Heroic innovation by doctors saves Pa. coronavirus patient who was ‘as close to death as he could have been’

On March 7, Dan Bisset went to a beer festival in Brooklyn, New York.

Days later, he was in intensive care at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, afflicted with COVID-19 and inches from being a dead man.

At one point, his odds of survival were rated at around 5 percent.

Yet, despite the mountain of uncertainty about how to treat the coronavirus, the heroic efforts and innovation of his doctors kept the 48-year-old Clark’s Summit man from crossing that lethal line, Dan’s sister Lisa Harvey said during a teleconference Thursday afternoon.

So, instead of going to the mortuary, Dan will be going home.

“He is getting stronger every day,” Harvey said. “He is projected to go home on Saturday.”

Yet this is not an entirely happy tale. Although Dan survived the coronavirus, his 75-year-old father, Daniel Bisset Sr., did not. Dan’s 73-year-old mother, Josie, is recovering from COVID-19 as well.

Dan’s fight with the virus started when he began feeling lousy the day after returning from New York, his sister said. His first test for COVID-19 was negative. In the interim, their father paid Dan a visit, not realizing the danger of contagion, Harvey said.

A second COVID-19 test came up negative, but Dan’s condition kept getting worse. By March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, he was comatose and in isolation at Geisinger, undergoing special, last ditch treatment.

“I pretty much sat vigil at my brother’s side, as much as I could through a glass wall,” Harvey said. “He was just fighting, fighting, fighting.”

Their father was ill by that time. His first COVID-19 test registered negative as well, Harvey said. “He did not make it due to COVID-19,” she said, adding that testing done after her dad died showed he had contracted the virus.

It wasn’t long before their mother, like Dan, was in intensive care at Geisinger being treated for the same disease.

Dr. John Sobuto, the critical care physician who led Dan’s treatment team, said Dan’s prospects seemed grim initially. He said Dan was Geisinger’s first coronavirus patient. The reports coming out of China, where the disease first ran rampant, were not encouraging.

It was going to be a learn as you go situation with extremely high stakes.

“My first thought was I was scared for Dan,” Sobuto said, noting that Dan’s deterioration was frighteningly rapid.

With few options available, the team decided to try ECMO, a procedure where Dan’s blood was artificially oxygenated, taking over that process for his besieged lungs, Sobuto said. “It’s basically a therapy to help your lungs weather the storm,” he said.

Sobuto said he knew going in that the Chinese had not had much success treating coronavirus patients with ECMO. There also was fear, he said, that “Dan was too far gone.”

It worked, though.

“Dan was probably as close to death as he could have been,” Sobuto said. “Dan’s case was a success, but it easily could not have been.”

So, Sobuto said, it was exhilarating to see Dan pass through a cheering crowd of more than 100 healthcare workers as he was wheeled out of Geisinger bound for a rehabilitation center last Thursday.

“Day by day, we’re learning from this disease,” said Evan Gajkowski, Geisinger’s ECMO coordinator.

Dan wasn’t the only one in peril. Nurse John Harahus of the center’s Biocontainment Unit Team, said his crew had to keep the people who were treating Dan, as well as other staff and patients, safe from COVID-19. He said they applied lessons from the 2015-16 Ebola outbreak to accomplish that task.

“This is a taxing situation,” Harahus said.

He said it was especially taxing for Harvey, as he realized the first time he saw her. “She told me, ‘I think people downplayed this, like it was the flu…This isn’t the flu’.”

It was much more pleasant when he finally got to talk to Dan soon after he was taken off a ventilator. “I said, ‘You want to get a beer after this?’ He said, “Anything but Corona’,” Harahus recalled.

Harahus and his colleagues stressed the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. “This is not the regular flu,” Harahus said. “It’s not a joke.”

Pseudo-experts who belittle the peril of the pandemic online are spreading a dangerous message, he said. “We can’t stress it enough. This is something that should not be downplayed.”

Nor should safety precautions to prevent the spread of the virus be ignored, Sobuto said.

“Please stay home. Please distance yourself. Please wear masks in public,” he said. “These are the only things we know that work.”