Palm Springs nurse in need of lung transplant after battle with coronavirus
A local nurse is need of a lung transplant as he continues to fight for his life months after contracting coronavirus.
Nurse Cesar Millan spent 85 days at Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Ana battling coronavirus. He says he got the virus from one of his patients while working in Palm Springs.
Millan spoke with ABC7's Veronica Miracle about his battle with the virus.
"I started having shortness of breath and that's when I started going down," Millan said.
The ICU nurses and doctors treated Millan said it was especially difficult for Millan as he would hear what they saying about his condition and knew about the severity of his illness.
"I could just imagine he was so scared. Because he knows how deadly this virus is," Jessica Moiseyev, an ICU Nurse.
"He went through everything you could possibly ever go through to survive," said Dr. Terese Hammond.
"But he hung in there. He has two kids and a wife. They zoomed as much as they could. The wife came in for her birthday, we celebrated that. So we tried to bring him as much happiness and joy that we could into the room," said Theresa Martello, the ICU Clinical Supervisor.
Millan was grateful for the care he received from staff.
"They made me cry. They treated me like a brother," Millan said.
Millan was transferred to USC's Keck School of Medicine on Tuesday. Staff at the Providence Saint John's Health Center gave Millan a fond send-off.
Millan will now wait for a lung transplant, but doctors in California haven't yet performed a lung transplant on a coronavirus patient. Doctors say only a handful of people around the world have gotten the procedure.
"Increasingly these patients, the young ones who survive COVID, are coming out of it with really tremendous damage to their lungs," Hammond said.
Doctors hope Millan will be considered for the national transplant waitlist, but that is tough to get on and even tougher for lungs.
On Wednesday, Nurses with the California Nurses Association held a rally near Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs to demand more personal protective equipment.
