MIAMI – When Sherri Dilorenzo scrolls through her collection of photographs, nearly all of them show her holding a cigarette.
Dilorenzo is among the more than 34 million who live with chronic lung disease in the United States, and many of them require ongoing intensive care or invasive surgery.
“Unfortunately, I have been smoking cigarettes for 50 years,” Dilorenzo said, later adding that by the time she met Dr. Tiago Machuga, she “couldn’t even finish a sentence without gasping for air.”
Dilorenzo said she felt hopeless but Machuca, the director of the Lung Center at Jackson Health changed that. The center has been providing a specialized team approach since March 2022 at the Miami Transplant Institute and it is already one of the nation’s top locations for thoracic surgery.
About a decade ago, Dilorenzo was diagnosed with emphysema, a disease that damages the air sacs in the lungs. The disease caused her lungs to expand to the point where they were pressing on her esophagus and abdomen.
“You always think it’s not going to happen to you, but I also enjoyed smoking enough that that was a part of my life, so I’m not going to stop living, so I’m going to smoke and I did,” Dilorenzo said. “I continued to smoke, and unfortunately it got progressively worse. ”
Although Dilorenzo was not a candidate for a lung transplant, Machuca was able to perform a lung reduction procedure for which access is very limited. Several months post-surgery, Dilorenzo is back to doing the things she loves and she no longer struggles to breathe.
He said patients like her now can count on a team of specialists who offer the most advanced intensive lung care.
“These patients continue to be underserved and the reason for that is treatment for lung diseases is often fragmented, so just think of how intuitive it is, if you could just walk into a place that can deal with any complex lung disease and can offer the most up to date cutting edge therapies under a single roof,” Machuca said.
The center has patients coming from the entire Southeast and Machuga said he has been seeing two or three patients weekly. Dilorenzo said Machuga’s care changed her life.
“I do my gardening, I do my jigsaw puzzles, I do walk around the block, I play with my dog,” Dilorenzo said. “It’s just the same life that I used to have before. I can’t even remember how long it has been since I felt this good.”