The gift of life

Maureen Elliott had just months to live when she went on St Vincent's Hospital's transplant list. Thirty years on she's one of the longest living heart-lung transplant recipients in the world.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

It was a clear winter’s night, July 10, 1993. Maureen and Laurie Elliott’s breath made puffs of steam as they walked slowly, arm in arm, towards a waiting taxi. Maureen’s puffs were more laboured and alongside her, on wheels, came a compact oxygen cylinder. In those days it accompanied her everywhere, trailing a plastic tube that attached to her nose with tiny prongs. Just three months earlier, Maureen had been diagnosed with primary pulmonary hypertension by a doctor who had told her, quite bluntly, that it was a death sentence. And as if to prove him right, her health had deteriorated rapidly.

None of that, however, was going to deter her from enjoying the very glamorous function that evening at David Jones department store, where Laurie worked in management.

“I was done up like a Christmas tree,” she remembers, and far too excited to notice the beeping that was coming from her handbag as the taxi sped across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Maureen also carried a pager with her everywhere in those pre mobile phone days, and that night, the transplant team at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst was trying desperately to reach her.

“We got to David Jones, I checked the pager, and the message was to call St Vincent’s,” says Maureen. “When we phoned through, they said, ‘We have a heart and lungs for you, and you need to get in here as quickly as possible’.”

Donor organs have a limited lifespan even today. Thirty years ago, they needed to be transplanted within roughly four hours, as the technology used to transport them was barely more sophisticated than an esky. So, the clock was ticking.