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With a Little Help From Friends -- Little-Known Surgery Saves Officer's Life
Wednesday, March 13, 2002
By SFC Kathleen T. Rhem
U.S. Army
American Forces Press Service

The Naval Academy superintendent did call Fever in to make sure he didn't feel pressured because Pasko is a senior officer. Fever told him that was never part of the equation. Fever said his mother, a nurse, assured him a lobectomy didn't generally entail serious complications. That was good enough for him. "It was like a five-minute call with my mom, and so then I called and said, 'Yes, I'm going to do it,'" he said.

WASHINGTON -- AFIS
In June 2001 Navy Capt. John Pasko was dying. A disabling disease was robbing his lungs of their ability to expand with each breath. He didn't know a little-known surgery and a couple of selfless naval officers were to save his life.

Pulmonary fibrosis causes lungs to lose their elasticity. Most people diagnosed with this disease slowly lose their lung function over four to five years. Pasko was diagnosed with the disease in January 2001 and in desperate need of a transplant by June. Doctors couldn't explain his rapid descent.

At the time, Pasko was a battalion officer at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He was a career submariner who commanded the USS Wyoming a year earlier at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Ga.

He was put on the waiting list for a donor lung in the end of May. By June 26, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his doctors at Bethesda (Md.) Naval Medical Center hospitalized him and wanted to put him on a ventilator, a machine that would breathe for him.

Pasko knew once he went on the vent, he wasn't likely to ever get off unless he got a donor lung. He wouldn't allow it. He had something he had to do first. On June 29, he left the hospital and went back to Annapolis to swear in his son, Joey, as a member of the Annapolis Class of 2005.

The captain attended the ceremony in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle, but stood and administered the oath when the time came to swear in his son. Early the next morning, his wife, Sherry, called 911 because Pasko could hardly breathe, even with supplemental oxygen.
(More: DoD News Source)
2002 © The United States Department of Defense.

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