[conspire] Young woman w/COVID needs double lung transplant

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

First, a primer, 60,000 miles of disease:

https://elemental.medium.com/coronavirus-may-be-a-blood-vessel-disease-which-explains-everything-2c4032481ab2

That will sort of explain what happened.

NY Times reports:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/health/coronavirus-lung-transplant.html

"The 10-hour surgery was more difficult and took several hours longer than most lung transplants because inflammation from the disease had left the woman’s lungs “completely plastered to tissue around them, the heart, the chest wall and diaphragm,” said Dr. Ankit Bharat, the chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant program at Northwestern Medicine, which includes Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in an interview.”

Note: that lung photo is just next level. :(


So let’s go over a line from the Medium article and I’ll give you my hypothesis from last night.

"Endothelial cells protect the cardiovascular system, and they release proteins that influence everything from blood clotting to the immune response."

Remember my fascination with IgM and it not showing up on tests? And that was driving me crazy?

Welllllllllllllllllllll.

I was randomly going through wiki pages sifting for clue ideas, and this thing I used to know but had forgotten popped out: 

"IgM antibodies are mainly responsible for the clumping (agglutination) of red blood cells if the recipient of a blood transfusion receives blood that is not compatible with their blood type."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunoglobulin_M

So what if the clotting that happens in covid and the mystery disappearing IgM are the same thing?

Perhaps an RBC’s (red blood cell’s) exterior marker of some blood typing is getting misfolded? Or differentiated in some other way?

The endothelium helpfully triggers what it’s supposed to do: hemoagglutinate, which most people would call clot. (Technically, these are different processes.)

So people may be thinking it’s clots, but it’s…almost clots. It’s just doctors aren’t expecting to look for a blood type mismatch within someone’s own body when there’s been no transfusion.

Deirdre