(CNN) — Mayra Ramírez says she was careful to follow all the health precautions she could before the day she was admitted to a Chicago hospital with symptoms of coronavirus.
The 28-year-old arrived at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital emergency room on April 26 and within minutes, giving her just enough time to call her family, her heartbreaking experience began.
“All I remember was that they put me to sleep when they intubated me and then six weeks of complete nightmares,” he told CNN. “Some of the nightmares consisted of suffocating a lot and I attribute it to not being able to breathe.”
The coronavirus had taken a fatal toll on her body: her lungs had suffered irreversible damage and other organs were starting to fail, she said. After Ramírez spent more than a month on a ventilator, her family flew in from North Carolina for one last goodbye after, she said, doctors announced to them that they weren’t sure if she would survive.
There was an option to save his life: a double lung transplant.
“Without the transplant, I would not have succeeded,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, chief of Thoracic Surgery at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, adding that Ramirez had multiple complications related to the virus.
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The fact that she was young and healthy, she said, made her a good candidate for the rare procedure.
“I looked at myself and I couldn’t recognize my own body,” said Ramirez, after waking up in the hospital after his procedure. “I couldn’t speak, I could barely move a finger, I couldn’t move. I was in a lot of pain, I was very confused.
Ramírez is now the first American known to have undergone the procedure after a battle with the coronavirus, according to a release Northwestern Medicine press release. Almost two months have passed since the surgery and he is recovering at home. She says she is still weak and struggling to breathe.
She is one of more than 4.6 million Americans who have been infected with coronavirus. At least 154,860 people have died.
“This is not a hoax,” he said. “This virus is real, it happened to me.”
CNN’s Deanna Hackney contributed to this report.
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