Today, Dimitri Georgiadis can breathe easy, but that wasn't always the case.
"They took X-rays, cat scans,” Dimitri said. “The Fibrosis had spread rapidly, significantly.”
Dimitri had been sick since 2006, but in 2017 his condition became far worse.
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"The team all agreed he needed to be on the transplant list," said Eleni Georgiadis, Dimitri’s wife.
The only place Dimitri could conduct the procedure was Temple University in Philadelphia, and so living in Syracuse meant being ready to drop everything and leave at a moment’s notice.
"That's when my heart was racing cause I'm like okay, now what do we do?” Eleni said. “How am I going to get this transportation under control?"
Eleni’s heart would race for two more years until October 2019, when a friend at church introduced them to Ted Limpert — an introduction she viewed as a gift from God. Limpert, a Syracuse city judge and retired fighter pilot, did not hesitate to help and offered to fly Eleni and Dimitri to Philadelphia the second a lung was available.
From the moment the call would come in, Eleni and Dimitri would have four hours or the lung would go to someone else. On November 18 at 8:45, the phone rang, the time had come.
"He's like 'Is this for real, is this for the lung?' and the lady says 'yeah, we have one lung for you.'” Eleni said. “So he's looking at me [saying] 'This is the call.'"
But there was a problem.
"I had already checked the weather. I knew we weren't flying.” Limpert said.
From the first time he met Dimitri and Eleni, Limpert started religiously checking the weather along their flight path. When the call came in, Limpert had to pivot to plan B. He gassed up the car and picked up Dimitri and Eleni at home.
"I plugged into the driving app, I used Waze,” Limpert said. “It said we're gonna be late. We weren't going to make it in time."
He had a police escort on standby, but thankfully it wasn't needed.
"There was no traffic at all; it was like the road was given to us by God,” Eleni said.
“I trusted him,” Dimitri added. “I knew we were gonna make it."
"If I drove expeditiously, we could make it in time, and we ended up getting here with 15 minutes to spare."
For their first reunion since the transplant, it was another rainy and foggy day in Philadelphia but with a major difference. It's a lot easier to fit Dimitri in the backseat because he doesn't have an oxygen tank.
With his new lung and Dimitri's health no longer in question, there remained one question we all wanted to know — how fast did Limpert go? He simply laughed and smiled while jokingly talking in legal jargon.
We may never know Limpert's exact speed, but we know it was just fast enough to save a life.
