The Lung Transplant on the Fourth Floor

In 2019, a thirty-one-year-old teacher named Marcus Reed received a double lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The donor was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore who had died in a car accident outside Raleigh. Marcus spent eleven weeks recovering, learning to breathe again with lungs that once belonged to someone else. His pulmonologist, Dr. Amita Patel, told him something he never forgot: "These lungs are a gift.…