And they were eating pizza that evening when Huddleston called to say the surgery was a success. Around 3 p.m., they were at Chick-fil-A when the nurse called back to say it was going well. She was in Foot Locker buying them shoes when the nurse called to say surgery had begun.

Now he was getting another chance - albeit a long shot - at a new life, a crucible that would test his marriage and family and force him to confront his troubled past even as he hoped for a future.Īngie took three of their sons to the Mall of America to pass the time during the eight-hour surgery. He’d kept working through the pandemic, largely dismissing covid’s threat, until he got sick in late October 2020. He had found love with wife Angie, a hospital administrator, and in the past nine years left his drug habit and criminal past behind, embracing family life, music and his job installing tinted windows for an auto detailing shop. At 16, he went to prison, ultimately serving two stints for a total 15 years on assault and drug convictions. He was sent to an Indian boarding school, where he was bullied and learned to fight back. A member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, he grew up on reservations and in tribal housing in South Dakota. 17, he was accepted as a candidate for a double lung transplant at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, one of about 200 covid-19 survivors nationwide to receive new lungs since the coronavirus pandemic began.įoote’s life had been a story of tragedy and redemption. His wife brought their children to say their goodbyes.īut Foote, then 42, got lucky. The amateur rapper had posted a farewell video on his Facebook page, worried that he would die forgotten and alone in his hospital room. His lungs were so scarred from covid-19 that doctors back home in Sioux Falls, S.D., told him he was going to die. Nathan Foote was motionless on the operating table, already under anesthesia, his chest cut open in a clamshell incision. Two surgical fellows delivered the fragile organs to Stephen Huddleston, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, who won’t even begin removing a patient’s old lungs until the new ones are safely in his hands. The lungs arrived in a chartered jet, hooked up to a machine to keep them warm and pumped with blood on their way to a transplant recipient.

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