Miami.— Very few people can count on dying three or four times and fighting for their lives for eight months. This is the case of Toño Mauri. The first hospital where he was treated was on Mount Sinai, in Miami.
“Every day he was about to die, I had to talk to the family at least three times,” recalls Dr. Juan Rivera herself, who became the actor’s primary care physician.
“Toño’s clinical picture was moderate pneumonia, but he needed oxygen and the lung collapsed,” he added.
By then Toño Mauri had already had gastrointestinal bleeding; The doctors wanted to intervene, but Dr. Rivera advised the family not to approve. Miraculously, the bleeding gave way to the drugs the next day.
When the doctors on Mount Sinai told the family that there was not much else to do because the lungs were practically useless and that the patient was kept alive by the mechanical support of the breathing equipment, Carla Alemán, Mauri’s wife, brought him over to the hospital, Shands, in Florida.
Toño Mauri arrived at the Shands on November 25, where he was reconnected to a ventilator, underwent a tracheostomy, and for nearly two months they removed the blood from his body to supply it with oxygen.
“We worked very hard to ensure that Toño was strong enough to qualify as a candidate for a lung transplant. The lung has not functioned for four to five months, ”explains Dr. Andrés Peláez, who performed the lung transplant on Mauri along with Dr. Tiago Machuca, surgical director of the lung transplant program.
“Donor lungs are assigned to the waiting list based on the severity of the recipient patient,” said Dr. Machuca. That’s why Toño Mauri received his new lungs 14 days after he was registered as a possible recipient.
According to various sources consulted and expressly requested, it is very difficult, almost impossible, in the US that influence can be exercised in medical cases such as Toño Mauri’s or others.
The actor returned home and to his social networks after a long battle with Covid-19.
“Sometimes patients die while they wait; That’s why Tony was extremely lucky, ”says Dr. Andrés Peláez.
“In the US, there are more than 27 million Covid patients and more than 500,000 deaths, the focus is on those at risk of death, such as Toño,” said Peláez.
According to the description of the medical staff who treated Mauri, he was a very serious, chronic and atypical patient.