By Joel Jacobson
Freeman Patterson welcomes the opportunity to quietly gaze from high over the Saint John River. On many occasions, his camera will be part of him, as he photographs the beauty his eye beholds, and lets the lens describe what Freeman Patterson feels – a sense of calm and tranquility. Ten years ago, he was also calm and tranquil – but he was almost dead.
 
The New Brunswick native, now living on a nature reserve near Shamper’s Bluff, N.B., about 40 km from Saint John, was deathly ill with Hepatitis B. His diseased liver had to be replaced.

“Until 1991, I was very healthy,” Freeman says. “I graduated from Acadia University with a B.A., received a fellowship to study at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in New York City, completed three years there, taught for three years in Edmonton, and then decided to be a professional photographer.”

His career – taking pictures and writing for the media, writing several how-to books on photography and presenting photo workshops – took him, and still does, to South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, many other countries, and across Canada and the United States while based in rural New Brunswick. He thinks the Hep B might have been contracted in Botswana in the 1980s and lay dormant, but can’t be sure. Nonetheless, he had it and it wore him down.

By 1999, he was very ill. He visited emergency rooms several times and was finally prepared for a liver transplant. A specialist in Toronto wanted him there, to be ready when a liver became available, but Freeman insisted on living at home. “I knew the rate of organ donation in the Atlantic Provinces was better,” he says and was proven correct. With his health history sent from Toronto General Hospital to the QEII Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Freeman was added to the transplant list.

He monitored his own health, knew he was going downhill fast and, on January 22, 2000, sent a monthly data comparison between December 1999 and January 2000 to his doctors at home, in Halifax and Toronto. “Two nights later, I got the call that a liver was waiting for me in Halifax. I was flown by Medivac from Saint John, signed what I had to sign, and went under the knife. I woke up six weeks later.”

The 12-hour transplant surgery wasn’t successful. He was on life support for five days, and placed at the head of the liver transplant list in Canada. After those five days, another liver was implanted in a seven-hour operation at the QEII but, because of the trauma to his system, he was kept “out” for the next five weeks. “Later, my transplant surgeon told me I had won the 6-49 lottery six weeks in a row. Those were my chances of surviving,” says Freeman. “I was told they weren’t even sure whether to give me the second liver because I was so far gone, but the doctor insisted.”

Six weeks of inert positioning atrophied his muscles. He had to learn to hold his head up (a painful procedure initially, he says). He spent weeks at the Nova Scotia Rehabilitation Centre site of the QEII, learning to hold a pencil, to move every muscle in his body, and eventually to walk. However, in all that time of unconsciousness, his heart did not skip a beat. It continued the flow of blood to the brain which today, at age 71, is as sharp as it was 50 years ago. Freeman has not forgotten how to laugh and how to reflect. “I remember thinking, as I flew in the plane that January 2000 night that this was a heck of a Millennium project, and I didn’t approach it with fear. Rather I saw it as something I had to deal with. Death was never in the equation in my mind. And I had confidence in the medical teams, who were absolutely fabulous throughout.”

Single all his life, Freeman had a bevy of friends and family who supported him through the ordeal, bolstered by the energy they created with their deep caring, expressed in meditation, notes, e-mails, and flowers galore. He tells of a QEII hospital housekeeping staffer who spoke to him for a few minutes each day when he was in the step-down unit. “I had no family there. I was isolated. But this woman gave me a sense of self worth by taking that interest in me for those couple of minutes a day.”

Now in what he says is “the best shape of my life,” Freeman works hard physically on a regular basis, exercises, gets proper rest, and eats well. “At my 50th reunion at Acadia recently, I was in better shape than most of my classmates,” he laughs. Freeman Patterson is a registered organ donor and continues to provide workshops in visual design and photography around the world. Most importantly, he enjoys each and every sunrise and sunset on the Saint John River.