DEVASTATING

Texas Father of 12 Dies of COVID After Desperate Scramble for Last-Ditch Treatment

Reed Hickson’s family was looking desperately for an ECMO machine when he died Monday.

Reed Hickson, a father of 12 in Texas, has died of COVID-19 just one day after his wife issued a desperate plea on Facebook for a hospital bed with special ECMO capabilities. “We are running out of time and options,” Gina Robnett Hickson wrote. She and Hickson were married for 29 years. Before Hickson died on Monday, his family scrambled to find an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which provides a type of life support and would have allowed for a last-resort procedure that “was his only chance to stay alive,” according to Gina. Machines are scarce, as they require specially trained teams of medical workers to operate. Hickson tested positive for the virus last month; within 20 days, he had made multiple overnight trips to the hospital, and was admitted to the ICU twice. “He stayed stable for a couple of days and then he was starting to steadily decline,” his wife told a local outlet. It’s unclear if Hickson was vaccinated.