這名患COVID-19 的醫(yī)生病情已經(jīng)好轉(zhuǎn)了

這名患COVID-19 的醫(yī)生病情已經(jīng)好轉(zhuǎn)了

In mid-March, he was a cautionary tale for medical workers: an unnamed doctor "in his 40s" with a case of COVID-19 so bad, he was near death.

3月中旬，他給醫(yī)務(wù)人員敲響了警鐘：一名“40多歲”的不知名醫(yī)生患上了一例嚴(yán)重的COVID-19,他已瀕臨死亡。

Almost a month later, 45-year-old emergency physician Ryan Padgett is back in his home in Seattle, rebuilding his strength and marveling at how quickly the novel virus laid him low.

大約一個月后，45歲的急診醫(yī)生瑞安·帕吉特回到了他在西雅圖的家中，恢復(fù)了體力，并對這種新型病毒讓他如此迅速地病倒感到驚訝。

"This is very scary," he says. "That it's not only medically fragile patients, but young people can be cut at the knees and taken down by this."

“這非常可怕，”他說。“這不僅是醫(yī)學(xué)上脆弱的病人，年輕人也可能會被這種疾病所擊倒。”

Padgett works at EvergreenHealth, the hospital in suburban Seattle that saw the country's first known COVID-19 deaths at the end of February, primarily patients from the Life Care nursing home.

帕吉特在西雅圖郊區(qū)的EvergreenHealth醫(yī)院工作，這家醫(yī)院在2月底見證了美國第一例已知的COVID-19死亡病例，主要是來自生命護(hù)理院的病人。

At first, he says he just had a headache and some muscle soreness, but within just a few days his health took a sharp downturn.

一開始，他說他只是有點頭痛和肌肉酸痛，但沒過幾天，他的健康狀況就急轉(zhuǎn)直下。

"It becomes a big deal when you realize you can't breathe," he says.

他說:“當(dāng)你意識到自己無法呼吸時，這就成了一件問題。”

It took the urging of his fiancee, Connie Kinsley, to get him back to hospital. "He didn't want to," she says, "because doctors are the worst patients."

在他的未婚妻康妮·金斯利的催促下，他才回到了醫(yī)院。“他不想(回醫(yī)院治療)，”她說，“因為醫(yī)生是最糟糕的病人。”

Within hours of getting to EvergreenHealth, they were putting him on a ventilator.

在到達(dá)EvergreenHealth的幾個小時后，他們給他裝上了呼吸機(jī)。

"I have no personal recollection, but evidently I told [Kinsley] where some important documents were, just in case," he says. "And the next memory I had was about 16 days later, waking up at Swedish Hospital."

“我失去了個人記憶，但為了以防萬一，我清楚地告訴了(金斯利)一些重要文件在哪里，”他說。“接下來的記憶是大約16天后，我在瑞典醫(yī)院醒來。”

While he was unconscious, he'd been transferred to a different hospital — Swedish Medical Center near downtown Seattle, because it's one of only two hospitals in the state with an extreme form of life support called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. It bypasses the lungs to oxygenate a patient's blood.

當(dāng)他失去知覺的時候，他被轉(zhuǎn)到另一家醫(yī)院——西雅圖市中心附近的瑞典醫(yī)療中心，因為這是該州僅有的兩家擁有一種極端形式的生命支持的醫(yī)院之一，這種支持被稱為體外膜氧合，簡稱ECMO。它繞過肺部為病人的血液提供氧氣。

"It saved my life," Padgett says of ECMO.

“它救了我的命，”帕吉特這樣評價ECMO。

"ECMO allowed us to sustain his life while we tried other therapies," says Dr. Krish Patel, an oncologist at Swedish who helped treat Padgett.

“在我們嘗試其他療法的同時，ECMO讓我們得以維持他的生命，”曾幫助治療帕吉特的瑞典腫瘤學(xué)家克里什·帕特爾博士說。

"Not only has the understanding of the illness changed, but the world changed," he says.

他說：“我不僅對疾病的理解發(fā)生了變化，世界也發(fā)生了變化。”

He also found out his May 16 wedding had been postponed. He and his fiancee don't seem too concerned about it.

他還發(fā)現(xiàn)自己5月16日的婚禮被推遲了。他和他的未婚妻似乎并不太在意。