After two lung transplants, he’s an all-star catcher playing ‘just as hard as I can’

Five years ago, Christian Lupo stared down the likelihood of life in a convalescent chair, his days spent merely surviving, watching his strength, spunk and identity slip further into the past.

He’d had a double lung transplant — twice.

On his worst days, it took 45 minutes to walk downstairs. His pulse ox reading once dipped to 50. He spent 12 days in a hospital, connected to machines, breathing through a tube in his neck. All this thanks to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, diagnosed at age 39 for reasons no one can explain.

“I’m just lucky, I guess,” Lupo laughed.

So flash ahead to last spring and there’s Lupo, a 55-year-old rookie on the baseball diamond, pulling on his catcher’s mask and squatting behind home plate.

Sometimes he huffs and puffs. Sometimes he fake-adjusts his shin guards for a chance to catch his breath. But come Labor Day weekend, he’ll be sporting no. 29 on a bright blue Bulls jersey, playing in the all-star game.

“Christian has been our guy,” said Mark Shaefer, his coach in the over-60 classic division of the Central Carolina Men’s Senior Baseball League. “He’s not a tall guy. He’s not a big guy. But I’ll tell you what, he’s got a huge heart. He’s back there, getting beat up, diving for balls because the pitchers aren’t always great. He says, ‘Hey coach, if we play a double-header, I’m in for both.’”

Lupo grew up playing catcher in the pony leagues of upstate New York, where Yankees fandom is mandatory for Italian families like his. He knocked around in high school and college, then in MSBL leagues into his 20s.

‘How could this happen?’

He jokes that nobody would figure him for a power-lifter now, but in his day, he could handle close to 500 pounds.

On top of that, his career with the product-testing firm NSF won him a “40 under 40” business award in Michigan, where he was applauded for increasing revenue by 30%.

But around 2007, he noticed himself sweating heavily walking up a flight of stairs, unlike older and heavier men. A doctor had him walk on a treadmill and he lost his breath after three minutes. When the diagnosis came, Lupo went straight to denial, seeking second, third and fourth opinions.

“I was very strong,” he said. “I worked out all the time. I was moving up in my career. My brain was rejecting it. Kind of a mentality of, ‘How could this happen?’ “

With no known cause, IPF causes scarring and stiffness in the lungs, getting gradually worse. Sometimes medication can slow it down, but sometimes a transplant is the only option. Lupo’s first transplant came in 2010, and it wasn’t a perfect match.

He had rejection issues, and surgery for acid reflux, then landed back on the waiting list in 2018, waiting for his third pair of lungs. But this time his medical team in Michigan deemed the transplant too risky, and his doctor basically said, “We can keep you comfortable.”

Neither Lupo nor his wife, Kelly, accepted that, so in 2019, they packed up for North Carolina and Duke Hospital, which performed Lupo’s second transplant. After far-fewer rejection issues, considerable rehab and a successful bout with COVID-19, Lupo was rebounding.

A nurse who played baseball even told him, “Maybe I’ll see you out there.”

And this spring, he was.

‘I don’t take that for granted’

Lupo lives in Hope Mills outside Fayetteville, where she works as a physician assistant and he plays for the Bulls — a team that consists entirely of players who didn’t get picked by other teams. As the Bulls’ only catcher, he had no time for last-minute cold feet.

“I knew I couldn’t run to first very fast,” he said. “If a ball got past me, I wasn’t going to be able to go after it. They probably got sick of me saying that.”

But Lupo did manage two hits in eight at-bats.

And he did throw out a base-stealer.

And he did chase a foul ball back to the fence, snagging it with a diving catch.

“I hate even to mention it,” he said, thinking back. “I hate to feel I’m bragging. I have this impostor syndrome. It means a lot to me. When they tell you you can’t work, or lift weights, or play baseball anymore, it takes your identity away. So you get some of that back.

“Even just to take these breaths,” he continued, “every time I breathe in, I don’t take that for granted. While I’m still breathing, while I still have this set of lungs, I’m going to play just as hard as I can.”

Lucky, maybe. Relentless for sure.