A man who was hospitalized with COVID-19 was released Friday after more than 6 months, AL.com reports.
Ricky Hamm, 50, was the longest-staying COVID-19 patient at the UAB Hospital in Birmingham, Ala.
“When it first started, we just thought we’d be here a couple of weeks and it won’t be that long,” his wife Shannon Hamm said of his hospitalization. “But it turned into a long ordeal.”
Hamm called finally being discharged “surreal” as he walked out of the hospital with the help of a walker.
“It’s been a long journey,” he told AL.com. “I guess I haven’t really fathomed that it’s coming to an end. But it’s slowly starting to give me butterflies.”
During his hospital stay, he spent almost five months on life support, according to the report. He was attached to a extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to assist with his breathing for 147 of his 187 days in the hospital, according to AL.com.
“ECMO is a complicated, complex procedure,” Keith Wille, medical director at UAB, told AL.com. “It’s invasive and not much fun for the patient. In this case, it saved his life. But trust me; you do not want to go on ECMO.”
Hamm, a medevac helicopter pilot, first became sick from the coronavirus in January, right after receiving the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Hamm is still promoting the COVID-19 vaccine.
“I believe in the vaccine,” he said, according to AL.com. “I believe I already had the virus before I got the vaccine, before it could work to protect me. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I went through.”