Today, we lined the corridor for one of our own and clapped this frontline NHS staff home, following a 16-day stay at Darent Valley Hospital.
Paul is a 42 year-old long-serving NHS Radiographer (24 years of service) who was admitted to Darent Valley Hospital on the 3rd April with COVID-19. He developed a supra-rare complication of COVID infection, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, which gave rise to total muscular paralysis of the whole body. This is a first known case of its kind in Kent, if not the country.
Paul walked out of ITU and the hospital today having proposed to his girlfriend Katy via FaceTime when he was still in the ITU, where he stayed for 11 days. He thought he was in his last leg; and he took a deep breath and mouthed the proposal through his tracheostomy tube. To no one's surprise, Katy accepted, to the immense delight of all the ITU staff looking after him. It was an extraordinary happy occasion to an otherwise sweaty hard-slog routines of ITU.
Apart from intensive respiratory management, to the full credits of our Critical Care team, he was also treated with a ground-breaking therapy (on the advice of our expert Neurologists), an immunoglobulin infusion, a plasma extract from generous blood donations supplied by the National Blood Transfusion Service (NHSBT). Without this, Paul might have been on the ventilator for much longer. His rapid recovery is just short of a miracle.
And what a fruitful and productive day at work. Perhaps that's what is driving our NHS staff working so hard everyday in caring for these patients.
Dr Jonathan Kwan
Divisional Medical Director