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It’s a waiting game for others |
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Written by Dave Mabell
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Friday, December 19 2008, 9:33 PM |
If you’re playing in an orchestra, conducting choirs or teaching high school, you need a good set of lungs.
That’s why former Lethbridge resident David Smith is hoping for a transplant soon. He’s now living in Edmonton, recently retired from the public school system there — and preparing his United Church choir for busy Christmas Eve services.
But Smith, a life-long musician, has been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. There’s no cure, he says, and it gets progressively worse.
Doctors recently approved him for lung transplant surgery, however, after verifying he’s in good health otherwise. Now he’s added a pre-transplant exercise program to his already-busy schedule.
“I’m not waiting around for a phone call,” Smith says. “I know it’s going to be awhile.”
So rehearsing his large choir has top priority right now.
“We’ll have four services on Christmas Eve, and our choir is involved in two of them.”
Smith, who moved to Edmonton in 1963, credits his parents for his interest in music. Both sang in the choir at the then new McKillop United in Lethbridge, he points out.
“Mom and dad also ran the Kiwanis Music Festival,” and supported their son’s interest in learning the French horn — even though there was no one to teach him in Lethbridge.
“I took the CPR ‘dayliner’ to Calgary twice a month,” for lessons there. Before long, he’d become one of the founding members of the Lethbridge Symphony Orchestra.
After moving to Edmonton to attend university, Smith became a teacher and administrator in the schools’ music program.
“And then, two years ago, I just collapsed,” he says. “I’ve been on oxygen ever since.”
Doctors found he was healthy otherwise and placed his name on the transplant waiting list.
“The average wait is 12 to 18 months,” but Smith learned their are many factors involved in matching a patient with a set of lungs.
“It’s hard to say how long it could be,” so he’s keeping busy meanwhile.
That process would be much faster, Smith adds, if Alberta followed some other jurisdictions in making organ donation easier. While Albertans have to sign a form and let their next-of-kin know that they wish their vital organs to be donated, there’s a “reverse onus” approach in some other places — allowing doctors to put healthy organs to good use after a fatal accident or another sudden death.
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