Nurse downed by COVID-19 recovers, donates blood

MANILA, Philippines — Two weeks ago, Roselle Gale Arranz, 32, thought she was going to die.

Confined in the hospital for 10 days and requiring an oxygen tank to breathe normally, the nurse knew she had contracted the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) even before her doctors confirmed it.

Listed as Patient 204, Arranz was exposed to a known COVID-19 case and on March 8 started showing symptoms that eventually developed into pneumonia.

“I was surprised by how swiftly it progressed within two weeks,” she told the Inquirer. “It was so hard to breathe that, at one point, I almost passed out on my way to the restroom.”

Alive for a reason

After a tough and lonely battle, she started getting well and finally tested negative for the virus in the first week of April.

Convinced that God had kept her alive for a reason, Arranz and two other COVID-19 survivors donated their blood to Philippine General Hospital (PGH), where medical experts are preparing for an experimental treatment using convalescent plasma, or blood from survivors.

Lifeline

Medical experts believe that blood teeming with antibodies produced by the immune system to attack the virus can be a lifeline for the critically ill via transfusion. This treatment had been used against infectious diseases like the 1918 Spanish flu, H1N1, measles and to some extent, Ebola.

Plasma is extracted from survivors through plasmapheresis, which “is almost like hemodialysis,” Arranz said. The blood is passed through a filter to separate plasma from the red and white blood cells, and platelets. The plasma is then treated and returned to the body.

The complicated process initially scared Arranz, until she read that it was done successfully in clinical trials in China.

Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City were among the first in the United States to develop a test that can detect antibodies in recovering patients, an essential part of this treatment strategy.

In the case of the coronavirus disease, the convalescent plasma would be tried as a treatment for hospitalized patients who had a moderate form of the disease and had trouble breathing, but not for those in advanced stages of the disease, said Dr. David Reich, president, and COO of Mount Sinai.

Plasma donors would also be carefully screened to meet strict criteria. They would include people who tested positive for the virus when they were ill, recovered, have had no symptoms for 14 days and now test negative.

New mission

Arranz said her “near-death experience” has instilled in her a newfound sense of mission. “I just want to do something, anything, because I think God has left me here for a task that I must carry out,” she said.

That sense of purpose seems to have driven much of Arranz’s life. She finished a nursing course in 2009 but failed the licensure exam twice. “I was overconfident back then,” she recalled with a laugh. “I was so sure I would pass without studying.”

Arranz first worked as a call center agent for seven years before a fateful encounter with a nurse acquaintance made her realize that office work was not for her. “I knew that becoming a nurse means losing a lot of things: a relatively high salary, good health. But I promised the Lord that if I passed (the licensure exam) this time around, I would serve others until I die,” she said.

‘Institutional support’

Now employed in a private hospital in Metro Manila and counted among the more than 250 health workers in the country who got infected with the coronavirus, Arranz said the pandemic made her realize how the work of medical practitioners still tend to be romanticized.

“We’re happy when people applaud us, when they call us heroes,” she said. “But this is what we do every day. Even without the coronavirus, we face death and illness. We save lives.”

“The applause is nice, but what we need is (institutional) support. Must the rest of us die for people to realize this?”