Doctors in Arizona saved a Phoenix man With COVID 19, who was at death’s door, using a rare and risky procedure. This story, written by Alison Steinbach, appeared in The Arizona Republic.
A Phoenix man is the first in Arizona to survive COVID-19 through a rare form of treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy.
Enes Dedic, 53, was on the brink of death with a ventilator until his doctors at HonorHealth used ECMO as a last resort. Dedic is among the first U.S. COVID-19 patients to survive the disease by using the treatment and is among around 10 worldwide.
ECMO works by helping oxygenate blood outside the body so blood doesn’t need to transfer through damaged or filled lungs. Instead, tubes carry blood from the body to an external artificial lung that removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen, at which point an artificial heart pumps the blood back into the body.
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It’s a last hope treatment, as the mortality rate on ECMO is around 40% — “extraordinarily high for almost any medical procedure” — according to Dedic’s doctors.
After 10 days in a medical coma on ECMO, Dedic woke up responsive and soon was able to FaceTime his wife.
“I can’t even express myself,” his wife Olivera Dedic said. “I was jumping through the roof when I heard that they woke him up and he’s doing better.”
After returning from travel overseas, Enes Dedic spent a few weeks at home in the Deer Valley area of Phoenix battling fevers, chills, aches and nausea.
He first checked into HonorHealth’s Deer Valley Medical Center on March 15 and quickly deteriorated. He was intubated and transferred to the HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Phoenix for increased mechanical ventilation.
A team of doctors tried everything to save him, said Dr. Anselmo Garcia, a pulmonologist and critical care physician. Enes Dedic was treated with all the potential drugs used for COVID-19 including hydrochloroquine, azithromycin, Kaletra, Actemra, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.
None of these worked.
As a last resort, doctors turned to ECMO, said Dr. Robert Riley, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at HonorHealth. Riley performed the surgical procedure for ECMO.
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I first heard of ECMO about two weeks ago on the Coronavirus Dr. Radio channel on satellite radio. One of the doctors on the show was talking about how this is used to help patients who cannot breathe from themselves, however I believe it was always used as a temporary therapy. He mentioned that it could be useful in treating ARDS. It seems risky and expensive, but I’m thrilled to hear that it worked in this case. Might be a promising treatment.
There is an Israeli company called Plurisystems that just reported a very small but successful trial with a far less risky procedure using stem cells from the placenta. As we all known, placentas are usually thrown away. I am not endorsing this company or its treatment, but from what I have read, there are 70 companies competing to develop treatments, and that is good news. This is an instance where competition works.
I saw ECMO used in northern Italy on VICE News, which is on the VICE channel Monday through Thursday in the late evening. The broadcast is a less flashy version of what was done on HBO, but they still cover a lot of human interest and international stories. VICE also has a weekly special that appears on SHOWTIME.
By the man the very ill Italian man with COVID-19 recovered as well.
The issue could also be an oxygen deprivation issue, since brain function is very sensitive to oxygen level.
There is some indication that covid 19 might be producing proteins that bind to hemoglobin thereby reducing the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood.
In addition to pneumonia (resulting in reduced o2 exchange in the lungs), this might explain why some people experience headaches, dizziness and even strokes.
Oxygen therapies are being used in alternative and functional medicine offices very successfully.
It’s great that this worked in one or a few cases but at what cost?
This highlights just how absurd our medical system has become.
Our hospitals won’t stock relatively cheap masks that can prevent people from getting the virus to begin with, but instead spend their money on extremely expensive equipment to save a few people on the other end.
The American medical system is a tale told by an idiot, full of suffering and profits, signifying nothing.
Scientists are also finding there is brain related issues in about a third of COVID-19 patients. There is a higher rate of strokes even in some younger COVID patients. The current belief is that the inflammation is causing the brain to swell. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200410/brain-affected-in-1-in-3-cases-of-severe-covid-19#1
The issue could also be an oxygen deprivation issue, since brain function is very sensitive to oxygen level.
There is some indication that covid 19 might be producing proteins that bind to hemoglobin thereby reducing the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood.
In addition to pneumonia (resulting in reduced o2 exchange in the lungs), this might explain why some people experience headaches, dizziness and even strokes.
Some researchers have noted the similarities of symptoms of people with covid 19 and HAPE (high altitude pulmonary edema) which climbers can get above about 5000m.
