He Was a Doctor Who Never Got Sick. Then the Coronavirus Nearly Killed Him. – The New York Times

Dr. Padgetts team at EvergreenHealth decided to transfer him to cardiac specialists at Swedish Health Services in Seattle. Dr. Matt Hartman, a cardiologist there, said it was clear that Dr. Padgetts condition was rapidly worsening and that if they did not do something, he would not survive.

We didnt know if this was someone who was just going to die no matter what we do, he said. We think with his age, and the fact that theres no other major comorbidity or problem, that we should at least give it a try.

The team decided to hook Dr. Padgett up to a machine known as an ECMO that could essentially serve as both an artificial heart and lung, taking his blood out of his body, oxygenating it and returning it to him. While such procedures are most often done in the surgery suites, in this case it was all done in the intensive care unit, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus elsewhere in the hospital.

We brought the operating room to him, said Dr. Samuel Youssef, a cardiac surgeon at Swedish.

The team also began consulting with oncologists. Indicators of inflammation in Dr. Padgetts body were astonishingly high, suggesting that he was potentially dealing with a cytokine storm, a dangerous phenomenon in which the immune systems of otherwise healthy people overreact in fighting the coronavirus.

The doctors administered the drug tocilizumab, often used for cancer patients who can have similar immune system reactions. They added high-dose vitamin C after seeing reports that it might be beneficial. These experimental treatments had also been tried on another patient, a 33-year-old woman, with some success.

Over that week in mid-March, there were signs of improvement. As his inflammation numbers came down and his lungs started to provide more oxygen, the team began scaling back the ECMO machine, until they finally removed it on March 23.

Four days later, on March 27, the breathing tube was removed. Slowly, after two weeks in a sedated coma, Dr. Padgett began to wake up.

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He Was a Doctor Who Never Got Sick. Then the Coronavirus Nearly Killed Him. - The New York Times