Doctors declared her braindead due to COVID-19, but four months later, the 25-year-old from North Carolina was released from the rehab and is back home with her family.
Tionna Hairston and her mom, Stacey Peatross, were both diagnosed with coronavirus infection last May. Hairston took care of her mother and didn't have any symptoms. Then she felt the initial symptoms such as losing her sense of smell and taste, and then her condition took a turn for the worse, Fox 46 noted.
She became very symptomatic
She had suffered from a stroke and had terrible headaches due to the bleeding in her brain, apart from the blood clot in her heart. Her mother said that she just that her daughter was just too weak from the virus. But when she saw her eyes were going opposite each other, she knew Tionna was having a stroke.
She was brought to the Forsyth Medical Center intensive-care unit, where she suffered a cardiac arrest while being treated. For a period of 30 minutes, her heart stopped before briefly restarting, Winston-Salem Journal reported. Doctors were able to revive her, but she then started having kidney and liver failure. Her left arms and legs also became essentially useless for months.
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"Doctors thought she would be vegetable."
Doctors thought Hairston would have no hope for life and would eventually be taken off of life support. Her mother said that doctors told them that her daughter suffered severe brain damage that she would be a vegetable.
However, Hairston is not giving up just yet, not while she has her faith to hold on to. Inspired by Hairston's faith, her family, friends, church family, and even strangers started holding several prayer circles for her quick recovery.
Slowly but surely, their prayers were being answered. In July, her kidney and liver started to recover, allowing her to be taken out of the ICU. The doctors eventually removed her ventilator and challenged her to fight and breathe independently if she wants to go home. And so she did.
Faith in God and will to walk again kept her alive
For about a month, she was in rehab at the Novant Rehab Hospital, learning to do things on her own again. Now after battling COVID-19 for 137 days, she has walked out of the hospital and credits her faith in GOD for her miraculous recovery and her will to walk again. Doctors said that after every system in her body collapsed, shut down, and now she's got most of them back.
She is still on her way to full-recovery but being able to bounce back after being declared braindead is truly a miracle everyone can draw inspiration from. She brought everyone so much joy and hope just by seeing her stand up out of the wheelchair. Hairston had proven that you could achieve anything if you push hard enough, Winston-Salem Journal noted.
