A young woman whose lungs were destroyed by the coronavirus has a second shot at life after a successful double lung transplant.
Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago announced the successful surgery on Thursday, noting that it is believed to be the first time a COVID-19 patient in the United States has undergone such a procedure. The patient, who has not been named, is in her 20s and had spent weeks on a ventilator as the virus ravaged her lungs.
“For many days, she was the sickest person in the Covid ICU — and possibly the entire hospital,” Dr. Beth Malsin, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the hospital, said in a statement.
“There were so many times, day and night, our team had to react quickly to help her oxygenation and support her other organs to make sure they were healthy enough to support a transplant if and when the opportunity came,” Malsin added. “One of the most exciting times was when the first coronavirus test came back negative and we had the first sign she may have cleared the virus to become eligible for a life-saving transplant.”
Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director at the Northwestern Medicine Lung Transplant Program, said his hospital was “one of the first health systems to successfully perform a lung transplant on a patient recovering from Covid-19.”
“We want other transplant centers to know that while the transplant procedure in these patients is quite technically challenging, it can be done safely, and it offers the terminally ill Covid-19 patients another option for survival,” he added.
The world’s first-known double lung transplant to heal a coronavirus patient was done on a 45-year-old Austrian woman in May.
