Last month, Yvan Pierrelouis, an active lieutenant with 30 years of service with the NY police department, received a police escort from Philadelphia back to his home to continue his recovery from COVID 19. But had his daughter, Diane Latham, MSN, assistant nurse manager on Silverstein 9, not moved heaven and earth to get him to HUP, his story would have had a very different ending.
It started on March 26, just three weeks after a family vacation. Pierrelouis was admitted to NYU Winthrop Hospital — a small community hospital — after testing positive for COVID-19. The following day he was put on a ventilator and he stayed on it for the next three weeks. But it wasn’t helping. “He was not doing well and was already maxed out on the ventilator settings,” she said.
Latham wanted him transferred to a larger hospital, one that offered COVID trials, such as the use of convalescent plasma to provide antibodies against the disease. On April 22, he was transferred to North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital, a teaching hospital, but “he couldn’t get into the plasma study because he was no longer COVID positive. His body had fought off the virus,” she said.
But the news got worse. Pierrelouis had been on the ventilator, at the highest settings, for almost a month. Six days after arriving at North Shore, doctors told Latham that he had suffered severe damage to lungs. They were severely scarred from COVID; he had fibrotic acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).
“They told me my dad was going to die,” she said. Because of visitation restrictions, she hadn’t seen her father for a month but “I needed to physically see him.” Now, as a so-called “end-of-life” patient, she — and her mother — were allowed to visit. The formerly robust police office “had 50 pounds of fluid. I didn’t even recognize him he looked so different.”
Latham knew her father was not suffering from a multi-organ failure. In fact, nothing seemed wrong except his lungs. She thought a lung transplant could save his life. His care team reached out to transplant programs in New York, but because of the severity of the pandemic in NY at the time, some were temporarily closed while others thought he was just too sick.
But Latham wasn’t giving up. She reached out to the Penn Lung Center and connected with Andrew Courtwright, MD, PhD, a transplant pulmonologist. He spoke with doctors at North Shore, reviewed her father’s medical records, and agreed to have the patient transferred to assess in person. PennSTAR airlifted Pierrelouis to HUP late on May 1 and he was brought to Rhoads 5, a COVID ICU at the time. A month later, when he tested negative for COVID, he was moved to the medical ICU.
Over several weeks, following ventilator management protocols, his clinical team were able to slowly lower the ventilator settings and gradually take him off his medically induced sedation in preparation for weaning him off the ventilator. The first week in June, he woke, looked around and asked “What’s going on?”
“This case was remarkable. It was a testament to the hundreds of people who cared for him, the consistent dedication,” Courtwright said. With the lung transplant option as a possible back-up, “they just kept pushing forward.”
Clinicians continued to slowly wean him and, on June 19, he was “liberated. They took him totally off the vent,” Latham said.
“You could tell a story about the pandemic just based on kind of the understanding of the disease at different times,” said Courtwright in an Inquirer article, adding that the use of steroid probably made the biggest difference in his care.
Three weeks later, Pierrelouis was discharged from HUP and sent to Good Shepherd Penn Partners for rehabilitation. On September 12, he was escorted by his fellow police officers to his home in New York.
“From April 28 to now was a totally different story,” Latham said a few days before his trip home. “My father’s going to be ok. His quality of life is there. And he can return to what he likes to do.
“I was blown away by everything Penn did,” she continued. “I never stopped believing.”