GREENE — Pam Sirois was just days away from dying when her doctors got the call.

They had lungs.

She was in the intensive care unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, on a ventilator, unconscious. She’d already been there for two weeks. With every day that passed, she got weaker.

Doctors had told her husband, Wes Sirois, that he’d have to decide whether to put her on a stronger machine, something that would bypass her damaged lungs and provide total life support. Soon.

Then a doctor walked into the waiting room that had become a second home for her husband. “I think we found some lungs for Pam.”

“My husband sort of freaked out,” Sirois said. Their hopes were realized.

After more than a year on the transplant list, two weeks in the ICU and a lifetime dealing with cystic fibrosis, it was her best and final shot. But doctors had warned her from the start that a transplant wouldn’t be easy. They were right

‘A perfect match’

For the longest time, hardly anyone knew Sirois was sick. The Greene woman had dealt with cystic fibrosis — a genetic, life-threatening condition — her whole life, spending hours each day on treatments to clear her lungs, but she always felt OK and looked healthy. Only close friends and family members knew. 

“I didn’t really want it to define me,” Sirois said in a Sun Journal story from April 2015, when she started to talk publicly about her illness to raise awareness for both CF and organ donation. “I didn’t want people to feel bad for me. I don’t feel bad for myself. I didn’t want people to associate me with a disease.”

Although doctors had told her parents she wouldn’t live past age 10, Sirois blew past all expectations. She went to school, played sports. She met and married her high school sweetheart. She became a nurse, then earned her master’s degree and became a nurse practitioner.

She and Wes Sirois had three kids, a son and twin daughters, all three free of CF.

But in her early 40s, breathing got harder for Sirois. Her daily regimen — which included 30 pills, four inhaled medications and a compression vest to clear her lungs — couldn’t keep up as her lung function deteriorated. She went on oxygen. She left her job at a Lewiston endocrinology practice.

Her lung function dropped from 65 percent to 50 percent to 20 percent in quick succession. With her children depending on her, she considered the one treatment that she’d always rejected: a double lung transplant.

It was a risky surgery, and there was a chance she might never be matched with a donor at all, but she decided to take the chance. She wanted to see her kids graduate from high school. Her son, 11 at the time, wanted his mom to dance with him at his wedding.

It was rapidly becoming clear that a lung transplant was the only way for that to happen.   

Sirois got on the transplant list at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in January 2015 and, six months later, at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Friends and family members held online fundraisers and a community benefit at the Boofy Quimby Memorial Center in Turner to raise the tens of thousands of dollars Sirois would need to pay for transplant-related expenses not covered by insurance. 

Then she waited.

In 2016, she was still waiting.

Last April, with Sirois’ health worsening, the family took a last-minute, weeklong trip to Florida. It proved to be a turning point.

“I didn’t feel well most of the time. A few days I wasn’t able to do anything. I think it was either the humidity or the airplane ride with the oxygen deprivation,” Sirois said. 

She made it back home, but she wasn’t doing well. On April 30, as her husband took care of their kids, Sirois’ brother and mother drove her to Boston. She was admitted to Brigham and Women’s that night.

Within a few hours, her respiratory system started to fail.

“I called my husband and said, ‘I think you need to come,'” Sirois said.

That was the last thing she remembers.

In the ICU, doctors intubated Sirois. Her lung function was at zero.  

Sirois’ husband rushed to her bedside in Boston. Close to death, Sirois rocketed to the top of the transplant list, but there was no guarantee suitable lungs would be found in time.

Days passed with little but bad news. The ICU waiting room became Wes Sirois’ new home.

Even with the ventilator’s settings turned up, Sirois’ lungs still weren’t expanding or maintaining oxygenation. Doctors asked her husband to think about putting her on a life support machine that would bypass her lungs completely, and signal another step in the wrong direction.

“He said my transplant surgeon (said) we needed to decide in the next few days if lungs didn’t become available,” Sirois said. “That was Friday, the 13th of May.”

At 5:30 that evening, the transplant surgeon returned. This time he didn’t have bad news about Sirois’ health or a new intervention to consider.

This time, he told Wes Sirois they had lungs.

“(My husband) didn’t call anybody because a lot of times once they go look at the lungs they decide they’re not a good match or there’s issues with them or whatever. Sort of this false alarm, false hope,” Sirois said.

A few hours later, the transplant surgeon returned. It wasn’t a false alarm.

“He said they’re a perfect match. And they’re bringing them here,” Sirois said.

‘What’s going on?’

Sirois was wheeled into surgery at 10:30 that night for a transplant that would take several hours. Once she was out of surgery the next morning and doing well, Wes Sirois called family. 

Son, Ben, then 12, was at all-star baseball tryouts — at the same Boofy Quimby center where Sirois’ fundraiser had been held the year before — when he got the news.

“He started crying and jumping up and down,” Sirois said.

Daughters, Abby and Katie, 9, were playing in a softball game. Their grandmother told them when the game ended.

“Of course everybody in our community was there. Same at the Boofy Quimby. So all the parents . . . news quickly spread. It was a good day,” Sirois said.

A few hours later, she ended up back in the operating room with bleeding in her new right lung. But it wasn’t an unexpected complication and it wasn’t anything doctors couldn’t handle. 

Several hours after that, Sirois opened her eyes to bright light and her husband bent over her bed.

“I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘You got your lungs.’ And I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘No way.’ I thought I was in a car accident or something. He said, ‘No, really, you’ve got your lungs,'” Sirois said.

When it was obvious she didn’t believe him, he asked a nurse standing at her bedside to try.

