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Inspired by Poignant Memories
Fauver gift supports quest to cure deadly lung disease
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Ellen Fauver, who lost her husband, James,
to pulmonary fibrosis, is providing support
for research into the disease led by the Miller School’s Marilyn Glassberg, M.D. |
Medical researchers are at a loss to explain what causes pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that scars and thickens lung tissue and results in more than 40,000 deaths annually. What is known is that 70 percent to 80 percent of pulmonary fibrosis (PF) victims were once smokers, and most PF sufferers are men over the age of 50.
James Fauver had been a nonsmoker for 15 years and was 59 years old when he began experiencing shortness of breath in Bonita Springs, Florida, during the latter part of 2005. “One day he left his putter in the golf cart and ran back to get it,” Ellen Fauver recalls of her late husband. “When he returned to the putting green he said, ‘Ellen, I can’t believe how out of breath I am!’”
James Fauver underwent a battery of tests to pinpoint his illness. On February 12, 2006, the same day he and Ellen were to fly to St. Louis for a friend’s birthday party, James Fauver learned he had PF. He wasted little time informing his wife.
“I said, ‘What is pulmonary fibrosis?’” Ellen remembers. “Jim said, ‘Ellen, it’s a fatal lung disease.’ We were just stunned.” The Fauvers honored their commitment to attend the St. Louis celebration and “wanted to be excited, but there was this cloud hanging over us,” Ellen Fauver says.
After returning to Florida, the Fauvers paid a visit to Marilyn Glassberg, M.D., an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, and director of the NIH-funded interstitial lung disease program at UM. The couple also saw a pulmonary specialist in Durham, North Carolina, in an unsuccessful quest for a positive prognosis. James Fauver ultimately opted for an intravenous formula of vitamins and minerals, but his symptoms grew progressively worse. In September 2006, Fauver was hospitalized in Naples. A few days later, he was transferred to University of Miami/Jackson under Glassberg’s care, but succumbed to his disease on September 16, 2006, a week before his 60th birthday.
“I saw someone I love just die in front of me,” Ellen Fauver says. “It’s still very, very painful.” On a mission to find a PF cure, Fauver has donated $85,000 to the Miller School since her husband’s death. The money has been earmarked specifically for Glassberg’s use.
Fauver says Glassberg was chosen because of “her energy, her enthusiasm, and the fact that she said she was eventually going to find a cure for pulmonary fibrosis,” Fauver says. “And I believe her.”
When it comes to Fauver, Glassberg says: “Some of the best work coming out of my lab in years has really been supported in its entirety by her.
“Ellen’s husband was obviously very dear to her, and she wanted to turn his loss into something that would turn pulmonary fibrosis research in a different direction.”
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