From Too Risky to Last Resort, COVID-Related Organ Transplants Are Surging
Mark Buchanan from Roopville, GA didn’t think he was going to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his entire family came down with a nasty bout of the disease, but no one wound up in the hospital except him. He was on a ventilator, sedated for nearly three months before starting extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a last-resort effort to save patients dying of the disease.
“They said that it had ruined my lungs,” Buchanan said. “The vent and the covid ruined ’em completely.”
However, his luck changed after becoming one of the first people in the U.S. to receive what’s being referred to as a COVID-related transplant. He received a double lung transplant in October at a time when few hospitals were willing to take a chance on the procedure. Now, these kinds of transplants are soaring all over the country.