The families of two unvaccinated men who had to undergo major lung surgery after contracting the coronavirus are speaking out, encouraging others to get the shot and reevaluating their own vaccine hesitancy.
A 24-year-old Georgia man who was hesitant about getting the Covid-19 vaccine underwent a double lung transplant after spending months in the hospital battling the virus.
Now his mother is urging people to protect themselves and get the shot.
“I just don’t want anyone else to go through this. It’s horrific,” Cheryl Bargatze told NBC affiliate WXIA of Atlanta.
“It’s not worth all the pain it’s going to cause you and your family,” she said.
Cheryl’s son, Blake, has been hospitalized since April after contracting the coronavirus at an indoor concert in Florida. She told the news station that days before the show, she had talked with Blake about getting vaccinated.
“He wanted to wait until it was out for like 10 years or so, kind of like a lot of the population wants it to be out longer,” she said.
After attending the concert, Blake got sick and was taken to a hospital in Florida. As his situation became dire, the family had him transferred to Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta so he could be placed on an ECMO machine. The device pumps and oxygenates a person’s blood outside their body giving their lungs and heart a chance to rest.
Bargatze said the machine was not enough to help Blake recover, so he was moved to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore where he was placed on the lung transplant list. She told the station that her son was in such bad shape that he was moved to the top of the list.
In June, he underwent a double lung transplant.
“He wanted the chance, he wanted to live, so we did whatever we could to have that happen for him,” she told the news station.
Bargatze and her husband could not immediately be reached Thursday by NBC News.
Days before the surgery, Blake got the Covid vaccine. His brother and cousin also got the shot after seeing what Blake has gone through, Bargatze told WXIA.
Another family in Ohio is going through a very similar situation. Janelle Janatowski, of Toledo, said her 25-year-old son has been hospitalized for the past three months after contracting the coronavirus at work.
Over the past several months her son, Marcus Hartford, has undergone three surgeries including one to remove part of his right lung, Janatowski told NBC News in a phone interview on Thursday. After spending 81 days on an ECMO machine, it was finally removed on Tuesday.
Hartford remains on a ventilator and may have to undergo a double lung transplant if his left lung isn’t able to do the work of the right one.
“He’s finally moving his arms more and he did some leg squats. They have a bed … and they put the patient on there and it slides up and down and they can help him do squats to get his legs stronger so he is able to stand and eventually walk again,” she said.
“He had a very long road, but he’s hanging in there,” she added.
Hartford got sick at the beginning of April after a group of people held a birthday party at the restaurant he was working at, Janatowski said.
She said her son, an award-winning executive chef in Ohio, was recruited to help the restaurant re-open after it had been closed for months due to the pandemic. He was only on the job for roughly three months before he got sick.
“He just happened to be the one that got it really bad,” she said, noting that he had no prior medical conditions and did not drink or smoke.
“I still feel like this is surreal,” she said, “like I’m living in a dream.”
Janatowski said her son had not discussed getting vaccinated because his age group had only become eligible about a week prior to him getting the virus.
Janatowski, who battled the coronavirus herself after getting it from her son, said she was initially hesitant about getting the shot but is now reconsidering her stance. Family members and close friends have also now decided to get vaccinated.
Health officials across the country have been warning that young, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized for Covid — and at times admitted to the intensive care unit — at alarming rates.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, slightly fewer than half of people in the U.S. ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 39 are fully vaccinated. The number is even lower for children 12 to 18.
Many officials are urging young people to get vaccinated as soon as they can.