At Bichat hospital, transplants slowed down by Covid-19

JULIE BALAGUE FOR THE WORLD

The second wave day by day | Episode 4. Tuesday, November 24, just before 11pm, Reynald is on the couch watching a documentary on television when the long-awaited phone call from Bichat hospital finally arrives: thanks to a donation from a family, two lungs are available to him. The transplant is expected in a few hours in Paris, a two-hour drive from the small town of Hauts-de-France where he lives with his wife and three daughters. At 45, he suffers from severe respiratory failure and was enrolled a year ago on the waiting list of the Biomedicine Agency, which coordinates the samples throughout France. But with Covid, everything has slowed down: fewer donors, fewer doctors for organ harvesting, fewer intensive care beds to welcome patients after the operation.

A tall dark tower on the edge of the ring road, Bichat hospital is the only public care hospital in Paris (AP-HP) to perform lung transplants. About 70 interventions are carried out per year. “Here, we have a great delay. We will not exceed 50 “, observes Yves Castier, head of the vascular and thoracic surgery department, who will take part in the operation in the late afternoon. On the WhatsApp thread created by the hospital surgeons to exchange information on the organs offered by the Biomedicine Agency, the messages hardly encrypted in November, even if several interventions took place during this second wave.

During the first wave, surgeons had stopped everything, believing it was too risky to be admitted to the ICU “Overwhelmed by Covid Patients” transplant patients, with immune defenses weakened by anti-rejection drugs. “We were all stressed out”, recognizes Yves Castier. Added to this was the fear of being left without beds. “Lung transplantation requires a hospital stay of at least ten days, sometimes more when patients have infectious complications,” stresses the surgeon. As much as a patient with a severe form of Covid.

This fall, the beds were “Sanctuarized” for transplants, but other procedures had to be canceled, to the chagrin of the surgeons concerned. “In spring we all felt in the same boat, people were reasonable. There the atmosphere is more tense and the tone sometimes rises “, says Yves Castier, co-chair of the board of the hospital block, the body responsible for distributing resources – access to operating rooms, intensive care beds – between the different wards.

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