Elgin woman, Cook County commissioner with 'flipped organs' receive double-lung transplants

This spring, Northwestern Medicine's lung transplant team performed complex double transplants for Cook County Commissioner Dennis Deer and Elgin resident Yahaira Vega, both of whom were born with situs inversus — or “flipped organs” in their chest and abdomen.

With the lungs, heart and other vitals in the mirror image of those in a typical patient — a condition seen in one in 10,000 people — surgeons had “to come up with some technical modifications” to make donated lungs fit for Deer and Vega, according to Dr. Ankit Bharat, Northwestern Medicine's chief of thoracic surgery.

“It's rare enough to perform a double-lung transplant on one patient with situs inversus, let alone two patients in less than a month at the same health system,” Bharat said.

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