Roanoke, Va.-based Carilion Clinic is spotlighting the story of a community figure who had a severe case of COVID-19 in an effort to encourage vaccinations amid an unprecedented nationwide surge of cases.
A video shared by Carilion Clinic on Dec. 22 tells the story of Justin Ditmore, a 52-year-old local sports newscaster who fortunately recovered after a severe bout with the virus left him hospitalized for more than four months.
Mr. Ditmore was placed on a ventilator within two days of hospital admission after contracting COVID-19. After a week with no signs of improvement, he was placed on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a machine that adds oxygen to the blood and essentially acts as the heart and lungs.
"ECMO is very stressful on the body because you're basically running blood through a hose and flowing four liters of blood a minute into this vein," said Sarah Curran, RN, an ECMO specialist at Carilion Clinic. "We exhaust everything that we can before we do ECMO because of that stress and the high, high risk of multiorgan failure from the ECMO machine itself, but there comes a point when it's life or death and [patients] need to go on ECMO."
After weeks of uncertainty on a ventilator and ECMO, Mr. Ditmore began to improve. He was hospitalized for more than 120 days and is undergoing physical therapy for muscle weakness and stiff joints from lying in a hospital bed for months.
Beth Fisher, Mr. Ditmore's partner, said she hopes sharing his experience will encourage more people to get vaccinated.
"There were a lot of people who said to me, 'I didn’t really think this could affect people the way that it has.' It made it more real," she said. "Which, if the positive of that is more people getting vaccinated or being aware or learning what they need to learn about COVID and what it can do, then I think there’s a silver lining to us going through this."
Mr. Ditmore added: "If you think just because you're healthy [that] you're going to be fine, think again, because COVID doesn't care," he said. "I'm a perfectly healthy 52-year-old male, and I died or almost died six times … and if that doesn't open your eyes, I don't know what does."