Liesbeth Stoeffler, Lung-Transplant Pioneer, Succumbs at 61
Liesbeth Stoeffler’s is the classic story of a heroic immigrant. She emigrated from Hermagor, Austria, to America at the age of 18, alone, knowing no English, and with little prior training for jobs she might find here.
She arrived in New York City in 1977. Thirteen years later, speaking perfect English – she refused to speak German for her first three years in New York -- she held a key job in marketing communications at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Everyone at the Bernstein investment firm came to admire and love this woman, including top officers Lewis A. Sanders and Roger Hertog, founder/Chairman Zalman C. Bernstein, every salesman and all her colleagues in marketing communications.
Bernstein had some $10 billion under management at the time. The firm was famous for its communications, which made Liesbeth’s role – creating computer graphics for all its sales and marketing efforts from pitch books and client reports to conferences slides – of utmost importance.
If her story had ended here, it would have been glorious. But it didn’t. Liesbeth Stoeffler became a medical hero too.
During her childhood in Austria, she never knew that she suffered from cystic fibrosis which was dormant until much later in her life. But rather than dying as a child like most people with untreated cystic fibrosis, and not knowing she should not be able to do such things, she skied and hiked the mountains of her hometown, ran two New York City marathons, and endured semi-weekly boot-camp sessions which required running up and down 12 flights of stairs.
But she was coughing so constantly that a Bernstein colleague referred her to a pulmonologist, who gave her the correct diagnosis. Even then she wouldn’t accept defeat. She continued her athletic pursuits and her business career as best she could.
By 2008 her disease had caught up with her. But to get onto the lung-transplant waiting list at NY-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where Columbia’s transplant team worked, she had to be accepted as physically and mentally fit to endure such surgery.
She was accepted. Then came four “false alarm” trips to the hospital only to find the waiting lungs unsuitable.
Liesbeth was nearly dead when friends drove her to the hospital. Unless she received a double-lung transplant fairly soon, she would die.
It’s never easy to find suitable lungs for a transplant, let alone the double transplant that Liesbeth needed. She had waited for more than a year with an oxygen mask on her face as her lungs slowly failed.
But she did not die. She continued to display her quick wit, honesty and kindness. And blessed with Columbia’s highly skilled and compassionate medical staff and transplant team, she made history by becoming the only patient until then to survive without surgery for 18 days on a new technology called ECMO – short for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation – that breathed for her through two tubes in her neck.
“About five days into it,” she told her attending Drs. Matthew Bacchetta and Selim Arcasoy “it was the best I’d felt in years.”
A fitting pair of lungs was located just in time. The transplant was successful, and during her subsequent hospital stay Liesbeth exercised in bed, texted friends when she could not speak, and walked around when necessary. She wrote a thank-you letter to Steve Jobs for inventing the iPhone and suggested he donate these to ICUs around the country.
Once home, she started by walking across the street into Central Park and taking many rests on “her” bench. Before long she was back to running two more NYC marathons, half marathons, and mountain hiking in her native Austria. She also completed an Ironman bike course and a sprint triathlon. In total she ran 50 races.
This extraordinary story made the national news. USA Today ran a lengthy story. But after 10 years Liesbeth’s new lungs failed, and in 2019 she received a second double-lung transplant. This one was not successful.
Liesbeth Stoeffler died on March 4, 2021, survived by three sisters and two brothers. She was 61.
Born: Hermagor, Austria June 18, 1959
Died: New York NY March 4, 2021
Survivors: sisters Waltraud Wildpanner, Gabriele Stoeffler and Birgit Stoeffler, brothers Ewald Stoeffler and Hannes Stoeffler
https://joinus.cuimc.columbia.edu/participant/LiesbethStoeffler