Faith and healing

Doctors get only some of credit

With 15 percent lung capacity, Clay Naylor carried an oxygen tank on his back to ease his labored breathing. He could barely move and often spat up blood.

Then came the double-lung transplant at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Eight months of waiting and praying paid off.

At midnight, nurses shaved his body and filled him with intravenous fluid. Then the 25-year-old talked with his family.

“If I don’t see you in a few hours, I’ll see you in eternity,” he told them before the seven-hour operation.

About 40 relatives and friends waited in the wings. They sang. They prayed.

When it was over, Naylor said, the doctor informed them of the surgery’s success.

That was in 2008. In May, the Norcross, Ga., native, now 26, marked his first anniversary with his new lungs. It was a year filled with bouts of pneumonia and a medically induced coma, but one that reinforced his faith in God and renewed his love for life.

“I take nothing for granted,” Naylor said recently. “I try to live every day to the fullest.”

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Naylor’s health problems stem from cystic fibrosis, a genetic respiratory disease that batters the lungs and pancreas and worsens with age, often killing its carrier before age 40.

Doctors diagnosed Naylor with the disease at age 4 and initially gave him 14 years to live. They advised the young man to exercise to clear his lungs of mucus and get the airflow going.

“Your lungs fill up with so much phlegm, it basically strangles you,” he said. “Some kids can get very sick and go down very quickly. So much of it depends on their lifestyle.”

So Naylor led an active life growing up in Norcross. He fished, hiked, rode horses and played baseball.

But in ninth grade at the disease started getting the best of him. With just 60 percent lung capacity, Naylor couldn’t keep pace with fellow baseball players.

By the time he graduated in 2006 from North Georgia College in Dahlonega, Ga., Naylor’s lung capacity had plunged to 20 percent. Even so, during and after college, Naylor led Bible study groups, counseling students about life, relationships and “their walk with God.”

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Naylor’s suffering continued months after his surgery. Despite his new lungs, he had constant congestion, fevers and vomiting that made him weak. He took painkillers and sleeping pills that made him hallucinate. For almost a month, he was put in a medically induced coma.

“I closed my eyes, and the next memory I had was a month later,” he said. “It took me forever to learn how to walk again.”

These days, Naylor said he continues to talk to students about his faith,”just with more passion and zeal.” He also has started writing a book, loosely titled “God and Our Suffering.”

“I want to write something that will teach people to find their joy, their strength, their peace and even their purpose in God through their suffering,” he said.

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BY THE NUMBERS

• 30 — Approximate number in thousands of children and adults in the United States who have cystic fibrosis.
• 10 — Approximate number in millions of children and adults in the United States who carry the gene that causes cystic fibrosis but do not develop the disease.
• 37 — Median age to which a cystic fibrosis patient survived in 2008.
• 2 — Age by which most cystic fibrosis patients are found to have the disease.