‘Am I alive or am I dreaming?’ A former Northwestern Medicine nurse got a new lease on life from former employer with new liver and lung transplant, the health system’s first. ‘It was a tear-jerker.’

Patricio Collera considers Aug. 25, 2022, his new birthday. That’s the day the Vernon Hills resident received a new lease on life with a liver and lung transplant thanks to the skills of physicians at Northwestern Medicine.

Collera’s combined lung-liver transplant was the first one successfully performed by the health system. An operation that had close to two dozen medical professionals in on the planning and execution, it took a combined total of six to seven hours to complete and a series of dry runs and practices to make sure any problematic scenario was planned for.

“I feel like someone could have easily made a ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ episode with all the fun and action that was happening,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine. He removed Collera’s right lung and put in the new one. Dr. Satish Nadig, director of Northwestern’s Comprehensive Transplant Center, an abdominal transplant surgeon and the chief of organ transplantation in the Department of Surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, performed the liver transplant.

“The most complex abdominal organ transplant is a liver transplant,” Nadig said. “Coupled with a very complex operation, a lung transplant, it’s not done very successfully in the country.

“But Nadig asked the questions, for this particular operation: ‘Can we sew a lung in and make a lung work? Yes. Can we sew a liver in and make a liver work? Yes. We do that all the time, we have one of the largest programs in the country for both. Have we done it together? No. But the secret sauce was can we do this together with the level of communication that it takes? I knew that the answer was yes.’ We knew that he was a high-risk candidate, but we also knew that if we did appropriate organ recipient matching that we could give him a good outcome.”

So after he was denied for transplantation by three different health systems for reasons such as age and prior unsuccessful liver-lung transplants, Northwestern took on Collera’s case.

The 63-year-old retired nurse had pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that happens when the lung’s tissue thickens. As the condition progresses, one gets more short of breath.

By 2017, Collera was on medication to treat his illness conservatively, but by 2019, he traveled everywhere with oxygen tanks and had to go on disability from his 32-year nursing career, two years of which he worked at Northwestern Hospital. Problems with his liver materialized when it was found that the medicine he was taking injured it. That, coupled with Collera’s drinking in his younger days, fibrosed his liver.

“I was hopeless,” Collera said. “And finally, the Northwestern medical director gave me so much hope with the words ‘We will do your transplant, not just your lung but your liver too.’ That was the best news I’ve ever had in my life.”

Collera was put on the transplant waiting list Aug. 15. He had two offers in less than a week’s time, but one donor had a perfect lung but the liver was failing, while the other offer was the opposite. But after 10 days on the list, Collera was called with another potential donor. This one had a perfect liver and a good right lung.

“I said to my wife, ‘I will take this one lung and perfect liver, this is God’s blessing,’” he said. “The next time I woke up, I was in ICU. The first words I asked the physician assistant, writing it on a piece of paper. ‘Am I alive or am I dreaming?’ And he said, ‘Yes, Patricio, you are alive.’ That was a tear-jerker. I cried.’”

Thanksgiving Day marks three months since Collera received his life-changing surgery, and he’s grateful. He said he’s become more spiritually inclined following his procedure. His faith has gotten stronger.

“I do believe my life after the surgery is a miracle,” said the native of Leyte, an island in the Visayas group of islands in the Philippines. He is encouraging the population to become donors and for those that are sick with diseases that need transplant, to go for it, because “your life will really change. There’s nothing to fear.”

Collera is willing to share his life’s story (how he got into nursing after his older sister: A nurse suggested it; he came to the United States in 1988, and his wife is a nurse too) to anyone who is willing to listen.

“If you saw me three, four months ago, I had a miserable life. I was dragging oxygen wherever I went,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to make you more comfortable at the idea of transplant, let me know. … You don’t have to be anxious.”

Collera is now thinking about passing the nursing skills he picked up as a PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) nurse on to the next generation of caregiving staff working in nursing homes.

“What better way to do this as our first successful one than on a previous Northwestern nurse?” Nadig said. “There is a buzz around Northwestern, a forward-thinking mentality.”

“We innovate when it’s needed,” Bharat said. “The surgery textbooks were written 30-plus years ago. … People don’t even want to have their iPhone for more than a year. Why is it that you’re following textbooks that were written 30 years ago? There’s so much opportunity for bringing in new technologies … developing to take things to the next level. What we truly believe is how can we move the line a little bit to the right to say, ‘How we can do better than what’s out there?’”

drockett@chicagotribune.com