Special report: A stranger’s lungs could save this woman’s life - but time is running out
Monday, 18 August 2025
A double lung transplant is Meghan Robson’s only chance of survival - an operation that carries huge risk but also hope of a new life. Senior journalist Nicholas Jones reports on the desperation and hardship of life on an organ transplant waitlist, and investigates why donor numbers have stalled.
Meghan Robson showers once a week, knowing the effort will cause utter exhaustion that makes the rest of the day a misery.
The 32-year-old was born with holes in her heart, creating pressure that, over time, severely and permanently damaged her lungs.
“I wake up really tired. I get maybe a couple hours where I can move around, and I’m pretty uncomfortable,” she says, touching her neck. “My jugular veins get distended. I get headaches. I can't even bend over without getting breathless.”
Much of her day is spent asleep. When awake it’s uncomfortable to be upright, so she lies on the couch, her brain too foggy to stay with even the easiest of easy-watching TV.
The second-storey lounge in the Wellington rental she shares with her partner Tim Holland is like a treehouse - windows on three sides frame bush and the hills and greenbelt above Wadestown.
The couple are used to the frequent screech and swoosh of Kākā, but nerves jump when her phone rings - Meghan recently went on the waitlist for a double lung transplant, and the call to say a suitable pair has been donated could come day or night.
When that happens they will get the next flight to Auckland - if it’s full the airline will bump off passengers to make room - and Meghan will undergo a mammoth surgery that will give her a stranger’s lungs and free her of the prison of her own.
“I have a false sense that it's not going to happen so early [since being put on the wait list],” she says. “I'm sure that as time goes on, it starts feeling a little bit more time sensitive - ‘When's this going to happen?’”
Organ donation can be either from a living donor (restricted to kidneys or part of a liver) or deceased donor. The latter is possible only when a person is on a ventilator in an intensive care unit, usually with a devastating brain injury.
Meghan is one of about 500 to 600 people waiting for an organ, the vast majority of whom need a kidney.
This desperate need outstrips supply - in 2024, 70 people donated organs following their death, leading to a total of 213 people receiving kidney, liver, lungs, heart, and pancreas transplants.
(Data on how many people die on the waitlist or have to come off it because of a deterioration in their condition isn’t available.)
Organ donations roughly doubled between around 2013 and 2017, thanks to improvements made after an increase in government funding.
Rates have since plateaued, however, and languish well below Australia’s. Patient advocacy groups voicing dismay include Kidney Health NZ, which says successive governments have been asleep at the wheel, costing lives and health.
The expert clinicians running our donation service say there are proven, cost effective steps New Zealand can take to catch up - but, so far, no money to implement them.
“For the resources that we have, and what we do, we do pretty well,” says Dr Jo Ritchie, clinical director for Organ Donation NZ (ODNZ), which coordinates donations and is part of the blood service.
“But we can do better. We know we can get more donors.”
‘A last resort, high-risk option’
Doing so could save patients like Meghan. She’s been told finding a match could take about 6-8 months, and a donor is expected to come up.
Her condition is unstable, however, and a drop-off in health could make her ineligible. The fear of infection hangs over her household - when Stuff visits we are asked to wear masks and abandon the interview if we have a winter illness.
Meghan was born with this vulnerability. She failed to gain weight, and at a few months old an echocardiogram revealed a hole in the wall between the two main chambers of her heart, a congenital condition called a ventricular septal defect (VSD).
Her mum Sherryle Le Chaundeler took her to Auckland, where clinicians advised the hole wouldn’t delay her growth and to, essentially, “take her home and feed her up”.
“But you couldn’t feed her up,” she says. “I persevered for a few months, and then finally just lost it one day, and asked to be referred back to the pediatrician.”
He sent Meghan to a dietician, who concluded the heart condition was secondary to poor nutrition. However, Meghan was too fatigued to eat properly.
The stress was overwhelming - Meghan was one of four kids, and her elder sister had a serious heart condition too. Their parents juggled running a berry fruit farm on the Kāpiti Coast with medical appointments, many in Auckland.
Meghan’s health worsened. Oxygen-rich blood was flowing through a hole in her heart, into her lungs instead of out to the body.
This caused pulmonary hypertension - increased blood flow and pressure in the arteries from the right side of the heart to her lungs, which were irreversibly damaged. Her heart was working too hard to pump blood, causing its muscle to weaken.
