26-Year-Old “Brain Dead” Coronavirus Patient Just Walked Out of the Hospital

by Anna Medaris Miller

Reuters

Medical workers treat COVID-19 in Madrid.

When Tionna Hairston's heart repeatedly stopped beating for 30 minutes, her doctors worried yet again that she wouldn't make it. 

The 26-year-old in North Carolina was diagnosed with COVID-19 in May, and subsequently suffered a stroke that led to bleeding in her brain and blood clots in her heart that caused the cardiac arrest, the Winston-Salem Journal's Richard Craver reported. 

The conditions left her unable to fully use her arms and legs, and she was put on a ventilator for more than two months. She also suffered kidney and liver failure. 

Doctors "thought that we should take her off of life support because she had no hope for life," Hairston's mom, Stacey Peatross said, according to Rasheeda Kabba, who covered the story for multiple local outlets. "They thought she would be a vegetable. She wouldn't have any quality of life at all." 

They were wrong. After family, friends, and strangers prayed for her, Hairston began improving. She entered rehab for more than a month, where she relearned basic activities of daily living, like eating and getting dressed. 

On Tuesday, she walked out of the hospital to continue rehab at home. She had been in medical care for 137 days. "My faith in God and the fact that I wanted to walk again" allowed her to survive, Hairston said. 

Calling Tionna Hairston a survivor may be one of the great understatements of 2020. https://t.co/R4x0zRtFFD

— Winston-Salem Journal (@JournalNow) October 21, 2020

While she's not fully recovered — she walks with a walker and has some memory loss — her doctors praised her recovery and the lessons it can teach others. 

First, people should know "20-somethings can get very sick from COVID and COVID complications," Dr. James McLean, director of the Novant rehabilitation hospital in Winston-Salem, told Craver. "It's not just older folks." 

The other lesson is that Hairston "demonstrated that human spirit, that little flame inside that keeps us going, shows us that people can overcome things that we could never imagine."

Other young COVID-19 patients have suffered strokes and neurological issues  

Doctors have been concerned to see strokes in young people with no prior history of strokes and, in some cases, mild or even asymptomatic COVID. 

In May, five young New Yorkers with COVID-19 were admitted to the hospital with life-threatening "large-vessel" strokes, or those caused by a blood clot that travels from the body into an artery in the brain, Business Insider's Aylin Woodward previously reported. 

Doctors don't yet understand exactly how COVID-19 influences stroke risk, but it may have to do with blood clots, which have appeared in other parts of coronavirus patients' bodies, like the lungs and legs. 

COVID-19 has also been linked to a range of other neurological issues, including delirium, brain fog, and memory lapses. Some experts have even warned of an epidemic of brain damage. 

"My worry is that we have millions of people with COVID-19 now. And if in a year's time we have 10 million recovered people, and those people have cognitive deficits ... then that's going to affect their ability to work and their ability to go about activities of daily living," Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at Western University in Canada, told Reuters.

 

Michael Goldsmith returning home April 19.

Abbie Sophia

It's unclear why some young critically ill patients who were previously healthy recover and others die, but Hairston is not the only success story.

Michael Goldsmith, a 34-year-old husband and father in New Jersey, was in a medically-induced coma and on a ventilator for 22 days while fighting a severe case of COVID-19. At the same time, his family and community advocated for access to the drug remdesivir, which they thought might be his only chance of survival. 

He never got the drug, but recovered, and doctors don't know why. 

After returning home, Goldsmith told Insider he cherished simple moments like snuggling with the family while watching TV. "It's the little things that you hope for, and I would say 'you dream about,'" Michael said, "but after going through the coma, I don't know for sure that was the case."

Editor's note: This story was updated to remove medical information provided by another media outlet that Business Insider was unable to verify. 

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26-Year-Old “Brain Dead” Coronavirus Patient Just Walked Out of the Hospital

Quadriplegic man’s death from covid-19 spotlights questions of disability, race and family

A Texas hospital deemed further treatments for Michael Hickson to be futile — a decision his wife opposed but others signed off on

Michael Hickson, 46, surrounded by his children at the nursing home where he had lived. Hickson died June 11 of complications from covid-19. (Family photo)

By Ariana Eunjung Cha

Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old father of five from Texas, was sick with covid-19 when doctors reached a crossroads in his treatment. He had pneumonia in both lungs, a urinary tract infection and sepsis — a dangerous immune response leading to multi-system organ failure.

