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Families of two unvaccinated men who have had major lung surgery after contracting the coronavirus are encouraging others to get vaccinated and are reassessing their own reluctance to be vaccinated.
A 24-year-old Georgian who was reluctant to be vaccinated against Covid-19 underwent a double lung transplant after months in hospital battling the virus. Her mother urges people to protect themselves and get vaccinated.
“I just don’t want anyone else to go through this. It’s horrible,” the woman, Cheryl Bargatze Nuclo, told NBC affiliate WXIA in Atlanta. “It’s not worth all the pain this is going to cause you and your family.”
Blake Bargatze, Nuclo’s son, has been hospitalized since April after contracting the coronavirus during an indoor concert in Florida. She told WXIA that a few days before the show, she told him about getting the vaccine.
“He wanted to wait until it was out for about 10 years, much like a lot of the population wants it to be longer,” she said.
After attending the concert, Bargatze fell ill and was taken to a hospital in Florida. As his situation grew dire, the family had him transferred to the Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta so that he could be placed on an ECMO machine. The device pumps and oxygenates a person’s blood outside the body, giving the lungs and heart a chance to rest.
Nuclo said the machine was not enough to help his son recover, so he was transferred to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where he was placed on the lung transplant list. She told WXIA her son was in such bad shape that he was moved to the top of the list.
In June, he underwent a double lung transplant.
“He wanted luck, he wanted to live, so we did everything we could to make it happen to him,” she told the station.
Nuclo and her husband could not be reached immediately for comment on Thursday.
A few days before the operation, Bargatze was vaccinated against the Covid. His brother and a cousin also received the beatings after seeing what he went through, Nuclo told WXIA.
A family in Ohio is going through a similar situation. Janelle Janatowski from Toledo said her 25-year-old son was hospitalized for three months after contracting the coronavirus at work.
In recent months, her son, Marcus Hartford, has had three operations, including one to remove part of his right lung, Janatowski said in a telephone interview Thursday. After spending 81 days on an ECMO machine, it was finally pulled from it on Tuesday.
Hartford remains on a ventilator and may need to have a double lung transplant if his left lung is unable to do the work of the right.
“He’s finally moving his arms more and he’s done some leg squats. They have a bed … and they put the patient in there, and he slides up and down, and they can help him do squats to strengthen. his legs so he’s able to stand up and eventually walk again, ”she said.
“He’s had a really long road, but he’s holding on,” she said.
Hartford fell ill in early April after a group of people hosted a birthday party at the restaurant where he worked, Janatowski said.
She said her son, an award-winning executive chef from Ohio, was recruited to help the restaurant reopen after it was closed for months due to the pandemic. He had only been in the post for about three months when he fell ill.
“It just so happens that he was the one who lived really badly,” she said, noting that he had no previous health problems and neither drank nor smoked.
“I always feel like it’s surreal,” she said, “like I’m living in a dream.”
Janatowski said her son had not discussed getting the vaccine because his age group only became eligible about a week before he contracted the virus.
Janatowski, who has battled the virus herself after receiving it from her son, said she was initially hesitant to get the vaccine, but reconsidered. Family members and close friends have also decided to get the vaccine.
Health officials across the country have warned that unvaccinated young people are hospitalized for Covid-19 – and sometimes admitted to intensive care – at alarming rates.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just under half of people aged 18 to 24 and 25 to 39 in the United States are fully vaccinated. The number is even lower for children aged 12 to 18.
Many officials are urging young people to get vaccinated as soon as they can.
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