{"id":3218,"date":"2021-10-18T16:24:15","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T16:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medschool.prd.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2021-10-22T20:35:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T20:35:14","slug":"covid-recovery-included-long-stay-on-ecmo-double-lung-transplant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/covid-recovery-included-long-stay-on-ecmo-double-lung-transplant\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID recovery included long stay on ECMO, double-lung transplant"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

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Zach Lloyd spent 95 days on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, after contracting COVID-19. Photo by Susan Urmy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Zach Lloyd was only 37 years old with no preexisting health conditions, but COVID-19 brought him within an inch of his life.<\/p>\n

Beginning in October 2020, he lay immobile in a bed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hooked up to a life-sustaining mechanical system called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which can temporarily take over for the heart and lungs of critically ill patients. He primarily needed it for his lungs, badly damaged by the coronavirus.<\/p>\n

He would remain on the system for 95 days, far exceeding the time most patients spend on it. In a rare move, Lloyd was on not one, but two ECMO circuits, a maze of tubes carrying blood back and forth, keeping him alive.<\/p>\n

In January, Lloyd received a double-lung transplant that was his only shot at life. Lloyd looks back on spending more than four months in the hospital \u2014 including Thanksgiving, Christmas and his birthday \u2014 much of that time fighting for his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout the dedicated actions of the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit, Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU), Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU), and ECMO teams, he would not be alive today. They literally gave him a chance to live,\u201d said Lloyd\u2019s transplant surgeon, Matthew Bacchetta, MD, MBA, MA, chair of the Department of Thoracic Surgery.<\/p>\n

None of this made any sense. Why was a 37-year-old man with no known health conditions on the brink of lung failure because of COVID-19?<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think anybody knows why it impacted his lungs the way that it did,\u201d said his wife, Sara. \u201cEverybody is just dumbfounded by why.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd\u2019s lungs were badly damaged, and he needed a transplant, but he was also immobile. And there was little precedent for transplanting lungs into a COVID-19 patient \u2014 just a handful of cases nationally.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn order to get listed for any kind of a transplant, the patient has to be pretty sick, but they also can\u2019t be so sick that they won\u2019t do well once they get the transplant,\u201d said Jessica Bowman Williams, RN, CCRN, program coordinator in the CVICU, where Lloyd would spend time after the MICU. \u201cIn his case, his only option for survival was to get a lung transplant. But in order to get listed for transplant, he needed to prove that he could mobilize and rehabilitate.\u201d<\/p>\n

ECMO fellow Yatrik Patel, MD, proposed that Zach use a new supine bicycle. The bike, which the CVICU had just acquired, allows patients to essentially pedal in a hospital bed. Zach took to the bike immediately, setting goals for time on the bike and resistance, just as he would do on his stationary bike at home, which happened to be his exercise of choice.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven on weekends and holidays, Yatrik and I coordinated and met in the MICU to get Zach on the bike,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt was precarious with the two ECMO circuits (two large cannulas went into bilateral groins while two additional cannulas went into his internal jugular veins in his neck), but we made it happen as safely as possible while getting him mobilized. Sometimes some of our CVICU nurses would go up with the bike as well, if I could not. It was a team investment in his mobility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lloyd spent enough time on the bike to attract the notice of the transplant committee that determines who will be good candidates for transplants, and Lloyd passed the test. He was placed on the transplant list on Christmas Eve, and Bacchetta transplanted his two new lungs on Jan. 28. The cardiothoracic anesthesia team included Bantayehu Sileshi, MD, associate professor of Anesthesiology, and fellow Karl Hillenbrand, MD.<\/p>\n

Lloyd recalled his pulmonologist, Katie McPherson, MD, assistant professor of Medicine, describing them as a perfect match \u2014 like having a No. 1 draft pick and being able to pick Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.<\/p>\n

\u201cEssentially we were waiting for perfect lungs,\u201d McPherson said. \u201cWhen we found them, we went for it because it was Zach\u2019s only chance at survival.\u201d<\/p>\n

After 124 days as an inpatient, Lloyd was released to begin his physical rehabilitation at Vanderbilt Stallworth Rehabilitation Hospital<\/a>. He was discharged from inpatient rehab in April, and in July he resumed preaching at East LaFolette Baptist Church.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there\u2019s anything I could tell somebody, it is, have hope,\u201d Lloyd said. \u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of dark days, but have hope that eventually it\u2019s going to be better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Zach Lloyd was only 37 years old with no preexisting health conditions, but COVID-19 brought him within an inch of his life. Beginning in October 2020, he lay immobile in a bed at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hooked up to a life-sustaining mechanical system called ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which can temporarily take…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vm-around-the-medical-center","category-vm-fall-2021"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcDnub-PU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3351,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/3351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medschool.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbilt-medicine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}