First Successful Double-Lung Transplant On A COVID-19 Survivor Performed In Chicago

Of some of the severe symptoms of coronavirus, one of the most potent symptoms is how the virus attached itself to organs and badly damages them. But lucky for a female patient of COVID-19 in Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago whose lungs were irrevocably damaged, received a double-lung transplant which was successful.

Being the first double-lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient in the United States, that too with positive results brings hope for other coronavirus patients as well.

As per the details shared by the hospital, the woman is in her 20s and was otherwise healthy when she developed a severe case of COVID-19, shared Dr. Ankit Bharat, Northwestern's chief of thoracic surgery. In the next two months, as she stayed in intensive care on a ventilator and ECMO, while she was free from coronavirus, it had already caused irreversible damage to her lungs, followed by her kidneys and liver, which started to fail as her lung function deteriorated.

"As a result of the COVID, she had formed these cavities inside the lung, and those cavities had become infected, and that bacteria was driving sepsis," Bharat shared. “You have someone in their 20s, who’s otherwise healthy, this poor girl. The whole team felt it’s hard to let someone go like that. We wanted to give her every option. Everybody was just rooting for her.”

And a double-lung transplant was the only way.

“I want to emphasize that this is not for every COVID patient,” Bharat added. “We are talking about patients who are relatively young, very functional, with minimal to no comorbid conditions, with permanent lung damage who can’t get off the ventilator.”

After confirming that she was no longer infected with coronavirus, the transplant was carried out on June 5 and since then, she has been making progress as with her lungs working her other organs -- heart, kidneys, and liver -- have "completely recovered."

"I'm quite confident that she will regain her strength now because the infection is gone and other organs have recovered. It's just a matter of time,” he shared, adding that she is “awake, she’s smiling, she FaceTimed with her family.”