At the age of four, she had open heart surgery that revealed multiple holes. Five were closed, but the two smallest were left open, because her little body couldn’t remain on the bypass machine any longer.
As a child she managed okay, playing soccer and “running around”, her mum says, but around puberty her lung function dropped away.
She and her sister attended Heart Kids NZ camps, and got to know another girl with pulmonary hypertension, who died while on the lung transplant wait list when Meghan was 12 - a tragedy that ripped away any innocence about her own condition.
At 16 she received a text message from a wrong number. It happened to be about a video game she liked, so she answered.
“We just ended up talking,” says Tim, who lived in Auckland at the time, and contends with his own health issues in the form of chronic fatigue. “We connected over our shared struggles.”
The couple have been together ever since, and both studied computer programming (Meghan wanted to be a doctor, but abandoned that dream because of her health).
They have worked on games and web marketing apps together, and Meghan drafted the first in a planned trilogy of novels. However, her decline in health means she no longer has the energy to write or even play video games, let alone make them.
Tim’s chronic fatigue and the effort of caring for Meghan has restricted his own work, and they have for long stretches lived with family, being unable to fully cover rent and living expenses.
Things looked up a few years ago, after Tim landed contract work that allowed them to move into their Wadestown rental, and she had a purple patch of relatively good lung function.
That was short-lived, however - the momentum was reversed by a Covid infection in May 2023. Meghan spent a week in hospital, and lung inflammation and scarring took most of what little capacity she had left.
She went on the wait list for a double lung transplant a month ago - a last-resort option that promises a new life, but is high risk.
Meghan has been told there’s an approximate 10% chance of death within a month of the surgery, rising to 20% within the first year.
Her immune system will recognise the transplanted lungs as foreign and attack them, requiring a lifelong regime of heavy-duty immunosuppressant medications.
There remains a risk the body will still attack its new lungs, a sometimes fatal condition known as rejection, which can happen soon or years after transplant.
Doctors have told her the average life expectancy following a lung transplant is about seven years. If she beats those odds, living into her 50s is unlikely.
Wellington-based cardiologist Dr Andrew Aitken has cared for Meghan on and off for 20 years, and says her grit and bravery is extraordinary.
“She's stoically put up with significant limitation for many, many years … marked physical limitation, but also things like having a family not being an option with this condition, because the risks of pregnancy are just so overwhelming.
“This condition rules your life in so many ways … the paucity of donors is a real problem at the moment, I think - lack of access to donor hearts, donor lungs, donor kidneys and the like, which could transform people's lives.”
Why Australia has more donors
The Ministry of Health in 2017 launched a strategy to increase organ donations, but the rate of deceased donors has plateaued at around 12 per 1 million population, compared to over 19 in Australia and placing us in the middle of the international pack. Even in the top performing countries there is significant unmet need for organs.
Dr Ritchie of Organ Donation NZ, who is an intensive care doctor, told Stuff that key to Australia’s success has been funding dedicated, 24-hour donation specialist positions embedded within ICUs.
About 4% of NZ deaths happen in ICU, but only 1.6% of deaths can be considered for organ donation.
It takes a skilled doctor or nurse to identify a potential donor, and have time to sensitively approach the person’s family, talking them through the process and answering questions, sometimes over days.
New Zealand’s ICU workforce goes above and beyond, Ritchie says, but must contend with a demanding workload - our per capita ICU capacity is one of the lowest in the developed world.
In comparison, within Australian units a nominated clinician can step out of their day-to-day duties to solely work on organ donation, with cover brought in for as long as needed.
“They are the ones that will identify all donation opportunities, they help care for the whānau and help them make a decision that is right for them,” Ritchie says.
“When we talk to people overseas [about improving donation rates], they all say it’s getting those roles.”
A small amount of funding comes from the Ministry of Health, Ritchie says, “but it’s not much and it hasn’t gone up since that 2014 period”. Nor is it directed towards particular roles or visible, she says.
“It's just a drop in the ocean, compared to what they're spending in other countries on this.”
The need for dedicated ICU roles will be recommended in a five year strategy being finalized by ODNZ, perhaps beginning with pilots at a couple hospitals. That will be aspirational, unless the Government commits extra funds.
Health Minister Simeon Brown wasn’t available for interview, but in a statement said he recognised the toll waiting for a transplant could take.
“I have asked Health New Zealand and the Ministry of Health for advice on practical steps to boost donation rates and strengthen transplant services.
