Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago announced Thursday they've performed the first successful double-lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient in the United States.
The woman in her 20s was otherwise healthy but developed a severe case of COVID-19 that resulted in hospitalization, says Dr. Ankit Bharat, Northwestern's chief of thoracic surgery.
For two months, she was in the intensive care unit on a ventilator and another machine, known as ECMO, that pumps and oxygenates blood outside of the body. Although she eventually cleared the coronavirus from her body, she remained in severe condition.
By early June, Bharat says the patient's lungs showed irreversible damage. She was at risk of further decline and began showing signs that her kidneys and liver were starting to fail with no improvement in her lung function.
"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 says.
Bharat says they determined a double-lung transplant was her only chance of survival.