Mother’s Day recently took on an entirely different meaning for one mom of twins. After spending more than four months in and out of a Chicago hospital, Cornelia Tischmacher of Germany was finally reunited with her children.
“Seeing my children for the first time in four months was absolutely wonderful. The weight of my illness had weighed them down, and to see me healthy again was overwhelming – but in a good way,” said Tischmacher. “It’s a happy continuation of the story because it could have been so different. When we said our initial ‘goodbyes’ in December, it was much more dramatic because we didn’t know how things would go.”
Tischmacher was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer in 2018. Her twins were only 8 months old. “I absolutely loved my job and had to travel quite a bit for work, but when I was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, my priorities immediately shifted. I knew I had to do everything I could to stay alive for my children,” said Tischmacher. “My twins would never hear me say the words, ‘Mommy is going to die.’
After multiple attempts to rid the cancer, Tischmacher knew she had to leave her home in Berlin and seek treatment elsewhere. By June 2024, she could no longer breathe without supplemental oxygen, and that’s when Tischmacher discovered a first-of-its-kind clinical program at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago called DREAM (Double Lung Transplant Registry Aimed for Lung-Limited Malignancies).
“During our first telehealth visit with Cornelia, it was clear to us that she was at the end of the road,” said Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, who performed Tischmacher’s transplant. “Cornelia had failed every other medical treatment available to her, including surgeries, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, but the cancer continued to progress to stage 4 and became so advanced that it was causing her lungs to fail. She couldn’t breathe, and a lung transplant was her only option to fix the lung failure, remove all the cancer cells from her body, and give her a fighting chance to be there for her twins.”
A few months later, Tischmacher said goodbye to her children and husband and boarded an air ambulance bound for Chicago. She was placed on the transplant waiting list on Christmas Eve. On Dec. 26, she received a late Christmas gift –– new lungs.
“Receiving my lung transplant on December 26 was the best Christmas present I could have asked for,” said Tischmacher. “I remember waking up and thinking for the first time in a long time, I will be able to go to museums and go for bike rides with my kids without bringing an oxygen tank with me. I could finally breathe again. It was such a gift that I don’t take for granted, and I encourage everyone (who is able) to register as an organ donor – not just in the United States, but also in Germany.”
The 48-year-old will remain in the city for one-year post-transplant to be near her medical team. The most difficult part is being far away from her husband, Udo Kittelmann, and their 8-year-old twins, Leo and Lucie, who remain in Berlin to continue their schooling.
Tischmacher currently has no signs of cancer in her body and is breathing on her own. She was the first patient from Germany to receive a lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine. In the past, patients have also traveled from Asia, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, the Middle East and other parts of Europe for a lung transplant.
To date, Northwestern Medicine surgeons have performed more than 50 lung transplants for patients with advanced lung cancers. Cancers of the lung are the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, with more people dying of lung cancer than colon, breast and prostate cancers combined. Every year, 1.8 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed in the U.S., and roughly 600,000 people die from the disease.
