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Showing posts from April, 2020

32 Days on a Ventilator: One Covid Patient’s Fight to Breathe Again

“Is he going to make it?” Kim Bello asked, clutching her phone, alone in her yard. She had slipped outside so her three children, playing games in the living room, could be shielded from a wrenching conversation with a doctor treating her husband, Jim. For two weeks, he had been battling the coronavirus at Massachusetts General Hospital, on a ventilator and, for the past nine days, connected to a last-resort artificial heart-lung machine as well. The physician, Dr. Emmy Rubin, gently told Ms. Bello that while her husband had a chance of surviving, “If you’re asking for an honest opinion, it’s more likely than not that he won’t.” Mr. Bello, 49, an athletic and healthy lawyer, had developed a 103 degree fever in early March after a hike in the White Mountains in New Hampshire and landed in a suburban emergency room six days later, struggling to breathe. Now, despite all his doctors had done, his lungs looked white as bone on his latest X-ray, with virtually no ...

Silenced by Virus, Met Opera Links for Digital Global Gala

Javier Camarena was at his home in Zurich singing an aria from Bellini’s "Il Pirata" when the screen for the video feed split, and he was joined by Metropolitan Opera music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Montreal and general manager Peter Gelb in New York. "Just a second," the tenor from Mexico said, raising an index finger. He had just finished the slow-moving first section. An associate director an ocean away didn’t realize he also planned to perform the cabaletta, the faster-moving second part. Restored to a full screen, Camarena continued. With the entertainment world shut down by the  coronavirus  pandemic, the Met staged an At-Home Gala on Saturday that would have been inconceivable to the Vanderbilts and Morgans who helped found the company in 1883. A starry array of classical music’s biggest names sang live on Skype from their living rooms across 13 nations, including Renée Fleming in Virginia, Jonas Kaufmann in Germany, Bryn Terfel in Wales a...