Miami.- Very few people can count that they were about to die three or four times and that they fought for their lives for eight months. This is the case of Toño Mauri. The first hospital where he was treated was at Mount Sinai in Miami.
“Every day he was about to die, at least three times it was my turn to talk to the family,” recalls Dr. Juan Rivera, who became the actor’s GP.
“Toño’s clinical picture was of moderate pneumonia, but it required oxygen and the lung collapsed,” he adds.
By this time, Toño Mauri had already faced gastrointestinal bleeding; the doctors wanted to intervene surgically, but Dr. Rivera advised the family not to authorize it. Miraculously, the next day the bleeding gave way to medication.
When Mount Sinai doctors informed the family that there was not much more to do because the lungs were virtually useless and that the patient was kept alive by the mechanical support of the respiratory equipment, Carla Alemany, Mauri’s wife, the moved to Shands Hospital, Florida.
Toño Mauri arrived in the Shands on November 25, where he was reconnected to an artificial respirator, underwent a tracheotomy and for almost two months extracted blood from his body to oxygenate it.
“We worked very hard to make Toño strong enough to qualify as a candidate for a lung transplant. His lung had already been out of action for four to five months,” says doctor Andrés Peláez, who performed a lung transplant on Mauri. along with Dr. Tiago Machuca, surgical director of the lung transplant program.
“Donor lungs are assigned – on the waiting list – according to the severity of the recipient patient,” says Dr. Machuca. For this reason Toño Mauri received his new lungs 14 days after being registered as a possible recipient.
According to several sources consulted already express question, in the US, it is very difficult, almost impossible, that the influence peddling can take place in medical cases such as Toño Mauri or any other.
The actor returned home and to his social media after facing a long battle against the Covid-19.
“Sometimes patients die waiting; that’s why Tony was supremely lucky,” says Dr. Andrés Peláez.
“In the US, Covid patients exceed 27 million and the deaths already exceed 500,000 people, attention is being paid to those at risk of death, such as Toño,” says Peláez.
According to the description of the medical staff who treated Mauri, he was a very serious, chronic and atypical patient.