“She said, ‘No, Pam you had your lung transplant and you’re doing awesome,'” Sirois said.

That’s when she started to believe it.

“I just started crying,” Sirois said.

She’d nearly died. She had new lungs. She had no memory of any of it.

“It was all surreal,” Sirois said.

Difficult recovery

Sirois had lost 30 pounds and a lot of muscle during her two weeks in the ICU. She had new lungs, but she didn’t have the strength to even brush her own hair, let alone get out of bed.   

“I had to learn how to do everything,” she said. “Nobody can prepare you for that. They talk about how hard the recovery is, but until you actually go through it you have no idea how hard it is.”

For a while, she felt like every step forward was closely followed by a step back. For weeks she wasn’t allowed to eat or drink because her swallowing reflex was damaged. She struggled to talk because her vocal cords were weak and she couldn’t write because she didn’t have the strength to grip a pencil. Kidney problems kept cropping up.

“You’re just focused on, unfortunately, what you can’t do. I’m a pretty positive person, but that really brings you down to a terrible place,” she said. “I had a few complications, nothing major, but it just seemed like every day they were coming in with bad news.”

People told her recovery would happen, and would be worth it, but during her darkest times she wondered.

“You think, ‘Oh my god, my life’s going to be like this now. This sucks. I went through all of this for this?'” she said. “But they were right. It does come back and you do get back on your feet and start living again.”

As the weeks passed, Sirois got better. She gained enough strength to stand and walk. Her voice and hands got stronger. She got the OK to eat and drink, and for the first time in several weeks got her first sip of coffee.

“At the time it seemed like it was taking forever. It was hard to see down the road that I would get back to where I am now,” she said.

It helped that family was always around. Her mother rented an apartment in Boston and stayed with her during the week. Her husband and children visited on weekends.

Her goal was to be out of the hospital in time to surprise her son at his sixth-grade graduation, but kidney problems and blood clots kept her in the hospital. At the the time it was upsetting.

“But in the big scheme of things I’m going to be forever to see everything else. That’s what I kept thinking about, even though it was hard,” she said.

Stronger, healthier

Sirois returned home to Greene in late June, two months after she was admitted.

By October, she started to feel truly recovered.

Today, Sirois, 44, is stronger, healthier and breathing better than she can ever remember.

Her lung function is now 114 percent, up from the 14 percent it had fallen to in Florida. The woman who got winded tidying the house now enjoys snowshoeing and shoveling snow.

“Shoveling. I love to shovel. Isn’t that crazy?” she said. “I put it on Facebook when I was able to shovel our driveway and I took out the snowblower. I was like, ‘Best day ever!'”

She recently joined the local school board, something she’d always wanted to do. She’s looking forward to going back to work at some point, too, though maybe not in a doctor’s office that often sees people with colds and flu. If she got an infection, it could lead her body to reject the new lungs.

Rejection would put her right back where she was before: sick and in desperate need of a transplant.

Sirois takes anti-rejection medication and wears a mask when she’s out in public. However, in return she’s been able to get rid of some of her CF medications, machines and therapies.

CF, a genetic disorder, will not trouble these new lungs, she said.

No one knows how long the new lungs will last. Some transplant recipients are still healthy 20 or 30 years after surgery. Others suffer rejection within months.

Sirois is hopeful for hers.

“It’s very unpredictable. Very unpredictable. But as long as I take my anti-rejection medications every single day when I’m supposed to, which I do, and I try to remain not ill and in the best shape that I can, I should do well,” she said. “But I try not to really think about that. Like when I had CF, I tried not to think about that until you really start having to.”

For now, she goes to Boston for checkups every three months. Eventually, if all goes well, that will be extended to every six months, then every year.

Her life came at a cost

Sirois doesn’t know where her lungs came from. They’re smaller than her own lungs, which makes her think the donor might have been a woman. They’re pristine, which makes her think the person was probably young. They didn’t take long to get to the transplant team in Boston, so she believes the person probably lived in the region.

“Every day I try to imagine who they are,” she said.

She plans to write a letter to her donor’s family. She’ll send it to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which will pass it on.

She doesn’t yet know what she’s going to say.

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t want it to be all about me and how grateful I am, though obviously I am. But they have suffered a loss. I know where I’m at, which is a wonderful thing, but they’re probably not in that same place at all.”

As she and her family celebrated Christmas this year — her first healthy Christmas in years — she knew somewhere another family was mourning.

“That same family is sitting with an empty chair,” she posted on Facebook during the holidays.

When she does write, it will be up to the donor’s family to decide whether to write back. Sometimes families do. Sometimes they don’t.

Home with her own family, she’s very aware that her happiness has come at a cost that someone else paid. She feels blessed, yet knows she may never learn about the person who saved her life.

“That’s going to be hard for me,” she said, “to not know where they came from.”

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“I called my husband and said, ‘I think you need to come.'”

— Pam Sirois, talking about her admission to a Boston hospital shortly before her respiratory system failed

“I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘You got your lungs.’ And I didn’t believe him. I said, ‘No way.’ I thought I was in a car accident or something. He said, ‘No, really, you’ve got your lungs.'”

— Pam Sirois

“You think, ‘Oh my god, my life’s going to be like this now. This sucks. I went through all of this for this?’ But they were right. It does come back and you do get back on your feet and start living again.”

— Pam Sirois, about her tough recovery

“Shoveling. I love to shovel. Isn’t that crazy? I put it on Facebook when I was able to shovel our driveway and I took out the snowblower. I was like, ‘Best day ever!'”

— Pam Sirois