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A 27-year-old Arizona man now has new lungs and a wife after holding an impromptu wedding ceremony in a Mayo Clinic hospital ICU room — just days before undergoing double-lung transplant surgery.
Watch: New lungs, new wife for Mayo Clinic transplant patient
Journalists: Broadcast-quality video (3:47) is in the downloads at the end of this post. Please courtesy: "Mayo Clinic News Network." Read the script.
"I had always noticed that, despite being an athlete for my entire life, I never really had the same cardio endurance as my peers. And then later on in my life, it would come to light that I actually had this disease called PPFE, or pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis, a rare form of lung disease," says Mateo Franco, who lives in Mesa, Arizona.
"By July of 2025, I had to go back into Mayo Clinic in Phoenix because my breathing and my shortness of breath, my fatigue were at an all-time high. That's when they decided that lung transplant was the only viable route," he says. "They put me on ECMO in Phoenix. I got flown on a private medical jet to Rochester."
Dr. Sahar Saddoughi is a lung transplant surgeon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She performed Mateo's double-lung transplant.
"A patient on ECMO support is in critical condition. For Mateo, that was keeping him alive, and his only way to get disconnected from the ECMO machine would be to undergo lung transplantation," says Dr. Saddoughi.
Mateo's transplant surgery would be even more challenging because he had pectus excavatum, a condition in which the breastbone is sunken into the chest.
"I had a surgery to correct that in 2023, and they put two metal bars into my chest to correct the shape of my rib cage in my chest wall. That was one big reason why other hospitals had denied me for the lung transplant because it was too complex to have to deal with those bars, plus putting in new lungs," Mateo says. "I really don't think another hospital could have done what Mayo Clinic did."
"That's the beauty of Mayo Clinic. We take on these types of challenging cases, knowing there is a team of experts to care for these patients," says Dr. Saddoughi. "Obviously, there were certain intricacies of the case that made his case particularly difficult. First, he was very sick and inpatient out in Arizona. Two, he had multiple previous surgeries on his chest and right lung, which makes lung transplant surgery more challenging. And then, three, was his chest deformity and reconstruction of this post-lung transplant to allow enough space for his heart, especially the right ventricle."
Mateo's college sweetheart, Isabella, was at his side in the ICU at the hospital as he waited for donor lungs to become available. A marriage proposal, followed by a wedding at Mayo, soon became a reality.
"We had been together for five-plus years. So, you know, staring down the barrel of a very serious surgery, we figured we wanted to go through that as husband and wife," Mateo says. "The night nurses came in early for their shifts, and they decorated this atrium for us as a little impromptu wedding chapel. They made these cute little rings out of beads. It's pretty much like we eloped. You know, not quite a chapel in Vegas, but it's the next best thing. We got married on July 26, and the transplant happened on July 31."
Dr. Saddoughi says the complexity of Mateo's case necessitated the involvement of a multidisciplinary team, both in an out of the operating room, including the Transplant team, Thoracic Surgery, Plastic Surgery, and Vascular Surgery.
"We were in the operating room at least eight times during a two-week period," says Dr. Saddoughi. "This is the magic, I would say, of Mayo Clinic, truly in this case, because it's beyond one surgeon or one part of a team. It really involved a huge multidisciplinary team and also the support from Mayo Clinic in Arizona to safely get him here and to care for Mateo postoperatively, as well."
"Everyone at Mayo Clinic, the care I got was just unparalleled. It was amazing. I know that the job is not easy, but they make it seem easy. They're so good at what they do," Mateo says.
"He had fortitude. He had the fight in him to get through all of this, and that's a big part of Mateo's success," says Dr. Saddoughi.
Three months after his double-lung transplant, Mateo left the care of Mayo Clinic in Rochester as a newlywed and returned home, where he continues to receive follow-up care at Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
"For the first couple weeks, I would keep getting surprised by how deep I was able to breathe. Being able to do the dishes without getting tired, do the laundry — it's just little things, and it just feels incredible," Mateo says. "I would like to thank the donor and the donor's family. They gave me another chance at life, and that's something that I'll forever be grateful for."
"To know that he has that bright future that we wanted for him — that the plan that we tried to execute worked out. I mean, what better joy?" says Dr. Saddoughi.
"Dr. Saddoughi is a complete lifesaver, the way she, you know, took a chance on something that other hospitals, other doctors, said, 'No, we can't do this.' She said, 'Yeah, watch me.' And she nailed it. She knocked it out of the park," Mateo says.
And he's looking forward to enjoying his new life as a married man.
"Now that I can really function, the world's our oyster. We can do anything," Mateo says.
