Cardiothoracic Surgery: Matt's Story

On September 19, 2021, Matt Laprade was a 46-year-old man with respiratory failure from COVID-19. He was in an ICU in Kenosha on a mechanical ventilator with a tube in his throat, lying on his stomach with medications to paralyze his muscles so they didn’t use any additional oxygen. Even with 100% oxygen he was dangerously close to death. At the last moment he was accepted for transfer to a hospital in Milwaukee for ECMO with hope that it would buy his lungs more time to recover.

In late August, Matt had a sore throat, cough, and muscle aches, and then on September 1, he went to the emergency room in Kenosha and was found to have COVID pneumonia. He was started on supplemental oxygen and given treatment with Remdesivir and dexamethasone. By September 3 he was requiring 15 liters of oxygen and then later that day he needed a high flow device that delivered 60 lpm oxygen. A CT scan of his chest showed air in the mediastinum and bilateral opacified lungs, and by September 12 he was requiring mask ventilation. His lungs kept getting worse and he was intubated on September 15.

Matt showed no improvement throughout the entire month of October and by November 4, his doctors started looking for a hospital that could perform a lung transplant. At this point there was no possibility that his lungs would recover. Because he was unable to get out of bed and walk, multiple programs rejected him, but finally on November 30 he was transferred to Froedtert.

We knew that he had been confined to bed for over 2 months, and without being able to walk, he would be unlikely to recover from a lung transplant surgery. Matt’s ECMO was being performed with a cannula in his femoral vein and another in his jugular, and we needed to reconfigure his access. The femoral catheter was removed, and the jugular was replaced with a dual lumen bicaval ECMO cannula. He was not able to stand on his own until December 6 when he stood for 19 seconds. This was the first time Matt had been out of bed since September. He continued to work with physical and occupational therapy and by December 16, despite requiring ECMO and mechanical ventilation, he was able to walk for the first time in 3 months.

Matt was placed on the national lung transplant list December 22, and he received a bilateral lung transplant on January 8, 2022. Matt continued to improve rapidly, and he was discharged for physical rehabilitation on January 26. He was able to go home on February 2, 2022. After being hospitalized for five months (2 months at Froedtert), Matt was finally home and breathing on his own.

Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery cardiac faculty. Back row: Drs. James Mace, Takushi Kohmoto, Lyle Joyce, David Joyce. Front row: Drs. Nilto de Oliveira, G. Hossein Almassi, Paul Pearson, Stefano Schena, Lucian Durham, H. Adam Ubert.

Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery thoracic faculty. From left: Drs. Paul Linsky, Mario Gasparri, and David Johnstone.

Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery APPs. Top row: APPs Andrew Kennedy, Adam Holmbeck, Tim Sie. Middle row: Chelsea Nettesheim, Lindsay Morris. Bottom row: Melissa Kaske, Trisha Wilcox, Shannon Scalish.