An Arizona hospital saved the life of a patient suffering from COVID-19 using a special treatment in which the patient’s blood is oxygenated outside the body and pumped back in again.
Enes Dedic, 53, of Phoenix, Arizona, started to feel ill on March 15 after he attended a funeral in Bosnia. It soon dawned on him that he was infected with the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
“March 15, he woke me up and told me he couldn’t breathe, and I need to take him to the emergency room,” Dedic’s wife Olivera told AZFamily.com.
Dedic, who had only mild health complications like diabetes and high blood pressure, was admitted to HonorHealth Deer Valley Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, showing severe symptoms like fever, difficulty breathing, muscle aches, and nausea.
BREAKING: First Arizona #COVID19 patient treated with ECMO therapy survives. He’s also one of the first in the world! https://t.co/ACKtnH4RiR
— HonorHealth (@HonorHealth) April 14, 2020
He was put on a ventilator but soon his condition had deteriorated to such an extent that after two days he was transported to John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Sunnyslope, where the medical staff put him into a medically-induced coma and used extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy.
EMCO treatment is a medical technique whereby the patient’s blood is pumped to a machine where it’s saturated with oxygen before it is pumped back into the body again.
Dedic was in a coma for 10 days, on the verge of death.
“On day 11, he woke up, became immediately responsive, and has been FaceTiming with his family while recovering in the ICU,” an HonorHealth press release stated, according to ABC15.
“The first time when I had a FaceTime with him, it was… it was crazy! It was really hard, really hard,” Olivera told AZFamily.
“The survival of our patient required a tremendous team effort including physicians, respiratory therapists, nurses, and even housekeeping to address unique ways in which to care for, monitor, and sanitize our unit for the best possible care,” Dr. Robert Riley, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at HonorHealth told ABC15. “I can’t emphasize enough that this was truly an out-of-the-box approach to care.”
“ECMO itself is a pretty rare service that we offer,” Riley explained, according to AZFamily. “When there’s nothing else left to help save the patient, this is where we go.”
It was the first recorded successful treatment using EMCO in Arizona, and one of 10 documented by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization in the world.
“I promised the nurses in the ICU that I’m going to bring him because they want to see him 100 percent recovered!” Olivera said.