“I have also sought assurance that those waiting for transplants, and their families, are receiving the right support throughout this difficult period.”
What happens after a family says “Yes” to donation
Last year’s organ donations came from patients in 16 hospital ICUs, including Starship’s.
Of these, 54 donations came from patients with brain death and 16 followed circulatory death - patients with no chance of survival without ongoing life support.
A formal referral to ODNZ happens after a family consents to donation. At that point its donor coordinator team of nurses - known as DCs and who work in pairs in 24 hour on-call shifts - spring into action.
A flurry of testing is done, which can include bloods, X rays and CT scans, to build a detailed profile of the organ for the transplant service (there are distinct heart, lung, liver or pancreas teams), and investigate the effect of any common conditions like hypertension or diabetes.
This takes hours or even days. When an organ is accepted, ODNZ will arrange with the hospital for theatre time, day or night, and facilitate for a specialised surgical team to load into a light aircraft air ambulance, along with a donor coordinator nurse.
Upon arrival the donor coordinator will meet the donor and whānau and provide information and support, and answer any questions. Families then say goodbye - time that can include sharing stories about the person’s life, karakia and song.
During the surgery the DC liaises with the medical team who will operate on the recipient, typically at Auckland Hospital, though kidneys can be transplanted in Christchurch and Wellington.
They then carefully package the donated organs. Hearts are put into a special perfusion machine, which preserves oxygen and blood flow. Other organs are kept in a sterile container, then surrounded by ice in a chilly bin.
The focus then switches to after-life care, including gently washing and removing tubes and lines from the donor, and completing any family requests such as for handprints or hair locks.
‘We worry constantly about her health’
The thought she could soon have someone else’s lungs is mind-bending to Meghan, and secondary to more immediate problems like money.
She and Tim are both on Work and Income’s weekly supported living payment, for people who have, or are caring for someone, with a significant health condition.
Calculations are complicated by their past occasional contract work, meaning the payments total about $600 in pocket between them, a week. They could also receive a disability allowance, but this is capped at $80 a week.
They cannot cover their costs. Tim skips meals, and recently bought new shoes on sale, after water leaked through holes in his old pair after seven years of wear. Most of Meghan’s clothes have holes in them.
He has unsuccessfully sought individualised funding to help with her care and support. Through separate funding Health NZ has offered 14 hours of help a week, which Tim is appealing as totally insufficient.
Their savings will soon run out. Tim won’t be able to earn after her transplant, because it’s mandatory to have an around-the-clock support person during the months-long recovery.
They face having to give-up their home - which provides precious independence - to move into a small studio area currently being renovated for them in Sherryle’s Kāpiti Coast home.
The couple would have to pay to store essential items like their fridge and washing machine, and the strict dietary requirements for Meghan’s recovery will add to grocery bills.
Tim has set up a Give-a-little page, explaining on it that, “We worry constantly about her health, her prognosis, and how to cover our bills. With available support covering barely half our expenses, we're only months away from losing our rental - and when Meghan gets her new lungs, that miracle will bring new costs and challenges to overcome.”
That hurts his pride, he says.
“It’s embarrassing, but I said to Meghan, she’s literally dying - this is when you ask for help. I feel she deserves it. I always hoped I could get well, start a company, and give her a good life. And I haven’t been able to do that.”
It’s another act of love in a story that sprung from a text message sent to the wrong number. Meghan cannot fathom where she’d be without that happenstance.
Contact the reporter: nicholas.jones@stuff.co.nz
“I think most people have someone who is there for them, always. I don't know how you would deal with all of this stuff without having that.”
Tim feels the same.
“She's supported me through some really hard times. I couldn't imagine how bad my life would be if she wasn't in it.
“I said to her that she's not allowed to die in the surgery, because I wouldn't know how to deal with it. It's something I can't really think about.”
Mixed in with that fear and anxiety is hope.
Meghan’s post-transplant wish list includes having the fitness to walk through the nearby botanical gardens and Zealandia. She wants to learn to drive, earn money to get out of poverty, take a first vacation with Tim, and travel overseas.
“The biggest thing will come from the little things,” she says.
“Even being able to vacuum, which sounds stupid, but it's always been so hard to do, and now I just can’t do it at all.
“Being able to walk and not have to think, ‘I’m on an incline, this is hard’, or getting to the bottom of a hill and thinking, ‘I have to climb that.’”