Bruce Sams is no stranger to fighting for his life and fighting to save others’ lives. As a McMinnville firefighter, it’s right there in his job description.
But the North Albany resident didn’t expect to be fighting for his own life against one nasty case of COVID-19. Fortunately, for Sams, 55, landing in the intensive care unit of Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center meant being admitted to one of the few hospitals in the country using a brand new treatment.
Which saved his life. The treatment is a Seraph 100 filter, which works in conjunction with a typical dialysis machine to filter out pathogens from a patient’s blood. It’s essentially a sealed plastic tube filled with tiny little beads that look like sand. The beads are coated with heparan sulfate, a type of carbohydrate that’s common in human and animal cells.
A person’s blood is removed from the body, run through the filter and then sent back into the bloodstream.