‘He has a fighter’s spirit’: Tulane grad student awaits post-COVID double-lung transplant

Kyle Park can strum the mandolin. He can greet you with a swagger. He can lean in for your chat. He can even chew his food. What he has trouble doing, is breathing.

The 27-year-old Tulane grad student is a very capable young man. Now that he’s convinced the right doctors of that fact, he’s one step closer to getting the lung transplant he desperately needs.

As Hurricane Ida neared the school's New Orleans campus in late August, Park evacuated to safety with friends in Tyler, Texas.

While there, the young man, described as highly intelligent and humble by those around him, developed COVID-19.

So did his father, Clifford Park, in Honolulu.

"If we had known it would be like that, we would have gotten vaccinated much earlier," said Kyle's mother Eileen Park.

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The father seemed to get better. The son got much worse.

Within a month, both of Kyle’s lungs stopped working completely. Early tests showed they were hard like bricks. Then the muscle in their place started to disappear.

Eileen was in Shreveport, watching her son through the protective glass at Willis-Knighton Medical Center, as he lay in a medically induced coma in the COVID ward, sustained only by life support, as her husband took a turn for the worse and passed away in Hawaii in a hospital, alone.

The support system doctors at Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport have used to keep Kyle alive is the Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation machine, commonly used for cardiac arrest patients building back heart health.

The COVID pandemic - specifically the Delta-variant driven surge - has found more hospital crews using ECMO for severe respiratory conditions in young people, like the jovial Park once his lungs collapsed, said ECMO nurse practitioner Emily Tull, who said Park had no comorbidities.

“This round of ECMO patients after this surge has been really humbling,” Christie Armstrong said in reference to patients’ young ages and prior virality.

Armstrong is the floor manager where Park has been hospitalized. “We’ve seen people in their 20s and 30s who were very sick which is not what we saw at the beginning of COVID.”

ECMO replaces the respiratory system, pulling out the blood and balancing its oxygen and carbon dioxide levels before returning the blood to the body.

It is a risky form of treatment linked to the blood-clot-related death of 41-year-old Broadway star Nick Cordero in July 2020.

Willis-Knighton - ranked by U.S. News as the second-best hospital

in Louisiana - formed a team who took on the task of learning how the technology can be used to save the lives of the most affected COVID patients in their ward - patients who could no longer be helped by ventilators.

“We’ve had some really great wins for some people who have come in very sick and ECMO is the only reason we were able to keep them alive,” Armstrong said.

The ECMO machine doesn’t heal the lungs, but acts as the lungs do, allowing the other organs and muscles of the body to heal enough after pneumonia so the patient is deemed healthy enough for a transplant procedure.

Because no Louisiana hospitals perform COVID-related lung transplants, the Park family realized they'd be taking this saga to a fourth state. Hospitals associated with the University of Florida in Gainesville,and Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. accepted Kyle to the next step in the process - examination - but weren't able to admit him yet because they were at capacity.

Doctors around the nation have different milestones they need patients to have met before they’ll risk a lung transplant after ECMO treatment.

Essentially they want the patient to be able to sit up and eat. Other expressed abilities and signs of enjoying life also influence admissions. The team at Willis Knighton was driven to get Kyle into qualifying condition.

He was just as driven, understanding his love for playing music could now save his life.

Eileen said Kyle has played piano since 6-years-old when his father's relative introduced the instrument to him. Over the years he picked up drums, guitar, and cello. His Instagram page shows him busking for audiences while playing the banjo and mandolin at locales across the nation.

He's tagged smiling with friends in Hawaii, Southern California, Portland, Ore., Austin, Texas, and New Orleans, La.

Kyle studied musicology at Tulane. He majored in political science as an undergraduate at the University of California San Diego.

As the ECMO treatment worked, Kyle began playing the mandolin from his hospital bed, then progressed to playing while sitting in a chair. His return to a prior passion helped convince the right doctors.

On Sunday in Shreveport, a plane landed. It was from sunny San Diego.

Tull, who had been fielding potential transplant hospitals across the nation, received a call from the hospital associated with Park's alma mater saying was in appropriate condition to receive the next step: an examination to determine if he can survive surgery. If the San Diego team determines he has a good chance to survive, his name gets added to their transplant list.

As Kyle lay in the bed waiting to board his flight, he fiddled with the mandolin and listened to songs by Simon and Garfunkel through a Bluetooth speaker, surrounded by a dozen attentive and adoring medical professionals.

"The medical team was just wonderful. We really experienced the southern hospitality," Eileen said of the staff. "We really grew close to them like a family."

The Parks have family friends in San Diego who are prepared to help watch Kyle, giving Eileen the chance to step away from her son long enough to deal with her husband's passing.

Tull, Dr. Matthew Raley, and ECMO coordinator Polly Dowd will join Park and his mother Eileen on the trip to San Diego, with hope renewed that Kyle will receive new lungs and the hospital team will further develop their ECMO knowledge and ability of application.

Kyle will continue to receive ECMO treatment until a transplant is performed.

A GoFundMe set up to help his family through this time has raised more than $90,000 of its $250,000 goal. Updates posted by Kyle's sister Lauren and family friend Christine Yu lend a daily log of the struggles and successes the Park family has endured since Kyle and Cliff's hospitalizations.

Tull said post-transplant, Kyle faces a long road of recovery - probably a year.

But she has no doubt he can make it through. None of them do.

"He has a fighter's spirit," Lauren said when speaking of her brother's adventurous nature.

His mom believes he will once again become the passionate educator he's been for much of his adult life.

Kendrick Dante is a Government Watchdog Reporter in Shreveport. You can find him on Facebook as Kendrick Dante. Twitter @kendrickdante

This article originally appeared on Shreveport Times: Tulane student, Kyle Park, battling COVID is a candidate for new lungs