By Luke Voogt
Corio grandmother Karyn Ogle can’t thank her workmates enough after they donated their sick leave for her life-saving lung surgery.
“I love them to bits,” the 53-year-old City cleaner told the Indy this week.
“They melt my heart – they are just beautiful, lovely friends.”
Karyn returned to work at the City’s Corio depot late last year after nine months recovering from a double-lung transplant in January 2016.
“I said to myself ‘I may as well’,” she said.
“I was doing a lot more at home than I would be at work.”
Five years ago specialists diagnosed Karyn with aspergillosis, a life-threatening fungal infection, in her lungs.
She had been struggling to breathe but initially doctors thought it was just a chest infection.
“It was a horrible life,” she said, “I was suffocating.”
Luckily one recommended X-rays.
“If it wasn’t for a doctor here at the Corio clinic I’d be dead by now.”
Karyn had surgery at The Alfred in April 2014 but surgeons were unable to remove the whole infection because it had attached to major arteries.
She went onto the organ donor register after doctors told her she would need a transplant.
“They told me I was going to die,” she said.
“I started coughing up huge amounts of blood after the first surgery.”
Karyn’s workmates donated their sick leave and many visited her in hospital as she recovered.
She decided to return to work, but her workmates kept a close eye on her and her managers kept her to light duties.
“They were actually scared every time I went out the door I wouldn’t come back,” she said.
She had roughly a fortnight to live when she received a call at a work meeting that a donor had been found in Perth on 20 January 2016.
“They said ‘we’re transporting them over by private jet’,” she said.
Police escorted the lungs to the hospital and four hours later Karyn was in the operating room.
A year later, Karyn said it was incredible to have more time to spend with her four grandchildren and urged locals to register as organ donors.
“There were a lot of people who died in the hospital while I was there.”
Karyn said work was “a breeze” with her new lungs, even though she will be on “40 pills a day” for her remaining years.
Again her workmates donated sick leave and gave up their free time to visit her in hospital.
“I thank them with all my heart,” she said.
“I can never repay them for what they’ve done.”
But she added her generous workmates would expect nothing in return.
“They just want to look at my scars – but I tell them to bugger off!”
