Senior Airman Tre Porfirio was laying cable in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, on November 21 when he was shot three times in the back from about ten feet away, by an insurgent who had been posing as a member of the Afghanistan army.  It required eleven surgeries to reconstruct his abdomen, including some that were groundbreaking.  This surgery was the first known successful transplant of insulin producing cells after severe trauma resulting in the complete loss of the pancreas, according to Walter Reed officials.

On May 6, the Huber Senior Carvers, who meet at the Huber Heights Senior Center, had the opportunity and pleasure of meeting SA Tre Porfirio and the “special lady” in his life, Ahja Nock.  They had been invited to stop by the center so they could be presented a special hand carved eagle head cane.  The Huber Senior Carvers have been participating in the Eagle Head Cane Project for over three years.  Originally this project was started by a group of carvers in Eastern Oklahoma, and has spread to just about every state.

The goal is to “provide presentation canes to a select group of post 9-11 veterans who have received some manner of leg disability from combat related action.

The 21 year old senior airman received lifesaving medical attention at U.S. military hospitals in Afghanistan and Germany before being removed to Walter Reed on November 24.  There, a transplant surgeon, removed Porfirio’s pancreas, iced it down and had it flown to Miami where a specialist, Dr. Camillo Ricordi, who had developed a method for isolating insulin-producing islet cells, waited.  Dr. Ricordi, and his staff, spent a very early Thanksgiving Day harvesting the islet cells.  They then were put into a solution, bagged and flown back to Washington for the infusion into Porfirio’s liver later on Thanksgiving Day.

Tre Porfirio had eleven surgeries in 20 days, and has more ahead of him.  He can expect to appear in several medical journals, because of this record breaking surgery.  Doctors hope that his body will have enough ability to regulate blood sugar levels enough so that he will suffer little or no effects from diabetes.

When Porfirio was asked by Jake Jacobsen, who carved the eagle for his cane, as to what type presentation ceremony he would prefer, the answer was for a nice, simple and quiet presentation.  Otherwise, newspapers and television reporters would have swarmed the Huber Senior Center to photograph and interview the man, who had such groundbreaking surgery.

That was not the case on July 9, when he was awarded the Purple Heart at a ceremony that took place at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.