New York — Her fever hit 45.5º. In her delirium, Diana Aguilar was sure the strangers hovering over her, in their masks and gowns, were angels before they morphed into menacing aliens. As a doctor prepared to slide a ventilator tube down her throat, all she remembers thinking was: “I cannot breathe. I have no air. I give up, I give up.”
Some people never fully recover, says Michael Rodricks, medical director of Somerset’s intensive-care unit . And those who do often must relearn basic skills such as walking, talking and swallowing. Now there’s good news: it appears that US hospitals will need fewer than 17,000 devices to treat Covid-19 patients, according to one widely used model. What the final numbers will look like as the virus continues its march across the country is anyone’s guess. But there’s little doubt there will be thousands of ventilator survivors once the pandemic is over. And the quality of their lives is still an open question.
“They were jumping and clapping, and everybody was so happy,” she says. “I didn’t know I had all these people waiting for me, waiting to see how I’d do.” Coronavirus and the inflammation it causes is like slime, clogging up the intricate system. One of the most troubling aspects is the virus’s ability to penetrate deep within the lungs, burrowing into cells and churning out viral particles. The issue isn’t just losing those cells in the lungs that are supposed to help oxygenate the body. The problem is the lungs then become the battleground for the fight, where the human immune system takes on the foreign invader.
The following day, as she was wheeled out of intensive care, her nurse pulled her bed up beside his room to let her peer through the glass window so she could catch a glimpse of Carlos, who was now on a ventilator, too. For years, the main focus of critical-care doctors who intubate patients has been keeping them alive, fine-tuning the treatments in an effort to improve survival rates. The machines, first introduced in 1928, were initially called iron lungs and used to help polio patients breathe. Only recently have researchers learnt that the biological responses to the breathing machines that kick in almost immediately often have lasting harm.
Diana didn’t have the best health track record going in. She is a two-time colon-cancer survivor with high blood pressure, iron deficiency and a few extra pounds. She has only vague memories of her days on a ventilator, waking up in pain unable to talk or move, before drifting back into a troubled sleep full of dreams of her deceased relatives. Her husband, Carlos, with no previous medical condition, had a totally different experience.
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