Albert B. Chandler University of Kentucky Hospital

Albert B. Chandler UK Hospital

The Sid Foundation is currently raising funds for The Albert B. Chandler hospital at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. Specifically, your donations are going to the hospital’s lung transplant program. This is the hospital where Sid got a second chance at life after going through a successful double lung transplant.

The lung transplant program at UK hospital was established in 1991. The first lung transplant was performed in June of the same year.  They have grown tremendously and have transplanted 450 lungs since then. The program is now headed by medical director Dr. Maher A. Baz who is a lung pulmonologist with over 20 years of experience and surgical director Dr. Alexis Shafii who is a heart and lung transplant surgeon from Baylor and Cleveland Clinic.

The program’s medical team includes the director Maher Baz (MD), Anil Gopinath (MD), and Ashish Maskey(MD). The program’s surgical team includes the director Alexis Shafii (MD), Michael Sekela (MD), and Paul Tessmann (PharmD, MD). In addition to lung transplants, the surgeons perform combination organ transplants such as heart and lung, liver and lung, and kidney and lung.
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The program isn’t just run by these amazing doctors, however, it also includes highly experienced and caring nurses and a strong ECMO program. ECMO (Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation) is a technique used to provide life support for patients with damaged lungs. It is used to keep the patients alive until they are able to get a lung transplant. To learn more about Sid’s personal experience with ECMO, read this blog.

The UK lung transplant program was a necessity because according to the CDC, Kentucky has the second highest number of smokers out of all 50 states. Over a quarter of the population in Kentucky smokes due to a deep rooted culture of smoking that goes back generations. Smoking causes diseases such as COPD and lung cancer. Because of the poor lung health in the community there is a real need for this program. The program has continued to expand since it began and it now has clinics in Lexington and Louisville. However, they are not limited to those two cities. They serve patients all across Kentucky and the surrounding states, which, is why they took on Sid as their patient from Atlanta, Georgia.

The highly qualified, hard-working, and most of all caring doctors, nurses, ECMO team, and all other staff at the UK hospital lung transplant program are working to advance lung transplantation and more importantly to save lives with their research and experience. For this reason, The Sid Foundation is supporting their efforts by raising funds so they can continue to grow and give people a second chance at life.

To learn about Sid’s experience at UK Hospital read this blog.