When Stephen Donelson arrived at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
in mid-March, Dr. Kristina Goff was among those
who turned to what she called “the stories out of
other places that were hit before.”
Donelson’s family hadn’t left the house in two
weeks after COVID-19 started spreading in Texas,
hoping to shield the organ transplant recipient.
Yet one night, his wife found him barely
breathing, his skin turning blue, and called 911.
In New York or Italy, where hospitals were
overflowing, Goff thinks Donelson wouldn’t
even have qualified for a then-precious
ventilator. But in Dallas, “we pretty much threw
everything we could at him,” she said.
Like doctors everywhere, Goff was at the
beginning of a huge and daunting learning curve.
“It’s a tsunami. Something that if you don’t
experience it directly, you can’t understand,”
Italian Dr. Pier Giorgio Villani said in a series of
webinars on six straight Tuesday evenings to
alert other intensive care units what to expect.
They started just two weeks after Italy’s first
hospitalized patient arrived in his ICU, and 10
days before Donelson fell ill in Texas.
Villani, who works in the northern city of Lodi,
described a battle to accommodate the constant
flow of people needing breathing tubes. “We
had 10, 12, 15 patients to intubate and an ICU
with seven patients already intubated,” he said.
The video sessions, organized by an Italian
association of ICUs, GiViTI, and the non-profit
Mario Negri Institute and later posted on
YouTube, constitute an oral history of Italy’s
outbreak as it unfolded, narrated by the first
doctors in Europe to fight the coronavirus.