Mike Tharp: How precious is a single breath

We take them for granted the way we do breathing.

In fact, that's what they do for us -- breathe.

Our lungs.

Only when we're threatened with losing one, or both, do we begin to understand how important they are to our life, to living, period.

That's what Chuck and Linda Barenchi had to face in February. The Atwater couple flew to Duke University in Durham, N.C., for a double lung transplant. They'd known since 2008 that Chuck, along with his wife, a longtime Farmers Insurance manager here, had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

In shorthand, that's severe pneumonia with no known cause, which typically strikes older adults.

What the couple has been through in the past 10 months reads like the trials of Job. Heart bypass. Two transplants. An eye stroke. Back surgery.

As they enter the New Year, however, they're both upbeat about coming home and sticking around quite awhile. "There were times I was worried how things could turn," says Linda. "But no matter how bad the health issues are, there are miracles. You have to believe in them and pursue them."

Even as it became harder and harder to breathe, Chuck refused to cut back much on his activities, especially travel. Linda remembers them visiting Australia last year. Near Ayers Rock, the famous sandstone formation in the outback, Chuck used his walker to climb on a camel. While she took video, he braced his Inogen portable oxygen container on the animal. Later that year they went to New York at Christmastime to see the city in season, and total strangers stopped to ask how he was making it with all that gear.

But even his toughness couldn't conquer the disease. He was scheduled for surgery at UC San Francisco in January. Then just before he was to be admitted, doctors discovered that a three-way heart bypass was necessary. UCSF doesn't do those with transplant situations. Duke does. UCSF pulmonologist Hal Collard, who Chuck calls his "guardian angel," worked with a colleague at Duke to get Chuck transferred there.

Local physicians were instrumental in the couple's early decisions: Rama Nandipati, Nicolas Dela Pena and the county's health rehabilitation manager, Henry Moreno. Chuck and Annetta Meyer and Mark Seivert were among some 300 friends throughout the county who rallied round them.

So on Feb. 3, with about 50 family and friends to see them off at Merced Airport, the Barenchis boarded a red Lear jet air ambulance. He couldn't fly commercially or drive cross country because he needed so much oxygen. There was a 1 percent chance, Linda reckons, that their insurance would cover the $23,665 cost of the flight -- but through three subsidiary policies, they were able to get reimbursed.

At Duke doctors proceeded with the heart surgery -- but it became a much more complicated procedure and they performed a five-way heart bypass. Linda says if the physicians had known going into the operation that it would be a five-way instead of three, they wouldn't have done it "because Duke hasn't had a patient survive" that operation. Only a handful in the whole U.S. have made it.

Chuck did.

In early April came word that a left lung was available. Doctors did the 11½-hour surgery and he was hospitalized for 17 days. (Once they got to Duke the couple moved into a small apartment in Durham for the duration.) The experts wanted to do the second transplant fast, since they feared bacteria from the native lung could migrate to the new one. Chuck was working hard at Duke's renowned Center for Living Rehabilitation -- but with a bad back whose stabilizers had come loose during the long surgery, his rehab was restricted.