The drugs used to prevent the onset of the latter have been suggested as potential treatments for covid 19 infection, though they obviously require testing to determine if they actually work.
There has also been a suggestion (which again needs testing) that if there is actually something to the claims about hydroxychloroquine, it could be related to oxygen carrying by hemoglobin in the presence of covid 19 virus. hydroxychloroquine has been used to treat malaria, which affects just such an oxygen carrying ability.
It might turn out that the effects of covid 19 are very complex, but one thing is clear. All this stuff needs investigation and testing
My college roommate was among the first to heart-lung surgery with an early version of this procedure. Here is a study from NIH on the degree to which the procedure may also require a general surgeon and cause have complications. .
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6475990/
“A Phoenix man is the first in Arizona to survive COVID-19 through a rare form of treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy.”
Imagine how Trump will interpret that with his short attention span and limited vocabulary.
I will not be surprised if FOX (never real) News reports this, and at three in the morning after that release of Fox misinformation, Trump will Tweet.
“Get a great blood transfusion from anyone, even your dog or cat, to survive COVID-19. A lot of people are talking about this wonderful, safe, medical miracle. Saving millions. Do it in the comfort of your home if the hospital won’t do it. Great way to live. Doctors are stupid. My gut is a stable genius and knows what it knows. Then we will open the country, saved by your all-powerful President Donald Trump.”
ECMO is VERY expensive and the machines are limited in hospitals due to cost. They use it a lot for seriously sick children or ones waiting for transplants because children have better recovery outcomes from it’s use. This man is lucky, but he will likely have a heart attack and die when his insurance fails to cover the cost and he gets his bill. He can brag that he survived Covid-19 only to be thrown under the bus of debt for life. MEDICARE FOR ALL!!!
Excellent points all around. You might wonder if this pandemic is going to open people’s eyes to universal healthcare.
This is what our medical system excels at: extremely expensive procedures that benefit a relatively small number of people.
They don’t care about the latter as long as the the former is true.
In my view, hospitals are largely getting a pass for a gross lack of preparation for this pandemic that is largely their own fault because they have been so damned focused on profit rather than public health. Their thinking has been that it’s just not in their bottom dollar interest to stock a lot of masks that might never be used, for example.
Sure, Trump and his administration have been like a headless chicken running around the barnyard, but that does not get hospitals and doctors off the hook.
By the way. I have had personal experience with hospitals doing lots of tests to run up a bill of thousands of dollars when a simple prescription for oral antibiotics would have cured what I had, which was Lyme disease.
They knew damned well what the issue was because I told every one of them that I had been bit by a tick and that all my classic symptoms of Lyme disease had begun soon thereafter.
But they were FAR more interested in money than in helping me.
I visited 3 different hospitals in the Boston area (which will remain unnamed because I am sure they would sue me) before I found a doctor who would give me the antibiotics I needed. And sure enough, all my symptoms disappeared within a couple weeks and never returned.
This happened long after Lyme disease was well known to the medical profession.
And let me tell you, the whole experience was a REAL eye opener.
I used to work in a hospital in the mid 80’s – early 90’s. That was the beginning of the privatization of healthcare. If you think teachers are disrespected now, it was the same for RN’s and LPN’s back then. Hospitals used to be run/managed by Physicians, but the hospitals were always “bleeding” (red ink, profit loss) so big business thought it would be better to take over. Now it’s CEO’s and Insurance companies that make life/death decisions for patients….based on the “bottom line” and nothing more.
I’m guessing that the takeover of hospitals by for-profit corporations is responsible for the lack of hospital beds in the current crisis. Businesses strive to be low-cost and efficient. It’s “inefficient” to manage a hospital with empty beds. So these lean facilities were quickly overwhelmed by COVID patients.
What happened to me occurred in the late 90’s and I blame the doctors because they were the ones ignoring what I told them (that all i needed was a prescription for antibiotics) and ordering all the neck x rays, cat scan, and other completely unnecessary tests. The only reason I put up with the nonsense was because I thought eventually, they would just give me the antibiotics and I would be on my way. How wrong I was.
It was a clear case of medical malpractice at two of the most respected hospitals in Boston — but I never went after either of them because after I finally found a doctor to give me antibiotics, I was just glad to be done with the medical “profession”.
