Seattle ER Doctor, Nearly Killed By Coronavirus, ‘Saved’ With Experimental Treatment: Report

An emergency room doctor who nearly died from COVID-19 in Seattle says he was saved by an experimental treatment involving a drug designed for rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Ryan Padgett, 45, was placed on a ventilator at his own hospital, EvergreenHealth Medical Center, last month and was suffering kidney, lung and heart failure when he was transferred to another hospital in a last-ditch effort to save his life, he told the Los Angeles Times.

At Swedish Medical Center, also in Seattle, he was placed on a special machine known as an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) that replaces the functions of both the heart and the lungs.

He was also given the rheumatoid arthritis drug tocilizumab (Actemra) to treat the out-of-control inflammation in his body caused by an overreaction of his immune system known as a “cytokine storm.”

With the ECMO, the immunosuppressive drug and high-doses of vitamin C, the level of oxygen in Padgett’s blood improved dramatically, The Times reported.

“This is a movie-like save, it doesn’t happen in the real world often,” Padgett, who once played college football in the Rose Bowl for Northwestern, told the newspaper.

“I was just a fortunate recipient of people who said, ‘We are not done. We are going to go into an experimental realm to try and save your life,’” he said.

The FDA granted fast-track approval for a clinical trial for tocilizumab last month after it showed promising results in Italy.

A Brooklyn doctor diagnosed with COVID-19 said in a Twitter post that he received intravenous tocilizumab after his symptoms got worse while using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, the cocktail touted by President Trump.

Dr. Jignesh A. Patel said he was suffering from fevers, cough, wheezing and shortness of breath when he deteriorated further on the second day of using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.

“Got IV Tocilizumab, hoping to improve,” Patel, a cardiologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, tweeted March 21.



“12 hrs post Tocilizumab, I am able to talk a little, coughing but definitely better,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

In Padgett’s case, doctors were able to remove him from life support on March 23, The Times reported.

They later removed his breathing tube, and he slowly came out of his sedated coma while still a quarantined area of the hospital.

“It’s an incredible thing to survive a brush with death and not be able to see and be with your most loved people,” Padgett told The Times. “And when everyone on staff who comes to see you has to be in a spacesuit, you just feel like this pariah. The isolation was pretty devastating at times.”

He told NPR that during his 17 days in the hospital, so much changed, leaving him feeling like Rip van Winkle.

“It went from thinking that this disease was, you know, reasonably minor in otherwise healthy folks, and that our medically fragile population was the one at risk, to realizing that this is something that can cut down someone at any age, that this is now this very scary situation," he told the station.

"Young people could be cut at the knees and taken down by this,” he said.

Padgett, famous for being one of the first ER physicians in the country to be hospitalized in intensive care with the coronavirus, is now recovering at home and eager to get back to work, he told the Los Angeles Times.

He acknowledged that returning to his ER duties won’t be easy, “but that’s my home, that’s what I do.”

“I enjoy that everyone-in-the-foxhole mentality,” he said.

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