Don Poplin

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting. Don's journey began quite some time ago. He was diagnosed with COPD years ago and has declined slightly over the years.  Four years ago, after being vented and flown to Centracare in St Cloud from TCHC in Wadena, the idea of lung transplant was brought up. After that episode, he made a fairly full recovery and the topic of transplant was pushed aside. Three years ago, the idea of lung transplant was revisited. We contacted the University of Minnesota (UofM) and began to move forward with the preliminary testing to see if Don could be on the transplant recipient list. The final round of testing in April of 2017 found some heart disease, which was resolved with a stent.  After the stent, he had to be on Plavix (blood thinner) for a period of time, which kept him from being listed.  He finally got the OK to discontinue the Plavix in December 2017 and was officially put on the lung transplant list January 12, 2018. We were told by his Pulmonologist at the UofM that if Don were to get sick and need to be put on a ventilator again, due to his low lung function, he would not be able to come off the vent. With that in mind, our goal was to keep him healthy, out of the hospital and ready for "the call".   We were able to keep him from catching an illness with our proactive measures, however, the disease continued to progress and he landed in Tri-County Hospital in Wadena, MN on Thursday, March 21, 2019 with COPD Exacerbation.