SDP…..The physicians fell in line with the corporate way of thinking. Many got “incentives” from ordering certain tests or prescribing certain drugs. Their salaries were dramatically pared down with corporate take over yet they had $$$$$ in student loans to repay and families to feed. Then the insurance companies (health and malpractice) swooped in to make matters even worse and they added their own “incentives” and rules. Health care is a mess. Be thankful if you are healthy and you don’t have to navigate “the system” while ill or having a health crisis, because trying to figure it out will drive you absolutely insane.
I won’t let the doctors off that easily, especially not the ones who were supposedly treating me.
As I said, these were two very respected hospitals and these doctors were almost certainly getting paid very well. One was the head of internal medicine and had been practicing for quite a while (having to pay off student loans was no excuse for him)
They really had no personal price to pay by doing the right thing and prescribing the antibiotics. The hospital would have “lost” about $6000 (yes, you heard right. That’s what the bill came to for something that was eventually resolved with about $50 worth of antibiotics), but the doctors themselves would have lost NOTHInNG.
It was corruption, plain and simple and there is absolutely no excuse for it. The doctors in question should have been run right out of medicine.
Could my case be an anomaly? Possibly, but I seriously doubt it, just based on the systematic way that I was “passed” from one specialist to another, which was accompanied by tests at each stage. The system was quite obviously “designed” to maximize profit.
Though all perfectly legal, it is basically organized crime.
By the way, it’s quite easy to see that my case was PURELY to generate dollars because the first doctor I saw could simply have prescribed the antibiotics with the idea that if they did not have the desired affect within a few weeks, they could then proceed to pursue other possibilities and do other tests.
It would not have been as if they were prescribing blind, since these doctors knew that I had been bit by a tick and knew that all the symptoms described were symptoms of Lyme disease because made all that perfectly clear. In fact, I told them I was pretty sure I had Lyme disease (which they didn’t want to hear)
They quite willfully made the decision to do all the extraneous testing before they tried the rational, cheap, easy solution — which they never even got to.
And the claim that such a strategy is the main cause of antibiotic resistant bacteria does not hold water because the vast majority of antibiotic use is on farms which are veritable breeding grounds for bacteria, which the medical profession has all but ignored
SDP….A typical Dr is scheduled to see 20-30 patients in an 8 hr day. It usually winds up being 30-40 with emergency visits. The large schedule makes up for meager costs reimbursed by insurance companies for care. Dr’s don’t have time to talk with patients for a diagnosis so they order expensive tests so that they can review results in the evening or after office hours. I’m not making excuses….but just stating some facts. My husband had a “tele med conference” with a specialist yesterday since his expensive outpatient test got cancelled. The Dr said that they would have to go back to doing things the “old fashioned way”……talking with patients and listening. At least with the tele med, he got an uninterrupted 15 minutes of discussion time with the specialist and 2 Rx’s (cost-under $6) that got called into the pharmacy. Not ideal, but better than the original plan IMHO.
“The Dr said that they would have to go back to doing things the “old fashioned way”……talking with patients and listening”
That’s funny. The old fashioned way was FAR superior to the new “moneymaking” way.
In fact, the doctor who finally ended up helping me (Samuel Donta, whose name I had found on a Lyme Disease forum on the web) actually listened to me when I described my symptoms, something NONE of the other “doctors” (aka, clowns) had done.
And he prescribed antibiotics based on the symptoms alone because,, as he told me, the “test for Lyme is highly unreliable”. And he was right — about both the fact that I had Lyme (because the antibiotics cleared it up) AND the fact that the test was notoriously unreliable. (That may have changed since, but at the time, it was correct)
One of the previous “doctors” I had had a consultation with had told me the Lyme test was 95% accurate when I asked him about it. He just made that number up (and I actually suspected as much). I know that because he would not put the number down on paper in my file when I requested he do so because he knew it was BS.
If doctors can’t actually listen to what patients tell them (lacking the time for consultation was actually not the issue in my case. I told them but they just did not listen) they should simply not be doing what they are doing because they are making a REAL mess of people’s lives and causing untold unnecessary suffering. I put up with the quite debilitating symptoms of Lyme disease for 8 months because of the incompetence and corruption of doctors.
There was no excuse for it — period.