ‘breath in, breath out.’”
Aaron is already enjoying the improved health his new pair of lungs have afforded him.
“It’s nice to have a change of pace … My legs get tired of the exercise before my lungs do now,” Aaron said. “All my life there’s always been that rasping, fluttering sound when I breathe. And having lived with that all my life, now it’s like ‘Where’s the whooshing sound?’ There’s no rasping, no fluttering anymore.”
For Aaron, who hopes to return to Maine by Friday and to the Bangor area by the end of March, coming home will mean finally being able to do things with his brother they were not able to do before.
“I can walk a decent distance now,” Aaron said. “I’ll be able to play intramural sports, I can go to the gym with my brother. If he goes on a run, I can go with him.”
“We’ll be able to do the things we’ve always talked about,” Pelletier said. “Go camping, go for walks and I can’t wait to go ice skating again.”
Aaron must stay in Portland for the next few weeks so that he is close enough to Massachusetts General for checkups or should a complication occur. Aaron’s regular post-surgical checkups include chest X-rays, blood tests and pulmonary function tests.
While Aaron plans to re-enroll at UMaine in the fall of 2004, Tyler is back in classes and functioning nearly at his normal level, with little to remind him of his surgery, save some occasional discomfort and an eight-inch scar on his upper right back.
“I was off all my medications a week after school started,” Tyler said. “The pain really isn’t all that bad.”
Aaron is also looking forward to not being surrounded by oxygen tanks every day.
“If I’m going to be gone for six hours, I don’t have to worry about having two spare tanks and wonder what time I’ll have to come back,” Aaron said. “I don’t have to deal with that shit anymore. If it’s 2 a.m. and one of my friends is having a rough night and needs someone to talk to, I just go. I don’t have to be tethered.”
But Tyler said there is one thing he will miss about the oxygen tubes strung throughout the apartment the brother’s share.
“It was nice,” Tyler said. “If you wanted to find him around the apartment you just kind of tugged on his cord.”
Bangor Daily News