Local man receives lung transplant on Christmas Eve

On Nov. 11, Curtis Almeter left for Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis to begin his wait for a lung transplant. A month later, he got a very special Christmas gift.

“I actually got my lungs on Christmas,” Almeter said. “It was Christmas Eve when I got the call and I went in for surgery about noon on Christmas Eve and woke up the next day with new lungs.”

Almeter, 26, suffers from cystic fibrosis. Before the transplant his lung capacity had diminished to 20 percent. His lungs filled with thick mucus and were scarred from repeated infections. He carried an oxygen tank. Walking, talking and other everyday activities left him out of breath and coughing.

“It’s just like a world of difference,” he said of the transplant. “It’s great and I’m not even fully recovered.

“I can walk, like two miles, on the treadmill without any trouble at all.”

The oxygen tank is gone. He doesn’t cough after his treatments. By March, he hopes to return to Neosho and this fall he plans go to Missouri Southern finishing a degree he began at Crowder College.

His surgery has had no complications so far. Doctors continue to tinker with his immunosuppressant dosage to get it balanced. Too much medicine and he will be unable to fight off any infection, too little and he risks rejecting the new lungs. His incisions are still healing and he can’t lift anything over 10 pounds, but Almeter keeps busy going from appointment to appointment getting follow up X-rays, blood tests and physical therapy. It takes some time for the lungs to “settle in” and get up to their full capacity, he said.

“A lot of times you’re used to breathing shallow so you’ve sort of got to learn to use them,” Almeter said.

He dreamed of waking up and being able to breathe, but recovery was a little more complicated than that. When he woke up Christmas morning, he had a ventilator, chest tubes and lines running everywhere.

“It wasn’t like I expected it to be,” he said. “I thought as soon as I would wake up I would be able to take a deep breath and it really wasn’t like that. The lungs still have a lot of fluid around them and there’s four chest tubes that go up inside your chest cavity and those make it hard to breathe and you chest is kind of tight and sore so it’s not what like you think. I didn’t feel like I could breathe very well at all after the surgery, but as time went on I could really tell a difference

Once the chest tubes were out he could breathe better. After two hours or so they took out the ventilator and he was able to eat some ice chips and talk.

“They actually had me up and walking the first day – a little bit,” he said.

His family had come to St. Louis for Christmas. When they got the call Christmas Eve at 4:30 a.m., they hurried to the hospital where they called family and friends and waited. Bad weather delayed the retrieval team’s flight and the Almeters waited from 5 a.m. to noon that day before Curtis went to surgery. 

“I had a lot of emotions at first,” he said. “Of course I was scared and anxious and happy all at the same time, but everything worked out.”

Almeter is a photographer. An art display benefit to help support his stay in St. Louis was slated to begin this week at Crowder, where he is an alum. He has the funds he needs and the display was canceled, but friends can still donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

As his new lungs continue to open up and recover from the trauma of the transplant, Almeter is ready to get back to his life. Days after his transplant he was off the oxygen tank and 13 days from the surgery he was released from the hospital.

Now he is ready for a better existence, Almeter said.

“Now it’s just amazing,” he said. “I rarely get short of breath doing anything unless I’m like exercising. I’m able to climb stairs and stuff.”