- December 4, 2025
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Horizon West’s Andrew Wagner spent Father’s Day in Syracuse, New York, surrounded by family for a wedding.
If you had asked him seven months ago if he thought he would be able to reconnect with family members he hadn’t seen in awhile, he would have been doubtful.
He was barely functioning as he was waiting for a call from Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center in Chicago saying there was a liver ready for him for the second liver transplant in his life.
As he patiently waited day after day, he found his mindset becoming more negative as he thought of all he could miss out on in life if he didn’t receive a new liver.
He would miss the birth of his first grandchild in April. He would miss his 16-year-old daughter, Estella Wagner’s, high school graduation. He would be leaving his wife, Nicole Wagner, without a husband and his four daughters without a father.
But he was blessed to finally receive the call and had his liver transplant on Dec. 16, giving him the rest of his life to look forward to with family and friends.
Andrew Wagner’s transplant journey started in 2010 when he was living in the Virgin Islands working for the Marriott Corporation and wasn’t able to receive the medications he needed to properly care for himself and his ulcerative colitis and primary sclerosing cholangitis, which is a relatively common autoimmune disease that damaged his bile ducts in his liver.
He generally was a healthy man at only 45 years old, but his liver was failing.
As his condition worsened, the doctors at Tampa General Hospital, where he was waiting for a liver, put Andrew Wagner in a medically induced coma for six weeks.
Finally, the day had come, and in October 2010, he received what Andrew Wagner said was a liver “dubbed as not being the best liver.”
“However, it was a liver,” he said. “It was a match, and I was transplanted.”
But a new liver didn’t solve everything.
Andrew Wagner underwent three other surgeries due to complications.
After his transplant, he was beginning life all over again.
He had to learn how to talk, walk, eat and do other motor skills again.
But he did it.
He put in the work to return to normal.
He later had surgery to remove his colon, large intestine and two feet of his small intestine and have an internal colostomy pouch inserted all with the hopes of avoiding colon cancer. His chances of being diagnosed were higher after the transplant.
Andrew Wagner said he had the surgery to ensure he’d be around to raise his daughters.
Everything was OK.
At least for the time being.
When Andrew Wagner went in for a routine abdominal scan in September 2022, his life changed once again.
The scan showed he had a mass in his right lung. Doctors didn’t know if it was a fungus or cancer.
Andrew Wagner said he was at his dining table eating dinner with his family when he received the heartbreaking call.
The mass wasn’t a fungus.
It was stage one mucinous adenocarcinoma of the right middle lobe. Lung cancer.
“I was blown away,” Andrew Wagner said. “I could not believe this guy was telling me I had cancer because I had never smoked, ever in my life.”
Due to it being in an early stage and a slow-growing cancer, a surgery on Dec. 2, 2022, with follow-up CT scans showed the pathology was clean.
He was cancer free.
But it was just the beginning.
“We kind of walked out of that feeling relieved after feeling really scared,” Nicole Wagner said. “Little did we know at that time that that diagnosis was going to be the biggest roadblock, the biggest hindrance for what was coming down the pike in our future.”
In spring 2024, Andrew Wagner started exhibiting symptoms. He had pleural effusion, which is fluid around the base of the lungs and can indicate cancer.
Then came more labs and tests.
The family yet again was awaiting to see why Andrew Wagner’s health wasn’t at his best despite a liver transplant and being cancer-free. He was hospitalized due to liver complications.
His liver was failing. Again.
He needed another liver transplant.
Nicole and Andrew Wagner thought finding a hospital that would evaluate him, consider him a great candidate for transplant and put him on the list for a liver transplant wouldn’t be difficult, but the hospitals proved them wrong.
Every hospital in Florida denied him. Then the vicious hunt for a hospital up the east coast led to being unfruitful.
Andrew Wagner’s cancer diagnosis kept hospitals from giving them the “yes” they so desperately were looking for because the standard is patients need to be cancer-free for three to five years before they can receive a transplant. Andrew Wagner only was cancer-free for two years.
“In September, we had a follow-up visit with a hepatologist, and he essentially told us we needed to transfer our energy away from transplant and focus on just doing all the right things and trying to eat well, exercise and stay out of the hospital,” Nicole Wagner said. “Andrew had a 30% survival rate for 90 days.”
Feeling defeated, Nicole Wagner was watching “60 Minutes” on CBS when she heard the story of Dr. Gary Gibbon, who was a pulmonologist in California dying of stage three lung cancer and was on life support. But Gibbon received a double lung transplant at Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center.
Nicole Wagner called Northwestern immediately and asked, “If Gibbon could receive a transplant, why couldn’t her husband?”
The team at Northwestern reviewed Andrew Wagner’s case and called him.
In October, the Wagner family finally received the “yes” they had been searching for far and wide.
On Nov. 6, Andrew Wagner was put on the transplant list.
Since Andrew Wagner had to be close to Northwestern in order to be available on short notice in case a liver became available, he and his wife had to rush moving their lives temporarily to Chicago. A one-bedroom apartment two blocks from the hospital became their home.
The couple was told it only would be two weeks before Andrew Wagner would receive a liver.
Time kept passing though, and as each week went by, Andrew Wagner was getting worse.
Six weeks passed as they waited for the perfect liver.
When the couple received the call that there was a liver available for him, it was bittersweet. Andrew Wagner’s life would be saved, but in order for that to happen, someone had died.
“You’re kind of mourning at the same time as you’re happy,” Andrew Wagner said. “When I was done with that phone call, I immediately said, ‘We need to pray for that family.’ You want to call your family and friends and say, ‘We got the call. We got a liver,’ but it was hard to jump up and down. I just did not react that way. … It had to come from somebody so you are sad a little bit too.”
On Dec. 16, the wait was over. After a grueling 10-hour surgery that included three transplant surgeons and a thoracic surgeon working together to combat several challenges due to scarring from his first transplant, Andrew Wagner had a new liver.
He was walking out of the hospital back to his apartment 12 days later.
For at least two months post-transplant, Andrew Wagner had to remain close to the hospital to do follow-up testing.
On March 1, he finally returned home to Horizon West, but not before making stops in Michigan, West Virginia, Georgia and other parts of Florida for his victory lap, where he met with family and celebrated the success of the transplant.
“It was the best week ever,” Andrew Wagner said. “I didn’t want it to end.”
Andrew Wagner said he spent a lot of time in silent prayer going through the process of finding a liver and going through the second transplant.
“We have our kids and I don’t want my kids to be without a father,” he said. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘God, do I have to go through this again?’ You question a lot of things, and we did, but we have a lot of family support and prayer.”
He had his family, friends, church community and even random strangers supporting him, helping him to feel mentally and emotionally stronger in the toughest moments.
Now he is even more grateful for every moment he has and doesn’t sweat the small things. The times when he used to get upset his daughters left a dirty dish on the table or in the sink don’t bother him anymore. He’s thankful for every conversation he has with his family, even if it’s a quick two-minute conversation as his daughters are running off to school or work.
He was able to hold his granddaughter, Isla Castillo, and help his daughter Taylor Castillo adjust to life now as a parent.
Andrew Wagner now is focused on improving his strength and mobility.
“Everybody’s now saying, ‘You’re like a cat with nine lives, but I think you’ve run out of lives so you need to slow down,’” he said.
He is working on his new testimony so when he returns to work with OneBlood, he can share his story with high school students and others to encourage them to donate blood and become organ donors. OneBlood is a nonprofit providing blood and stem cell products to more than 200 hospitals in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
He started working for OneBlood after his first liver transplant where he received more than 100 blood transfusions. He learned first-hand the importance of the work OneBlood does on a daily basis.
