Woman completes road race after lung transplant

Achievement in athletics is relative. Consider Castro Valley’s Heidi Tegner, who may have turned in one of the most incredible 384th-place finishes in road-racing history.

Um, 384th place? Right. With her sister Amber and a half-dozen friends running with her, that’s where Tegner, 24, finished in the recent 5K Eden Medical Center Run to the Lake. She had to fight back tears of joy when she completed her quest.

At what position she finished hardly mattered, though she did wind up outpacing 126 runners. That she ran the race at all was enough.

One day short of a year earlier, Tegner underwent 10 hours of surgery at Stanford Hospital, receiving a double lung transplant after her battle with cystic fibrosis had reached an acute stage. She had 23 percent breathing capacity in her lungs at the time and required round-the-clock oxygen support.

“I had a tank I would have to take with me wherever I went,” she said. “I had trouble climbing the stairs. I’d have to stop halfway and catch my breath before I could climb the rest.”

Tegner never thought she would run again, let alone participate in a 5K. But after her remarkable recovery from surgery — her lung capacity is at 100 percent — she’s able to set real-life goals, and one of them was to honor her anonymous teenage donor by running in the event.

“Originally, just my sister and a bunch of her friends were going to run in honor of my donor,” she said. “They actually trained for it. But three days before, I just decided to do it, too.”Earlier in the year, Tegner had started preparatory training for the biennial Transplant Games in Pittsburgh, Pa., and though she missed that event because of a physical setback and other commitments, she felt she was in shape to make the 5K attempt.

The day of the race, she admitted to a slight case of panic.

“I was thinking, ‘How am I ever going to complete this? There’s no way,’” she said.

Ten years ago, it probably would have been unthinkable. The first successful double lung transplant wasn’t performed until 1986. Even now, it’s a rare, risky surgery with many postoperative concerns. According to the American Lung Association, only about 1,000 are performed every year, and about 15 percent involve cystic fibrosis patients.

Read the full story at InsideBayArea.com

Carl Seward has been writing a regular article of every day heroes for his regional paper in Northern California.  He suggested that this was a good story for Champoli to share.   You can find all of Carl’s articles in his online archive.

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