About Nicholas

Husband. Father. Survivor. Author.

Nick Dodge spent 25 years selling enterprise technology to CISOs and C-suite executives at Fortune 1000 companies. He traveled constantly, closed large deals, and built a career defined by performance under pressure.

In April 2021, his son came home with COVID-19. Nick got sick four days later.

By May, he was on a ventilator. By June, he was on ECMO life support, a machine that pulled his blood out of his body, oxygenated it, and pumped it back in because his lungs could no longer do that job on their own. He stayed on that machine for 241 days. Five transplant centers in Chicago rejected his case. On January 31, 2022, a team of five surgeons at Northwestern Memorial Hospital gave him new lungs.

Two days later, after 241 days on ECMO life support, he breathed on his own for the first time since May 2021.

He had lost 53 pounds. He could not sit up without help, feed himself, or climb a single stair. He spent eleven months across three hospitals and another nine months in rehabilitation learning to walk again.

He came home on March 16, 2022.

A Life Returned was written with his wife, Maureen, who drove to the hospital every day for eleven months and sat in the chair beside his bed while he fought. It is their story, told from both sides of the bed.

It is also a story about Tyler, the 16-year-old who registered as an organ donor when he got his driver's license. Nick did not know his name when he wrote most of this book. He knows it now. Tyler's lungs are the reason Nick was able to stand beside his son as best man at his wedding in May 2024, officiate his niece's wedding in October of that year, and wake up every morning since February 2, 2022, breathing on his own.

Nick is a Gift of Hope Organ and Tissue Donor Network Ambassador and speaks to healthcare organizations, transplant communities, and patient groups about the patient experience and what recovery actually looks like from the inside.

He lives in the northwest suburbs of Chicago with Maureen and their family.