OK, I know I have posted plenty of stories about the ignorant, stupid, conservative people who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and end up in the hospital and/or dead. And some have a regretful “epiphany” with regards to their stupidity and selfishness, especially before dying. But this one man from Tennessee caught my attention. And the reason I stopped and said, “Whoa” is because I had never heard of this medical device being used in an ICU ward to deal with COVID-19. It is called an ECMO machine.
This is a video of a young woman on the ECMO machine. She was 29, and she got COVID-19 in Sept 2020.
And here is more on the ECMO machine.
As the man I mentioned in the intro, his name is Joe Gammon. He is a truck driver from Tennessee. And yes, he listened to all that shit on conservative radio about COVID-19.
“If I would have known six months ago that this could be possible, this would have been a no-brainer,” the 45-year-old father of six says after weeks in critical condition. “But I honestly didn’t think I was at any risk. That is the naive portion on my end.”
Gammon is a truck driver from Lascassas who says he listens to a lot of conservative talk radio. And the daily diatribes downplaying the pandemic and promoting personal freedom were enough to dissuade him from vaccination.
He claims he was not an anti-vaxxer, but he sure as hell feels NOW that people should get the vaccine for COVID-19, especially since he is on an ECMO machine. His lungs are so damaged that they have the tube in his neck for his blood to run into the ECMO machine for reoxygenation.
His lungs are so damaged that they could not use a ventilator to force oxygen into them. I knew the lungs could be damaged and death would ensue. But to see the lengths that ICU workers have to do to keep someone alive whose lungs are that damaged is amazing. And just think. It is all based upon that thing conservatives reject: science!
Without that ECMO machine he would be dead.
As for how he feels towards his fellow human beings:
“Before you say no, seek a second opinion,” he says to people who think the way he did before being hospitalized. “Just to say ‘no’ is irresponsible. Because it might not necessarily affect you. What if it affected your spouse? Or your child? You wouldn’t want that. And you sure wouldn’t want that on your heart.”
Much better than some of the assholes we have read about and seen on the news.