ENTERPRISENEWS.com – Putting pen to paper and working on the love story with a twist of fantasy that had been fermenting in his head became an escape of sorts for author Andrew Botieri.
After years of battling scleroderma – a rare autoimmune disease that makes the body overproduce collagen, damaging organs, connective tissue and skin – Botieri was preparing for a double lung and kidney transplant.
His new book, “The Magical Espresso Machine,” came out Oct. 18, 2025, and he got the call Nov. 18, 202
5, to head to Massachusetts General Hospital for his triple transplant. It would be the first of its kind for the hospital.
“As I started to realize I’d be put on the donor list, I wanted to hurry up the book because there was a chance I’d not get off the operating table,” Botieri, 67, of Plymouth said. “That’s how major of a surgery it was.”
After 52 days in the hospital between the intensive care unit and a rehabilitation center, Botieri is celebrating his newfound health and the release of his book, which is a love story that spans seven decades from World War I in Italy, to the present in Plymouth.
How scleroderma changed Botieri’s life
Botieri grew up in Hanson, and in the late 1990s began working as vice president of sales and operations for the start-up dot.com company AllApartments, which eventually merged with Realtor.com to create the mega real estate site HomeStore.com.
It was a demanding corporate job that took him all over the country. He said he was working upwards of 80 hours a week when in 2000 he was diagnosed with scleroderma, likely due to stress.
Later that year the disease shut down Botieri’s kidneys and he almost died in the emergency room of a Phoenix hospital, where he spent 28 hours in a coma.
“I woke up and realized my mom and dad had flown out to Phoenix not knowing if I was alive or not and then I spent 13 days in hospital,” said Botieri, who needed to do dialysis for six months. “It was then I said it’s time to come home after 18 years, and I moved back here and moved to Plymouth.”
Botieri scaled back his career, focused on public speaking, sales coaching and in 2012 wrote his first book, “A Celebration of Life – A Story of Hope, A Miracle and The Power of Attitude” about his ordeal.
“It’s about my journey and how to find balance in our lives because we’re so out of whack, and I’m a firm believer that the trigger to a lot of illnesses and diseases is stress,” he said. “A lot of stress we create and put out there, but we also have the ability through attitude and discipline to remove that stress.”
Botieri was Massachusetts General Hospital’s first triple-organ transplant
In 2015, Botieri said he noticed he started getting winded and had a persistent cough, leading doctors to discover he had developed fibrosis of the lungs caused by scleroderma. Doctors floated the idea of a double lung transplant, but Botieri said he was hesitant.
Several years later he traveled to Europe, including Italy, and needed supplemental oxygen to get through the trip.
“I came back from that trip and was so exhausted that I called my doctor and said I think it’s time to discuss a transplant,” he said.
Because the anti-rejection medication is harsh on the kidneys, doctors told Botieri he likely wouldn’t survive the lung transplant without transplanting a kidney as well.
He started the workup process at the same time as he dove into writing his new book, inspired by his recent trip to Italy.
In November 2025, Botieri got the call that a 57-year-old man named Ralph had died and Botieri would be getting his organs. The surgery lasted more than 12 hours.
“I’m the true million-dollar man,” Botieri said. “So far, the doctors are amazed at how I’m doing, and praise the good Lord, he’s been keeping me strong.”
Botieri said he recently had the chance to speak to his donor’s brother, John, and said the conversation was “extremely emotional.” He has plans to meet John this summer.
What ‘The Magical Espresso Machine’ is about
Botieri said the idea for the book started in 2020, when he had plenty of time on his hands to reminisce and think “what if?”
“I was thinking, ‘what if I never left and married my high school sweetheart and had a family and didn’t do what I did?'” he said. “From there, it was, ‘what if my grandparents never met, and what if my great grandparents never met.'”
That’s when the plot for “The Magical Espresso Machine” started to take shape. The story is a historical, fictional dual-timeline love story with a touch of fantasy.
It takes place in Northern Italy prior to and during World War I, where two teenagers, Generosa and Caesar, want to be together, but war tears them apart. Before they’re separated, they take a photograph in front of a cafe, and it isn’t until later Caesar notices a blue smudge around the photo, indicating their souls were put into the espresso machine.
Generosa years later opens a cafe and is gifted that magical espresso machine.
Decades later, Generosa’s great great niece, Marie, is happily living in Plymouth with her husband, Anthony, and their daughter, Jacelyn. Marie decides to open a cafe, prompting Generosa to send her the espresso machine. The family soon discovers that their lives are intertwined with the mysterious machine whose magic transcends time from Italy to Plymouth.
“It was really a great labor of love, but it kept me focused and kept my mind off of the transplants,” Botieri said.
To learn more about Botieri and to purchase his book, visit andrewbotieri.com/the-magical-espresso-machine.
By Jessica Trufant
