Tampa Bay Children Transported by “Angels” to Life-Saving Organ Transplants

 

As they often do the frantic calls came in the middle of the night to Fred Cutting, of Clearwater, and David Trilling, of Lutz. Earlier this year, the volunteer pilots with Angel Flight Southeast were enlisted to transport two prospective Tampa Bay area transplant recipients to Miami for life-saving organ transplants.

 

“It’s unusual to receive two back-to-back requests for transportation of transplant patients in one week,” said Steve Purello, CEO of Angel Flight Southeast. “What made that week even more exciting is that both patients were young children.”

 

The first call came early one day in May behalf of Desmond Creary of Clearwater. The nine-month old boy was placed on the transplant wait list for a new liver after becoming ill in November 2013. Fred Cutting was the pilot who scrambled to ready his personal plane and fly Desmond and his mother, Charmaine, to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. While little Desmond did not receive an organ on that trip, Cutting was the Angel Flight Southeast pilot who flew the young family back to Miami several weeks later when another liver became available and was successfully transplanted into Desmond.

 

Angel Flight Southeast went to its list of volunteer pilots in the Tampa Bay area just hours after the Creary’s were delivered to South Florida when a plea for a second emergency flight came in. This time 15 month-old Caleb Hall, of Clearwater, was in line for a transplant operation at the same Miami hospital and David Trilling answered the call to transport precious cargo safely within hours.

 

“Caleb’s transplant has been successful! We are all done as of early this morning,” wrote Tim Hall, Caleb’s father, in a follow-up e-mail sent to Angel Flight Southeast. “God bless that pilot! He was wonderful!”

 

Both children are now back home with their families and recovering well.

 

Trilling and Cutting are two of more than 650 volunteer pilots in the Southeast who donate their time, personal aircraft and fuel to Angel Flight Southeast passengers. The organization’s “care traffic controllers” arrange approximately 3,000 flights annually, 24/7. Angel Flight Southeast relies on donations to help pay for services that help keep the pilots and passengers in the air.