He needed a ventilator to help him continue breathing, but the hospital felt further intervention for the disabled man was futile. A doctor explained to the family that there was little hope Hickson would survive or regain “quality of life.”

Hickson’s sister, a physician, agreed. So did the agency acting as his legal guardian. But his wife, Melissa Hickson, was horrified. She worried doctors were placing less value on her husband’s life because he was a black man who was disabled. After going into cardiac arrest in 2017 and suffering complications, he had been left quadriplegic and brain-damaged.

The disagreements over Michael Hickson’s care — amplified by an audio recording, widely shared on social media, of his wife pleading with a doctor to continue treatment — provide a rare window into fraught end-of-life decisions that are being made across the country as the novel coronavirus continues its rampage. The case puts a spotlight on issues of race, disability and family, including the different ways individuals, even within the same family, assess what makes a life worth living.

In the days after Hickson’s June 11 death, the audio recording shared by his wife has created a furor among disability rights activists across the United States who have rallied around his wife. Their outrage has been echoed by Catholic organizations and antiabortion groups, which have argued that stopping treatment was tantamount to failing to recognize the inherent value of a human life.

DeVry Anderson, chief medical officer at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, where Hickson was treated, described his case as a “very sad and complex situation.” He said the decision to withdraw care was not a matter of hospital capacity, Hickson’s disabilities or cognitive abilities, or his race.

“This was a man who was very, very ill,” Anderson said in a written statement.

“Some people want the public to believe that we took the position that Mr. Hickson’s life wasn’t worth being saved, and that is absolutely wrong,” he added. “It wasn’t medically possible to save him.”

Hickson’s sister, Renee Hickson, a fellow at George Washington University Hospital in the District, said doctors worked very hard to save her brother’s life, but his decline was precipitous. She does not believe any of their decisions were based on his disabilities or his race.

“There is only so much medically that we can do,” she said. “And they did that for all of those days, and there was nothing more to do.”

In the recording between Melissa Hickson and the doctor in charge of her husband’s case, she expresses confusion as to how the decision to stop treatment was made and tries to change his mind. Under Texas law, such recordings are allowed as long as one party consents.

“So as of right now, his quality of life — he doesn’t have much of one,” the doctor explains.

“What do you mean?” she asks. “Because he’s paralyzed with a brain injury, he doesn’t have quality of life?”

“Correct,” the doctor responds. The hospital declined an interview on behalf of the doctor, who is not identified in the recording.

The debate over Hickson’s care has hit a nerve as crisis protocols activated by health officials in some jurisdictions would allow hospitals to ration treatments in certain circumstances, as coronavirus cases surge. Disability rights activists, among others, express alarm that disadvantaged groups — the disabled, members of minority groups, the poor — might get lower priority.

“I’ve been stewing on this for a few days as I try to come up with the right words to explain to you how much of an underlying fear this scenario is for much of the disabled community,” tweeted Steven Spohn, a popular gamer who has spinal muscular atrophy. “We live our entire lives in fear that one day a doctor will decide we just aren’t worth it.”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights responded to such concerns this spring by probing some of the plans, issuing guidance affirming the need for nondiscrimination protections and threatening action against violators.

Devan Stahl, a bioethics expert at Baylor University, said research shows that people with disabilities often have a higher assessment of their quality of life than others do, including some doctors. That can adversely affect their medical care, Stahl said, and this bias has long been a source of controversy when it comes to medical futility laws in some states, such as Texas, that allow hospitals to override a patient or family’s wishes if they feel a treatment is not of benefit.

Stahl added that Hickson’s doctors may have been correct that he would not benefit from additional life-sustaining interventions, but it is “unfortunate that the physician stressed the quality-of-life judgment the way he did.”

“These are difficult things to say, and I want to be empathetic to physicians making hard choices,” Stahl said. “But I don’t think many are trained well enough to have these really sensitive conversations.”

