• Posted May 12, 2025

Double Lung Transplant Saves Mother Of Twins

MONDAY, May 12, 2025 (HealthDay News) — The timing of Cornelia Tischmacher’s pneumonia couldn’t have been worse — eight months after the Berlin mom gave birth to twins.

But the pneumonia just wouldn’t go away, so Tischmacher went to a doctor in January 2018. Tests revealed that the then-40-year-old had stage 3 lung cancer.

The diagnosis shocked Tischmacher, an active nonsmoker with a busy career as an art historian and gallerist.

“I absolutely loved my job and had to travel quite a bit for work, but when I was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, my priorities immediately shifted. I knew I had to do everything I could to stay alive for my children,” she said.

“My twins would never hear me say the words, ‘Mommy is going to die,’ ” Tischmacher vowed.

Her road to survival eventually led to the United States, where Tischmacher received a double-lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago the day after Christmas 2024.

“During our first telehealth visit with Cornelia, it was clear to us that she was at the end of the road,” Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, said in a news release.

“Cornelia had failed every other medical treatment available to her, including surgeries, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but the cancer continued to progress to stage 4 and became so advanced that it was causing her lungs to fail,” said Bharat, who performed Tischmacher’s surgery.

“She couldn’t breathe, and a lung transplant was her only option to fix the lung failure, remove all the cancer cells from her body, and give her a fighting chance to be there for her twins,” Bharat said.

Tischmacher received two new lungs under Northwestern’s first-of-its-kind clinical program called DREAM (Double Lung Transplant Registry Aimed for Lung-Limited Malignancies).

“Receiving my lung transplant on December 26 was the best Christmas present I could have asked for,” Tischmacher said. “I remember waking up and thinking for the first time in a long time, I will be able to go to museums and go for bike rides with my kids without bringing an oxygen tank with me.

“I could finally breathe again,” she continued. “It was such a gift that I don’t take for granted, and I encourage everyone (who is able) to register as an organ donor – not just in the United States, but also in Germany.”

Tischmacher’s treatment path started with surgery and chemotherapy in June 2018 to get rid of her initial lung cancer.

But by October 2019, the cancer had returned. Doctors told her all they could do was slow down her cancer’s progression using chemo and immunotherapy.

Tischmacher discovered the DREAM program last June, when she could no longer breathe without supplemental oxygen. In the program, select patients with advanced lung cancers that haven’t spread elsewhere can be considered for a double-lung transplant.

After being accepted to the DREAM program, Tischmacher flew from Berlin to Chicago in an air ambulance in December 2024.

On Christmas Eve, Tischmacher entered the ICU at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and took her place on the transplant waiting list. Two days after being listed, she received a donated pair of lungs.

“With how quickly her disease was progressing, it was clear to us that Cornelia would not be able to leave the hospital without receiving a lung transplant,” Dr. Krishnan Warrior, a lung transplant pulmonologist at Northwestern's Canning Thoracic Institute who has been caring for Tischmacher, said.

Tischmacher was receiving up to 60 liters of oxygen per minute, “which is the absolute limit you can supply without a ventilator,” Warrior said in a news release. “For that very reason, we worked around the clock to complete her lung transplant workup and arrange all the logistics needed for her to stay in the United States.”

The transplant surgery involves putting the patient on full heart and lung bypass, gently removing both cancer-ridden lungs long with the lymph nodes, then washing the airways and the chest cavity to clear away cancer cells before putting in the new lungs, Bharat said.

“These patients can have billions of cancer cells in the lungs, so we must be extremely meticulous to not let a single cell spill into the patient’s chest cavity or blood stream,” he said.

Tischmacher, now 48, spent one week recovering at Northwestern Memorial before being discharged to an apartment in Chicago. She’ll spend a year in the city to be near her transplant team.

Her husband, Udo Kittelmann, and their 8-year-old twins, Leo and Lucie, remained in Berlin so the kids could continue their schooling, but they were able to visit during spring break in mid-April.

“Seeing my children for the first time in four months was absolutely wonderful. The weight of my illness had weighed them down, and to see me healthy again was overwhelming — but in a good way,” Tischmacher said. “It’s a happy continuation of the story because it could have been so different. When we said our initial ‘goodbyes’ in December, it was much more dramatic because we didn’t know how things would go.”

Tischmacher is currently cancer-free and has recovered enough to walk around Chicago, taking in the city’s art galleries and breathe on her own.

She’s the first patient from Germany to receive a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine, doctors said. Past patients have traveled from Asia, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the Middle East and other parts of Europe.

Northwestern Medicine surgeons have performed more than 50 lung transplants for patients with advanced lung cancers, the school says.

“On a daily basis, we’re seeing more young women being diagnosed with lung cancer,” Bharat said.

“Conventionally, lung cancer has been associated with smoking and older age. While smoking certainly increases your chances of developing lung cancer, we’re seeing an explosion of lung cancer cases in patients who have never smoked or had limited smoking exposure – like Cornelia,” he continued. “The majority of them are young, and the majority are women, and we still aren’t sure why this is happening.”

The Canning Thoracic Institute also has launched a universal lung cancer screening program that evaluates patients even if their insurance doesn’t cover the test. Doctors plan to share their findings as part of an effort to expand lung cancer screenings to all people past a certain age.

“If lung cancer is causing the most deaths in this country, impacting smokers and nonsmokers, we need a universal screening program just like we have for breast and colon cancer,” Bharat said.

More information

The American Lung Association has more on lung transplants.

SOURCE: Northwestern University, news release, May 11, 2025

What This Means For You

Patients interested in being evaluated for a Northwestern Medicine lung transplant can contact the 24-hour referral line at 312-695-5864 or 844-639-5864, or visit nm.org to learn more about the program.