When his transplant call came through at 2.20am one long weekend, Nick De Marco was at Bribie Island and thought it was an automatic alert telling him his security alarm had been tripped. “The transplant coordinator told me they had lungs available for me. I said ‘I’ll see you in five minutes!’” Nick, his wife of 24 years Olga and their teenage daughters, Nicoleta and Violeta, drove to The Prince Charles Hospital in the middle of the night to start preparations for the nine and a half hour surgery. “No one was crying, everyone was happy,” says Nick. “As they pushed me through the doors I threw my legs up in the air and said ‘Come and get me, boys!’” Fifteen years ago, Nick realised he was sick. He had been carrying bags of cement up a couple of flights of stairs to a tiling job every day for several weeks when one day he collapsed. “I couldn’t breathe,” he says. “It went on for about a week, so I went to the GP and was diagnosed with adult asthma.” For the next few years, Nick was on steroids to manage his asthma, having good and bad periods. Gradually he moved from doing the tiling work himself to doing the office work. Nick, Olga and their daughters would go to Fraser Island every year for a holiday. “We’d do the same things. I’d hold the girls’ hands and walk up sheer sand dunes. Each year it was a bit harder,” Nick says. “Then about five years ago it came to the point where I couldn’t move any more. I was trapped in the house, too week to lift anything. I nearly died.” Since the initial asthma diagnosis, Nick had been seeing a specialist. He’d have trouble blowing into the breathing machine and would throw up. He knew something serious was happening to his body, but the tests would come back normal. “I knew that I was getting crook. I said to Olga ‘I think I’m dying, this is not just asthma.’ I’m so in tune with my body I can predict changes for my optometrist, so I knew something wasn’t right.” Finally, after being told his problems might be psychological, Nick asked for another opinion. He was referred to Dr Peter Hopkins, director of the lung transplant unit at The Prince Charles Hospital. “I said, ‘I don’t need a lung transplant, I just want to stop coughing’,” Nick says. “Peter walked in and straight away organised a biopsy. He said there were about five diseases it could be and he should be able to stop the coughing with antibiotics, unless it was idiopathic lung fibrosis.” Unfortunately, the worst case scenario was true. Nick had idiopathic lung fibrosis and was told he might live three to five years without a transplant. After the biopsy, Nick’s lung collapsed and he spent a week in hospital. During that time he felt like the disease progressed 10-fold. “I said to Olga, ‘It’s not that bad, I could’ve been hit by a truck. At least we’ve got two or three years of planning’,” says Nick. “We had to pick the time to tell the girls. That was the hardest thing, but once they knew it was easier.” The owner of several businesses, including Stone and Tile Queensland, Nick continued working until he was physically unable to get out of bed, about three weeks before the transplant. His staff would carry his oxygen tank up flights of stairs, stopping several times so Nick could rest. “I was trying to hang in till Christmas,” he says. “I wanted another Christmas with the kids.” When the call finally came, Nick was gravely ill and not sure he’d last another week. Five hours after the transplant operation, Nick had to have another four and a half hour surgery. Shortly after the transplant, Nick had a slight rejection, but otherwise has been healthy. Olga says he’s always been positive and the family have focussed on keeping life as normal as possible for Violeta and Nicoleta, 15 and 13 years old. “If I didn’t have my kids, I don’t think I would’ve gone through with the transplant,” Nick says. “But I had a purpose, a reason to live.”