Juan Diego CHS graduate returns home after battling coronavirus in intensive care unit

Friday, May. 08, 2020

MURRAY — It’s hard to believe there can be a silver lining when it comes to COVID-19, but one Juan Diego Catholic High School alumna is discovering that truth for herself. 

Cynthia Burgos Lemus, 24, is recovering from the coronavirus at home after 13 days in Intermountain Medical Center’s intensive care unit. 

On April 17, she became the first person in Utah to be treated with plasma from a person recovering from the virus.

“Most people who have been infected with COVID-19 form antibodies several weeks after becoming infected,” an IMC press release said. “These antibodies are tailor-made by the immune system to fight the novel coronavirus and are an important way the body fights the disease.” 

Lemus is a flight attendant who mostly serves on domestic flights and, according to her husband Moises, believes she contracted the virus at work. Initially, Cynthia thought she had a common cold. Both Cynthia and Moises became quite sick with the virus, but Cynthia gradually got worse. 

The couple had been married just 18 months, and “this was the last thing that we would be thinking we would have to be going through,” said Moises, a video producer. “We talked about it and we said, ‘If we do happen to get it, we’re young; they say this is only really affecting people of an older age where it can be deadly.’ So that’s what we were thinking, because that’s what all the news reports were saying at the beginning.”

After several days during which Cynthia did not improve and stopped eating, Moises convinced her to go to the emergency room on April 5, about a week after she became ill. There, both were treated; Moises received a breathing treatment while Cynthia was admitted to the hospital. Due to the pandemic restrictions, Moises was forced to leave his wife at the hospital. By 4 a.m. she called to tell him they were putting her on a ventilator. 

She called her mother, Vanessa Rojas, shortly after.

“It was shocking: I had texted her at 10 p.m. and she replied they were keeping her in the hospital,” Rojas said. “It was ‘Mom, I’m OK, don’t worry.’ She was worried that she had passed the virus to us because we saw her the Wednesday before she got sick.” 

Cynthia’s condition deteriorated rapidly, even though she was on the ventilator. She had to be heavily sedated, so she could no longer talk on the phone. All her husband and her mother had to rely on was calls and Facetime from medical personnel.

During those days, Rojas, a St. Francis Xavier parishioner, said she prayed and told God to take her daughter if it was her time, but asked that instead he allow her to live. 

“‘I want her back; you gave me her 24 years ago; I don’t think it’s time for her to go,’ I prayed,” she recalled. 

On Easter Sunday, the doctors made the radical call to put Cynthia on an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine, which pumps and oxygenates a patient’s blood outside the body. She was the first person in the state diagnosed with coronavirus to receive this treatment. Still, she did not improve. 

The next day, Dr. Daanish Hoda, director of IMC’s hematologic malignancy department, called the family and told them of a USDA Mayo Clinic study in which plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients was being used to treat sick patients. 

Desperate for help and running out of options, the family agreed to the procedure.

“We wanted to give her every best opportunity to get better, so that was a simple ‘yes,” Moises said.

The family immediately began contacting radio and TV stations to solicit plasma donations. In the end, it was a plasma donor from Minnesota who was the best fit for Cynthia due to her blood type and other factors, her mother said. 

On April 17, Cynthia received the plasma. 

Initially, she made tiny improvements, but within days, her care team removed the ECMO machine and started Cynthia on blood thinners.  On April 26, in a major development, doctors removed the young flight attendant from the ventilator.

“That was fantastic news after 20 days,” Moises said right after hearing the news. “I’m just overjoyed right now; I’m just extremely happy.” 

At that time, Rojas said, “I think our faith as a whole family has helped us. God listened to us and little by little, even though it’s baby steps, she is getting better.”

Cynthia left the hospital less than a week later, on April 30. She is still very weak and has a long recovery ahead of her. She does not remember much of her experience at IMC.

“I feel like I just took a little nap and then I woke up,” she said. “It has been surreal.”

When Moises saw his wife being wheeled out of the hospital, it felt like their wedding day all over again, he said.

“My heart just dropped, it was like she was walking down the aisle again and tears came to my eyes,” he said at a press conference the following day.

 As he looks back, Moises Lemus said the past month has “literally been the worst month of my life. ... Not even really knowing the condition she was in, not being able to see her, was extremely hard; not knowing what’s going to happen, how is she progressing.”

Statistically, neither Moises, who recently was released from quarantine, nor Cynthia should have been hit hard by COVID-19, but “what we found out is the virus doesn’t care how old you are,” he said. “You can be young; you can be middle-aged; you can be old, it doesn’t matter. The virus hits everybody completely differently.

“You don’t know where in that spectrum you’re going to come out with the virus, so take it seriously, wash your hands, wear a mask, be smart,” he added. “Don’t think you’re invincible because in reality, you’re not invincible.” 

Other Utah COVID-19 patients may need plasma donations from those who have recovered from the disease. Those who qualify and are willing to donate may contact the Red Cross at redcrossblood.org.