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Quadriplegic man’s death from covid-19 spotlights questions of disability, race and family

Doctors Starved Quadriplegic Coronavirus Patient to Death Because of His Disability

Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old COVID-19 patient, was starved and left without adequate treatment for his illnesses at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center. His wife, Melissa, says the hospital refused to treat his illnesses because of his disability.

Michael Hickson became quadriplegic due to receiving CPR after he went into sudden cardiac arrest while driving Melissa to work in May 2017. Melissa and their five children stayed by Michael’s side throughout his recovery. He landed back in the hospital in 2020 after contracting COVID-19 and pneumonia from a staff member at his nursing home.

Michael was conscious and alert but could not communicate verbally. He responded to jokes, shook his head, and puckered his lips on a FaceTime call when Melissa requested a kiss. Melissa asked if she could pray with her husband and their children, to which he nodded “yes.” But the doctor soon told Melissa her husband would be placed in hospice against her will. In a recorded conversation, the St. David’s doctor told Melissa her husband would not receive treatment because of his disability, despite her wishes.

St. David’s doctor: “So as of right now, his quality of life – he doesn’t have much of one.”
Melissa: “What do you mean? Because he’s paralyzed with a brain injury he doesn’t have quality of life?”
St. David’s doctor: “Correct.”

While Michael’s wife and another family member were litigating in court who would be Michael’s permanent guardian, a judge named an Austin-area organization called Family Eldercare as temporary guardian over Michael. Family Eldercare granted the doctor’s orders to not treat Michael and instead place him in hospice. Alarmingly, the doctor reiterated the scary reality that she had zero say in whether her husband lived or died. The doctor told Melissa, “but at this point, we are going to do what we feel is best for him along with the state and this is what we decided… this is the decision between the medical community and the state.”

Michael was left without food or treatment for six days despite Melissa’s will to save her husband. He passed away from the untreated illnesses on June 11, 2020.

Now, Melissa and her children grieve their beloved husband and dad. Melissa stated, “I’m struggling to understand how and why this could ever happen. I lost my best friend, my better half, the other half of my heart.” She continued:

I was stripped of my rights as a wife, and left helplessly watching my husband be executed. I now have no husband, a widow at 47. My children left with no father to celebrate Father’s Day. All taken away from us. I have no other words to express how I feel today except hurt, angry, and frustrated.

LifeNews Note: This originally appeared at Texas Right to Life.

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Doctors Starved Quadriplegic Coronavirus Patient to Death Because of His Disability

Renewed efforts to reauthorize Older Americans Act will solidify services for older adults

Representing nearly 6,000 healthcare professionals dedicated to improving the health, independence, and quality of life of older adults, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) commends the U.S. House of Representatives on passing the Older Americans Act (OAA) Reauthorization Act of 2015, key legislation to deliver social and protective services to older Americans through 2018.

Introduced by U.S. Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Patty Murray (D-WA), Richard Burr (R-NC), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in 2015, the bill would strengthen landmark legislation originally passed in 1965--and overdue for reauthorization since 2011. Among other objectives, the legislation aims to address elder abuse; evidence-based care; effective coordination of services at the federal, state, and local levels; and several other challenges confronting older Americans and their healthcare professionals.

"The OAA reflects our national commitment to protect and provide for generations of older Americans who helped shape the society we now share," said AGS CEO Nancy E. Lundebjerg, MPA. "It's important that all branches of government stand behind legislation like the OAA, which reflects the attention and respect that older adults deserve."

With several minor revisions made in the House, the OAA Reauthorization Act of 2015 will now be sent back to the U.S. Senate for a final vote--the last hurdle on the road to implementation, but one that will still require sustained support from the public and health professionals alike, explains AGS President Steven R. Counsell, MD, AGSF.

"Reauthorizing the OAA is as important as ever to modernizing and improving the aging services network in our country. Progress has taken time, but it's happened because we've worked together to show Congress that reauthorization is a priority," Dr. Counsell observed.

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Renewed efforts to reauthorize Older Americans Act will solidify services for older adults