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Manglos, then 40, was a special agent with the U.S. Customs Service. Driving back to San Diego a few days earlier after a morning assignment in L.A., he started feeling drowsy and pulled off the highway near the beach at San Onofre. There, he noticed a cluster of surfers in the water. He walked a ways, picked up some stones and started skipping them. Because the stone-skipping reminded him of being at church camp as a boy, he began to pray. And then: "I had this strong feeling that I was supposed to do something. I didn't know what it meant." He told no one -- not his wife, children, or co-workers -- about his moment on the beach. "I'm a cop," he says. "I deal in concrete things. I thought people who had experiences like that were a little off the deep end."The next night, he and his wife, Rhonda, watched the TV news, something they seldom do. Matt's cousin Jenny LaRocco came on to make an appeal for donors. Dave says, "Almost audibly I got this huge voice -- you couldn't ignore it -- saying, 'Didn't we talk about this yesterday?' " Jenny said they needed someone five-ten or taller, nonsmoker, O-positive blood. Dave looked at Rhonda. "That's me," he said.
Five days later, Dr. Vaughn Starnes, who pioneered the living donor lobar transplant in 1990, made a looping "clamshell" incision across Matthew Joyce's chest, sawed his patient's sternum in half, lifted the top of his chest wall as if it were the hood of a car, and went to work. He removed the ruined lungs and replaced them with a lobe each from Phillips and Manglos. The surgery went perfectly. Not long after he awoke from the anesthesia, Matt asked for paper and pen and scrawled 30 exuberant pages of notes. "I'm so happy," he wrote. "I have been reborn."
Three years have passed, and Matt is three inches taller and 40 pounds heavier. He still has cystic fibrosis, and will have to battle to keep bacteria from infecting his new lungs. But the transplant has given him the precious gift of time (some recipients are still doing well ten years after the operation), during which he and everyone associated with CF hope a cure will be found. Matt often counsels other CF kids who are considering transplants, and saves up money from his job at Mitch's Surf Shop in La Jolla to make junkets to Fiji, Australia and Costa Rica. He spends time with his parents and grandparents, his brother and surfing pals, his girlfriend, Amelia. When asked what he gets upset about now, he says, "Only one thing: people who abuse their bodies."
He stays in touch with his donors too. On a warm San Diego night recently he could be found at a Moroccan restaurant, joking with Dave Manglos about whose drainage tubes had come out faster after the surgery (Matt's), who had complained more (a matter of debate), and whether his lung is having more fun now in Matt's body, traveling the world.
The music is turned up. From the back room steps a belly dancer, who works her way among the tables clacking her finger cymbals and shaking her hips. As if prompted by some mysterious intuition, she stops next to Matt's seat, motioning for him to get up and dance with her. And he does, his body language surfer-cool, his face expressionless except for a tiny smile at the corners of his lips, a glint of gratitude, perhaps. Or just pure joy.
For more information, contact the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation at 800-FIGHT CF or visit cff.org.
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