NYPD lieutenant beats coronavirus after 168 days in hospital
NYPD Lieutenant Pierre-Louis. @NYPDNews
NEW YORK - An NYPD lieutenant made it home after battling the coronavirus in three hospitals for 168 days— and spent three months on a ventilator, according to the police department.
Doctors were not certain 59-year-old Lt. Yvan Pierre-Louis would recover, according to NYPD officials.
"I feel blessed," Pierre-Louis told Newsday. "From no hope to hope, that was a lot."
Cheers greeted Pierre-Louis at his homecoming in Hempstead, L.I., on Saturday.
Doctors discharged him from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, where his daughter Diane Latham is a nurse.
His 86-year-old mother, Maria Lina Pierre-Louis, died in May of COVID-19 while he was in a coma, Newsday reported.
The coronavirus sickened Pierre-Louis in late March. He was admitted to NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, L.I., on March 28 and placed on a ventilator that night, Newsday reported.
At Penn, the robust police officer was unconscious on a ventilator, bloated by 50 pounds of fluid, with sores on his face from lying on his stomach, a position that helps COVID-19 patients breathe, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. His doctor told Latham and her mother, Isabelle, he would soon be taken off the ventilator whether they approved or not.
Latham recalled a doctor saying her father had no chance of surviving and the ventilator was needed for other patients, the paper reported.
“We’ve seen people who have been as sick as him, but not just to have a recovery that was so prolonged, but ultimately was so successful …,” Penn doctor Andrew Courtwright told the Inquirer. “It’s a remarkable testament to him and his family."