This is an artificial living which takes the blood out of his body through thick tubes, oxygenates it outside and pumps it back into the body.
by Victor Cherubim
Inside the epicentre of the deadly Coronavirus hospital
Back in 8 December 2019 the first confirmed case diagnosed as Coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic was noticed at the Public Hospital in Jinyintan,Wuhan, a sub district of Jianghan in Hubei Province in China.
A man aged 55 was admitted to this hospital complaining of difficulty in breathing having high temperature and not responding to medication.
The doctors treating him did notice that he was not responding to the normal treatment as was put in Intensive Care,while further tests were being done.
Stages of illness
The reports emanating from Jinyintan ICU Hospital Consultants now give us a picture of the stages of his severe condition.
Based on the data from Jinyintan Hospital, they reveal that a particular strain of virus similar to SARS was detected in the pathogen tests.
At first his prognosis was pneumonia, which caused the inflammation of his lungs.
Due to his immune system overreacting to the virus,the chemical signals which caused the inflammation of his lungs also caused collateral damage throughout his body.
How it was doing this,they were at first unable to know. But it now appears,they were able to trace that the virus had travelled through his mouth,down the windpipe through the tiny tubes in both his lungs and eventually ended up in the tiny air sacks.
They came to know that this virus had triggered an imbalance in the immune response causing too much inflammation.
This was where oxygen moved into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide moved out.
In this condition the tiny sacs started to fill in with fluid (water) and eventually caused him shortness of breath and difficult breathing.
He was then put on a tubular ventilator by the ICU Consultant to help him with assisted breathing.
The ICU Consultants at Jinyintan Hospital now state that this stage affects some 14 % of patients and around 6% of cases generally become critically ill.
Inside an ICU
In the case of the first Corona virus (COVID-19) patient they treated at Jinyintan in December 2019, his body was starting to fail and there was a real chance of imminent death.
They knew at this point that his immune system was now spiralling out of control and was causing damage throughout his body.
It then lead to septic shock as his blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels and his organs stopped working properly.
To avoid acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by widespread inflammation in both his lungs and to stop the body getting enough oxygen it needed to survive,the Consultants at this stage put him on a highly invasive procedure called ECMO or extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation.
This is an artificial living which takes the blood out of his body through thick tubes, oxygenates it outside and pumps it back into the body.
This procedure did at first manage to clean his infected lungs, The ICU and ECMO Consultants at this stage after some time noticed that this did not stop the kidneys from cleaning the blood and the damage to the lining of the patient's intestines had caused multi-organ failure.
At this stage they had to take an ethical decision as to whether to keep him ventilated in the ICU to keep his keep his organs in the body alive or to treat him as clinically dead and switch off his life support.
This is a life or death clinical decision which was difficult to make. To avoid more pain and suffering to the patient he was under continuous sedation.
At this point the patient's next of kin were informed of his fatal condition and asked to give their consent to turn off the ventilator, thus giving him hours and minutes to be able to breathe without life support.
He was pronounced dead as all his organs had collapsed and his body was taken to the mortuary in the hospital.
Report on first death of patient of Coronavirus at Jinyintan Hospital, Wuhan was in late December 2019 while the first patient to recover from the new deadly virus was 23 year old man, Mr.Huang, a worker in a train station in early January 2020.
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