Above:
Jerry Nettles works under the
hood of his truck at his home in
Williston, Florida.
“ Jerry doesn’t worry about
anything ... he has a strong heart.
I think that positive attitude
helps with healing.
stand up. His health journey proved long
and challenging, but after a lung transplant
performed in 2017 at UF Health Shands
Hospital, Nettles has resumed his favorite
activity: working with his hands.
Nettles first noticed breathing trouble in
2006, when he took his daughter to the local
school track. He usually kept up with her, but
this time he couldn’t make it once around
the track. A month later, he fell on one knee
at work, unable to inhale. He saw a doctor
in Gainesville in 2010, who diagnosed him
with COPD and emphysema.
Nettles was referred to the UF Health
lung transplant list, but the process
required pausing his work to be ready at
all times for that call signaling his new
lungs were ready. So, he decided to keep
working, even when the morning walk
from his car became an ordeal.
“I’d be worn out, bona fide tired, before
I made it to the building,” Nettles says. “I
did that for another year or two. I like to
work, and I like to take care of my family.”
But one day, the difficulty breathing
became too much for him.
“It was 4 a.m., and I turned to my wife
and said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make
it,’” he says.
An ambulance rushed Nettles to UF
Health Shands Hospital, where he stayed
for two days.
“The doctor told me, ‘You’re lucky to
be alive,’” he says. “He said if I didn’t get
new lungs, I’d die in four years. I was 48.
I wasn’t scared of dying, but I wanted to
live.”
Nettles calls being on the transplant list
“a long process of holding on.” In August
2016, UF Health called Nettles with news
of new lungs, but his phone didn’t receive
the call. Instead of reacting with anger or
sadness, Nettles took it in stride.
“I thought, maybe somebody needed
those lungs more than me, or those lungs
might not have worked for me,” he says.
On March 23, 2017, Nettles’ phone rang
at 11:40 p.m., just as he and his wife, Nina,
were on their way to bed. “Can you arrive
by 12:30 a.m.?” asked the voice on the
other end of the phone. Nettles grabbed
the suitcase that had been waiting in the
corner for months.
“Driving over there, I wasn’t nervous. I
was ready,” Nettles says.
He recalls joking with the nurses as
they readied him for the extracorporeal
membrane oxygenation machine, or
”
— Nina Nettles
Jerry's wife
PHOTOS BY MINDY C. MILLER
4 | F LO R I DA P HYS I C IAN