The woman required a ventilator “almost immediately” after arriving at the hospital, Malsin said, an indication of how quickly the virus overwhelmed her lungs.
Machines supported her body for over a month, as doctors hoped her lungs would eventually heal and allow her to breathe on her own... By early June, her lungs were showing signs of irreversible damage, leaving a transplant as the only option.
A normal double lung transplant generally takes six to seven hours, but this transplant was complicated by extensive scarring on the lungs, Bharat said, highlighting how much doctors still don’t know about the impact of the virus.
Though lung transplants are not new on their own, the damage to the woman’s lung from COVID-19 made the surgery “technically much more complex,” said Bharat, who performed the surgery with a team.
“COVID-19 is a disease unlike anything we’ve seen before,” he said. “One minute the patient is talking to you and looks comfortable, and the next minute, the patient’s oxygen starts to drop and the patient suddenly requires ventilation and intubation.”
Доктор, оперировавший ее, заявил, что никогда в жизни еще не видел столь серьезных повреждений легких.
У женщины не было тяжелых сопуствующих заболеваний, хотя она принимала иммуносупрессанты до того, как заболеть, по поводу небольшого заболевания. Врачи не уверены, сыграли ли эти иммуносупрессанты свою роль в том, что болезнь протекала столь тяжело, или нет.
После пересадки легких, пациентку вывели из комы, но она по прежнему на ИВЛ.
Согласно статистике, 85-90% пациентов, перенесших пересадку легких, выживают в течение года и могут в это время жить без посторонней помощи.
"How did a healthy woman in her 20s get to this point? There's still so much we have yet to learn about COVID-19," Dr. Rade Tomic, a pulmonologist and medical director of the Lung Transplant Program at Northwestern Medicine, said in the statement.
