Season to Share: After a double-lung transplant, Maria Sanchez needs life-saving medications
For years, Maria Sanchez’s lungs were in such rough shape just laughing would leave her so desperately short of breath she ran the risk of going unconscious. Enjoying a simple popsicle presented similar challenges. The West Palm Beach resident was suffering the debilitating effects of cystic fibrosis.
In 2019, the disease appeared to have won, sending her into respiratory failure. But Sanchez survived, receiving a double-lung transplant.
Laughing is no longer a threat. Popsicles aren’t dangerous. And she no longer has to endure seemingly endless rounds of breathing treatments or tote around an emergency inhaler.
Though Sanchez’s life has been handed back to her, the transplant didn’t resolve all her challenges - both to her health and to her family’s financial well-being.
Season to Share 2023: Charity drive features families battling consequences of major illness. How you can help.
The 38-year-old must take a bevy of medications to protect her lungs from her body’s own immune system and from the genetic disease that wreaks havoc on her other organs. She also has discovered she is diabetic, battles hospital visit-inducing gout and has developed issues with her digestive system, requiring multiple surgeries.
Now, however, Sanchez is seeing her path forward with fresh eyes.
“Before the transplant, I didn’t think I had much to lose. Now I have a lot to lose, and so it's taking a lot more effort on this side to stay alive,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez is married to a minister. The doctors have advised against her working due to her fragile health, so they live on his one income. The couple say they can barely afford groceries. Meanwhile, thousands of dollars in pharmacy bills loom. She’s allowed to delay repayments, but she worries a day will come when the pharmacy tells her she can’t get the medicine she needs until she makes hefty payments.
And new medical needs continue to surface: The doctor recently told her the gout flare-ups and adrenal fatigue will require her to begin using a motorized wheelchair - a $2,000 investment.
Defying the doctors and the odds
But Sanchez has proven her resilience since she was a child. When she was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that troubles digestion and breathing, doctors told her parents she wouldn’t live past age 7. Her parents moved to the U.S. while she was still a baby to get treatment here. As she grew, doctors continued to forecast her death, maybe not 7, but 14, maybe not 14 but not beyond high school.
All the while she fought, tracking her medications, regulating her symptoms, turning doctor visits into her extracurricular activity. Adulthood arrived and she soldiered on until 2018, when she went into respiratory failure. Instead of celebrating her parent’s anniversary, she went to the ER and stayed for six weeks.
The respiratory failure caused her kidneys and colon to suffer and her blood sugar to skyrocket. When hope arrived in the opportunity to get two new lungs, doctors delivered a warning that she might not survive the procedure.
“Statistically, they tell you that 10% of people die on the table,” Sanchez said. “The odds are stacked up against you.”
But she survived and spent weeks in the hospital re-learning how to breathe and begin a new routine — including a drawer full of medicines. She takes 20 to 30 medications a day, including drugs to prevent her body from rejecting the transplanted lungs.
Sanchez said the pharmacy did not process a grant she received to cover post-transplant medications for 18 months, and that has now become part of her debt.
Through it all, Sanchez says prayer and faith and the support of her husband are sustaining her.
Her faith has been with her since she was in school tracking her vitals and trying to mitigate the coughs. It has seen her through each time her husband, or her faithful dog Daisy Duke, would find her unconscious on the kitchen floor. And it was there through the transplant surgery, when out of delicate caution family treated it as a day for goodbyes.
And now that faith carries her through each day she can still take the medications that keep her alive.
“There's many more things stacked up against us, just the thought of rejection — that it can come on at any time is a sobering thought I live with every single day since transplant. The whole notion of ‘I can have rejection at any point’ — that's every day,” Sanchez said.
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Maria Sanchez’s Wish
Born with cystic fibrosis, Maria Sanchez has spent much of her life at odds with her own lungs. Then, four years ago, they finally gave out. She went into respiratory failure, but her life was saved by a double lung transplant. Her recovery has been difficult and the costs steep. She and her husband are struggling to pay the $4,381.15 she owes her pharmacy to cover the first year-and-a-half of post-transplant medications. Maria also suffers from diabetes, gout and digestive issues that have required multiple surgeries, and now also require she purchase a motorized wheelchair. Sanchez's health prevents her from working and they are supported only through her husband’s single income as a minister. They need help paying off their medical debt and getting a leg up on growing medical bills.
Nominated by: Piper’s Angels
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Stephany Matat is a reporter for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network. She can be reached by email at smatat@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Charity: Double-lung transplant survivor from West Palm needs help
