Scottsdale dentist gives back after lifesaving transplant
Scottsdale dentist Mark Peck was the picture of good health. At age 60, he was treating patients in his private practice for nine months of the year and spending his summers as a whitewater river guide. He was also training with a team of 10 firefighters to climb Mount Everest to spread the cremains of his firefighter son, Austin Peck, who died of cancer in 2019.
It was during the Mount Everest training that he noticed he was having some difficulty keeping up with the others at higher elevations. A trip to the doctor identified a heart valve issue, which was surgically repaired at the end of 2020. Once he was given the green light, Dr. Peck was ready to jump back into his active lifestyle, but nothing prepared him for what happened next.
Reputation for accepting the most difficult and challenging cases
Dr. Peck, in his own words, suddenly became “delirious and deathly ill” in early 2021, having a heart attack on top of spinal meningitis, encephalitis, pneumonia and a stroke, all happening as he was rushed to a local emergency room. He was placed on an ECMO life-support machine that maintained his lung function until he was urgently transferred to St. Joseph’s Norton Thoracic Institute, hoping to qualify for a lung transplant—deemed his only possibility of survival.
Dr. Peck's medical condition was extremely complex, but after an extensive and thorough evaluation, he was approved for the transplant procedure and placed on the waitlist for donor lungs. Although patients typically wait months to be matched with donor lungs at other programs, the wait time at the Norton Institute averages just two weeks!
“I received my new lungs on April 6, 2021, thanks to a generous organ donor,” says Dr. Peck. “I am super grateful to the doctors and nurses and everyone at the Norton Institute at St. Joseph’s. They saved my life … probably more than once! I know that I am extremely fortunate.”
Although he was unable to accompany his climbing partners up Mount Everest in person, he was there in spirit. They reached the top seven days after his lifesaving transplant. “I feel like I summited as well,” he says.
Challenges community to donate in a dollar-to-dollar matching gift campaign
In gratitude for the lifesaving care he received at Norton Thoracic Institute, Dr. Peck and his wife, Marie, generously matched donations up to $50,000 during a recent promotion to support the lung transplant program at Norton Thoracic Institute.