Five Months After Double Lung Transplant, East Granby Man Runs 5K

On Dec. 18, 2011, East Granby resident Michael Hayes was sedated and hooked up to a ventilator having just undergone a double lung transplant.

Just over five months later, Hayes pulled off a minor miracle, finishing the 4th annual East Granby Ridge Run with his wife, Becky, and his two young daughters.

“It was just to test myself to see if I could do it,” Michael Hayes, a data architect at The Travelers in Hartford, said. “And to show everybody who was there for me through the whole process that I’m better and improving.”

It’s a remarkable recovery for someone who was diagnosed with Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) - or scarring of the lungs - in May 2010.

“It slowly got worse and worse,” Mike Hayes said. “I went to all the specialists, I went out to Denver and no one knows [how it was caused].”

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What made Mike Hayes’ condition unusual is that he is 36;  most people diagnosed with IPF, the cause of which is unknown, are over 50 years old.

“It’s pretty rare in people my age,” he said. “I was told in the March of last year that I was going to die if I didn’t go forward with the transplant.”

So he registered on the donor list with Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York and his condition worsened. In September one of his lungs collapsed and he was in the hospital until Thanksgiving. After being released for a week, he contracted pneumonia. Shortly thereafter he got the call for the double transplant.

“I was carrying oxygen tanks around, it was ridiculous,” he said of his time prior to the transplant. “I couldn’t walk across the hallway in my house. My wife was nine months pregnant and had to carry the garbage out.”

Yet there he was Saturday at , just one day past the five month mark since he received his new lungs, crossing the finish line with Becky, Ella, 3 ½, and Chloe, 14 months in just over 46 minutes.

“It’s pretty surreal,” Becky said. “We used a double stroller [for the kids], and we weren’t the fastest. But we [finished].”

It was something that, while he waited on the donor list, Michael Hayes said he never anticipated he’d do.

“It was awesome,” said Mike Hayes, who added that he isn’t a runner. “I loved it. Glad to be alive.”

And what does Hayes have to say to the donor and the donor’s family?

“I can’t thank them enough. I can’t thank them enough,” he said. “To be a donor is just amazing.”