Woman Survives 6 Days Without Lungs During Radical Procedure

A huge breakthrough in the medical industry just occurred where doctors removed both lungs of a patient in Canada and kept her alive with an artificial replacement for six days until they finally found a donated organ. This is the first case of its kind and has been getting massive attention from the medical community.

Artificial organs have been a common theme in futuristic science fiction for decades, with movies and TV shows postulating that it’s possible to live without the body parts that people are born with by replacing them with parts that are man-made. In the case of Melissa Benoit, this is no longer just a case of miracles in fictional stories, Futurism reports.

Ms. Benoit was brought to the hospital in Toronto where she was diagnosed with having cystic fibrosis. However, shortly after that, complications arose, which only gave her a few hours to live. Faced with overwhelming pressure, doctors decided to take a risk by removing the patient’s lungs and then placing her on life support. This is how Ms. Benoit survived for six days without her lungs.

After nearly a week of waiting for a pair of lungs from a suitable donor, she was finally given a new pair of the essential organs. During the interim, however, the days she spent hooked up to a machine is a huge breakthrough for the medical industry. According to Dr. Niall Ferguson, one of the doctors involved in discussing the desperate measure, what it made it really difficult was the number of unknown factors tied to the procedure, The Guardian reports.

“It was a difficult discussion because when we’re talking about something that had never to our knowledge been done before, there were a lot of unknowns,” Dr. Ferguson said.

In any case, this proves without question that humans don’t necessarily need the organs they were born with in order to survive. This could lead to several advancements in artificial organs for years to come.