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 The 50-year-old woman was diagnosed with the disease and
hospitalised in late February and then spent 16 weeks on
extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) support, which involves
circulating a patient's blood through a machine that adds oxygen to
red blood cells.
That's the longest that any COVID-19 patient in the world has spent
on ECMO support, her doctors said.
Various drugs such as the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, the HIV
treatment Kaletra and steroids failed to stop her pulmonary fibrosis
- scarring in the lungs - from worsening, said Dr Park Sung-hoon,
professor of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Hallym
University Sacred Heart Hospital.
That left few options other than a lung transplant.
"The probability of success in lung transplants on ECMO patients is
50%, and fortunately, our patient was well prepared before the
surgery when we found the donor," said Dr Kim Hyoung-soo, director
of the hospital's ECMO programme, who was in charge of the surgery.
The patient declined to be identified or interviewed.
The doctors who conducted the eight-hour surgery described her
destroyed lungs as hard like rock.
She had an acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) when she came
to hospital, Park said, and could not live without the ECMO
machine's help.
ECMO is typically used on patients who need more help than
ventilators can provide, and who are considered to have a 90% chance
of dying. Half of patients recover in two to three weeks on ECMO,
and a lung transplant is considered for those who don't, Kim said.
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The surgery was the ninth after six similar surgeries in China, and one each in
the United States and Australia, the hospital said.
Lung transplants are less common that other transplants in South Korea, with 92
of them in 2018, compared with 2,108 kidney and 176 heart transplants, according
to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Lee Sun-hee, a head nurse of the ECMO programme who has cared for the patient
since February, said the woman seemed to have a stronger-than-usual will to
live, in part driven by being a mother of two.
"She told us, 'I'm grateful for the sunshine, for the moonlight. I'm so grateful
that I am breathing'," Lee said.
Lee said the woman already knows the first thing she wants to do when released
from the hospital:
"To get a nice bath."
Doctors said she would be discharged when her chest muscles are strong enough to
support her breathing.
(Reporting by Sangmi Cha, additional reporting by Cheyoun Won; Editing by Josh
Smith and Robert Birsel)
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