A Long Island father returned to the hospital on Tuesday, where doctors saved his life after pneumonia caused him to cough so violently that he suffered a punctured lung.
Thanks to a COVID therapy reserved for only the worst lung injuries, he pulled through and can spend the holidays with his family.
“The feeling felt like somebody had punched me very hard in the rib,” Sean Jordan said.
That’s how the 52-year-old describes the cough that put him on life support.
It broke a rib, which then punctured Sean’s lung while he was at South Shore University Hospital, being treated for pneumonia last January.
“It was so loud that my next-door neighbor heard my rib crack, (the patient in) the bed next to me,” Jordan said. “My entire body started to swell with air because there was no external wound for the air to escape.”
“I was shocked because he looked like he had been stung by a thousand bees. He didn’t even look like him,” Jordan’s wife, Danielle, said.
A team of doctors and nurses with Northwell Health, between Suffolk and Nassau counties, worked feverishly to save him.
And they did it through a machine that administers a treatment called ECMO, which was used to save patients during the pandemic.
It oxygenates the blood, pulling it out and then pumping it back into the body.
“In Sean’s case, he had one catheter that was draining blood from his lower part of his body, and putting the blood back in, through a catheter in his neck,” Dr. Zubair Hasan said.
“His heart did all the work. His lungs were just allowed to rest,” Dr. John Goncalves Jr. said.
While that happened, so did the next incredible part of Sean’s story.
He believes he was in another realm.
“I was with my father, my grandma, and eventually it was my grandmother who told my father I’m not supposed to be there yet,” Jordan said.
All of this while his sister and mother were praying.
“I was praying that God would take me and leave him’ Jordan’s mother, Mary Jane, said.
And the doctors were waiting and watching for 6 days.
“I’m no longer afraid to die, but I also love the fact that we as human beings fight so hard to save a life,” Jordan said.
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