MIAMI (WSVN) - A documentary taking viewers behind closed doors to show medical miracles during the pandemic will soon be released.
The entire section of a South Florida hospital was forced to adapt to the times in order to bring life-saving care to patients while keeping them safe from COVID-19.
“Everybody I talk to in healthcare, we all tend to agree that this has been the most challenging year because of the remarkable challenges that COVID-19 has projected, and that is no less true for transplantation,” said one man being interviewed in the documentary.
The documentary gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at how a group of doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital took on the challenges as the coronavirus pandemic took the world by storm.
“It started out as a way to just, even really just an internal thing to show what our teams were doing,” said Miami Transplant Institute Vice President Luke Preczewski.
As COVID-19 patients flooded emergency rooms, other procedures were forced to take a backseat, but many of them couldn’t wait.
“If you didn’t take that organ that day because of the virus, that chance may never come again,” said one person in the documentary.
“We had to continue operating, offering transplants to these patients throughout the pandemic, despite the additional challenges, despite the hospital being at capacity and despite the stress that it created for our team,” said Preczewski.
Those efforts required many changes to the protocols for surgeons at the Miami Transplant Institute.
“We had to open two whole new clinics,” said Preczewski. “It’s been extremely important for us to be able to keep COVID positive and COVID negative patients separated from each other.”
MTI performed 721 transplants in 2020, which is down only slightly from 747 transplants performed the year prior.
One of the transplant surgeries was for Mikalyla’s 5-year-old son Elijah.
“He had his whole digestive system replaced,” Mikalyla said.
It’s a big procedure during any year, especially during a pandemic.
“It was a lot going on and trying to be there, and, you know, with COVID going on, you’re trying to keep him in the hospital as little as possible,” Mikalyla said.
The surgery went well and Elijah got all the care and support he would need while recuperating.
“They would make sure that he called me when I wasn’t there. If they didn’t hear from me by a certain time, they were calling me, telling me what was going on with Elijah every day, updates,” Mikalyla said. “They made sure Elijah had everything he needed. If he ran out of pajamas, they would go wash his blankets and his pajamas.”
They even made sure to get him home in time for the holidays.
“They let him come home Christmas Eve and that was the best Christmas gift ever,” said Mikalyla.
“What Jackson does, what this hospital does in the most difficult of times, to come together and continues to provide world-class care,” said Preczewski.
For the second consecutive year, MTI is the number one transplant center in the U.S. with no other transplant center performing more transplants in 2019 and 2020 despite the pandemic.
The documentary will be released Thursday at 12 p.m.
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