Every time I drive past Jacobs Medical Center, that hospital with a mirrored façade on the 5 near La Jolla Village Drive, I wave to my dad’s old lungs. Even though his lung transplant was almost two years ago—and in a different building, the Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center 200 feet away—I still imagine his original lungs resting in some nice, shaded dumpster outside Jacobs. They were actually taken to a lab for UC San Diego’s medical students to learn about pulmonary fibrosis, an altruistic second chapter of their life, but in my daydreams, they’re just hanging out in some hospital dumpster speakeasy with other jettisoned organs.
My dad is still kickin’ because of the medical staff at UC San Diego Health (and because of one very kind anonymous organ donor). I don’t just mean his team of doctors who performed the actual surgery; I also mean his nurses, physical therapists, case manager, social worker, transplant coordinators—it takes a village. And that village not only educated me, my mom, and my brother on what my dad was going through, it also kept us calm(ish). As calm as you could be before your dad gets his lungs yoinked out of his body.
During all of this, my family learned that UCSD is the place to go if you need a lung transplant. Its résumé of successful transplant surgeries dates as far back as 1968, and patient survival rates exceed the national average. How lucky were we that our local hospital is the transplant destination for people coming as far as the Middle East. Lung transplants are new in terms of human history—the world’s first successful double lung transplant, the same one my dad got, was in 1986. My dad’s surgery was one of 54 lung transplants that UCSD performed that year. The biggest day of our lives was just an average Tuesday for his doctors. And that’s kind of how you want it.
UCSD helped me and my family, but San Diego’s healthcare system as a whole ranks as one of the top in the country. We have the most hospital beds per population than any other city in the US, and Scripps, Sharp, Palomar, and Kaiser all rank near the top nationally. The whole county’s the epicenter of medical innovation. People like Luca De Vivo Nicoloso and Joshua Pelz saw the flaws in traditional prosthesis development and used a 3D printer and inspiration from the unique skeleton of cholla cacti to create a groundbreaking solution. Also, care at home seems to be a long universal dream, and a few San Diego designers are reimagining home design to cope with the physical challenges of aging and disability while maintaining the elements that make a home feel like home.
And if you’re confronted with a diagnosis that rattles your sense of agency within your own body, what do you do? Mastectomy surgeries can leave scars that turn a part of your body—one tied to personal identity—into a visual reminder of trauma. We feature Pacific Beach–based artist Shane Wallin, who has spent years helping people with scars reclaim their personal space with elaborate, gender-affirming tattoos. He’s even on the board of directors for the Alliance of Medical Tattooing. Even though he’s not a doctor per se, he’s a part of San Diego’s distinct medical ecosystem. We all are.
I’d like to close with a personal plea: Be an organ donor. An organ donor saved my dad’s life. I receive the benefit of a stranger’s generosity every time I come home. Whenever I’m done in this realm, hopefully a long time from now, I hope I get to be that generous, too. In the meantime, I’ll keep waving to that old lung by that shiny building off the 5, on my way to see my dad.
