A breath of life

AS I WRITE THIS, Sarah Murnaghan is in the O.R. at CHOP, undergoing a lung transplant.

So Steven Hanratty, Jeff Brown, Jason Billig and Rasheed Turner can hang on to their own lungs for the time being.

The men had contacted me, separately, after reading my recent column about how desperately Sarah - a 10-year-old dying of cystic fibrosis - needed a lung transplant to save her life. Each had volunteered to give her a lung if medical science allowed it.

(It does. But the procedure is rare because the surgery is so risky.)

These men were willing to go far beyond the easy act of adding their name to the Change.org petition - it has more than 371,000 supporters - that calls for amending organ-transplant policies that prohibit children younger than 12 from receiving adult lungs.

Which reminds me of that famous riddle about the chicken and the pig:

In a ham-and-egg breakfast, what's the difference between the chicken and the pig?

The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.

The petition signers are chickens. The men who offered to donate lungs are, pardon the expression, pigs.

"I can come down right now - she can have it," Steven Hanratty told me, as if he'd just noticed he had a block of free time and could work a major surgical procedure into the afternoon. "I can be there for as long as you need me."

Hanratty so urgently wanted to save Sarah's life, I felt bad telling him that the Daily News does not (yet . . . ) have on-site capability to remove organs from live donors. I promised, though, to make calls on his behalf to Gift of Life, the region's organ-procurement agency, and find someone to speak with him about live donation.

"OK, but don't call back for an hour," he said. "I'm almost out of minutes on my phone. I have to get some money to buy more."

I marveled that a person of such humble means was willing to part with half of something valuable if it could help a child he'd never met. Me, I'd never take that risk for any child but my own. I'm just not that selfless.

In other words, I'm not Jeff Brown. The 41-year-old Port Richmond native read my column, melted at the photo of Sarah and decided then and there that if one of his man-size lungs could fit into her little-girl chest, she could have it.

He didn't discuss it with his girlfriend of 25 years, Jenine Reynolds, because "she'd freak out," he told me in a phone call. So he consulted his father.

"He said to weigh all my options, then make a choice," said Brown, who is childless and flips real estate for a living. "I love kids. I have tons of nieces and nephews. And I come from a family that gives back a lot. It's in my blood, I guess."

When he learned that Sarah's parents, Janet and Fran Murnaghan, had adopted a child from Africa, the deal was sealed.

"These sound like wonderful people who deserve help," he said.

You know who else is wonderful? Jason Billig.

The 29-year-old single dad and appliance delivery man said it would be "an honor" to give Sarah a lung.

"If you have a chance to save a child's life, there's not even a question," he said. "I pray every day, and I ask God to show me what He wants me to do. So I look for signs. When I read Sarah's story, I thought, 'Maybe God is giving me a sign here.' "

But the surgery would be dangerous for him, I said. If he died during surgery, his 10-year-old daughter - of whom he has custody - would be fatherless. How could he take that chance?

"It would be hard," he said. "But I've had 29 good years. I've been so blessed. If I could give this little girl another year of life, I don't see how I couldn't do it."

When I paused, overwhelmed by the generosity of his answer, he took my silence for confusion and said, "I'm sorry. Maybe I'm not explaining myself right . . . ?"

I swallowed hard and told him he'd explained himself just fine.

I didn't get a chance to speak with Rasheed Turner, because he's in a western Pennsylvania prison. But he wrote to say that he was in the final stretch of an 11-year sentence, was in perfect health and wanted to give Sarah a lung.

"I'm not asking anything in return," he wrote, except for "the doctor to do a great job in the transition of the lung on both sides. I say this because I have three kids and wouldn't want anything to go wrong and they lose their father."

Thankfully, that will not happen. Because of another family's generosity in the midst of grief, these men will not need to act on the generous decisions they made in the prime of their lives.

They're not pigs.

They're angels.