The patient, a Spanish woman in her twenties, had been on an intensive care ventilator at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago for six weeks. “She was the hospital’s sickest corona patient,” her physician Beth Malsin said in a news release today. The doctors do not yet know how it was that this young woman became so sick and is still being investigated.
Damaged beyond repair
During her ICU stay, the doctors made every effort to keep her other organs as fit as possible so that when the time came, she could have a transplant. Her lungs were damaged beyond repair and a double transplant was her only chance of survival.
–
–
When the woman eventually stopped testing positive for the virus, she was put on a transplant list. The operation took place 48 hours later, with success.
“An opportunity to survive”
“We are one of the first hospitals to successfully perform a lung transplant on a patient recovering from the coronavirus,” said surgeon Ankit Bharat. “We want others to know that it is safe to perform such surgery on terminally ill corona patients. It provides them with an opportunity to survive the virus.”
Although the young woman still has a long way to go, the doctors believe she will fully recover from the virus with her new lungs.
–
–
