When Kate Sutherland struggled to catch her breath after walking down the street at age 15, she knew something was wrong.
Although, she never anticipated the cause was a life-threatening lung condition.
"It was a sensation of being breathless," Kate now in her 30s, recalls of the experience more than half her lifetime ago, in a segment from a recent documentary short from UHN, The Future of Transplant. "I've never experienced drowning, but that's what I imagine drowning on land feels like."
Kate was diagnosed with pulmonary occlusive disease, which is a rare, fatal condition causing pulmonary hypertension. She was told she had a few months to live. The only thing that could save her was a lung transplant but it was unlikely she could survive long enough to receive one.
Enter Dr. Shaf Keshavjee and the team in the Toronto Lung Program within UHN's Ajmera Transplant Centre. They performed a procedure that had never been done before — buying Kate enough time.
"Kate's a very good example of thinking things through," says Dr. Keshvajee, Chief of Innovation at UHN and Director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, the largest in the world, and Kate's surgeon.
"In theory, it made sense to put a tube from the right side of the heart to the left side of the heart so that the heart could pump around those lungs," he explains. "Then the patient should survive that and could be bridged to a transplant for a while that way.
"To this day, there's still people that think: How is that possible?" he says. "And we showed that it is possible. She was the first teenager in the world to receive a Novalung."
Six months after the transplant surgery, Kate was photographed surfing — a shot that earned her the "Surfer Girl" moniker.
"This is all because UHN has pushed the envelope," says Paul Sutherland, Kate's dad.
"This is all because of organ donation. I feel like I won the lottery."
Kate says, when you come to the end of your life, you're not thinking about money, cars or possessions.
"You're really thinking about the people you love," she says. "I have learned that life is precious every day.
"I know it's cliché to say — but truly — every day we wake up is a gift."
