We are very glad to hear that he’s almost out of the woods. He tells Law.com “I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head—and heart—around the enormity of what I’ve just been through,” he said during his first interview since returning to stable condition. “And I’m so grateful to be alive.”
Law.com report
Thirteen days ago, David Lat lay on a stark white hospital bed in Manhattan, getting oxygen 24 hours a day because his breathing had grown so labored. And he dared not look ahead too much, he said, as he faced up to his battle with a severe COVID-19 infection.
“I don’t know that I’m getting any worse,” he said by cellphone on March 18, speaking about his illness. “And at this point,” he said, “I’ll take it.”
Lat, the founder of the legal blog Above the Law, did not know that just two days later he would be rendered unconscious by medical staff, suddenly intubated, and hooked up to a life-preserving ventilator for the next week, as he fought to survive, and as doctors administered to him novel drug therapies that they hoped—despite lack of solid scientific evidence—would work.
And he couldn’t know that, during his recovery, he’d be offering vials of blood in hopes of helping doctors and scientists find a proven treatment for the coronavirus scourge.
On Saturday, March 29, Lat was transferred out of intensive care, not long after being taken off a ventilator. And on Tuesday, in his first media interview since he’d returned to stable condition, he talked gratefully about being ready to finally go home—most likely, he said, on Wednesday evening. He also tried to reflect—for perhaps the first time, he said—on what he had just gone through in his battle with a coronavirus-caused infection that had ravaged his life.
“I don’t think I’ve fully wrapped my head—and heart—around the enormity of what I’ve just been through,” he said during an extensive interview conducted via direct messaging on Twitter.
“It’s wild to think about how close I came to dying, to leaving my husband Zach to raise our two-year-old son as a single dad,” he said. “I guess my main emotion is gratitude. I’m so thankful for all the people, many of whom I’ve never met, who were praying for, thinking of, and otherwise pulling for me throughout this ordeal. … And I’m so grateful to be alive.”
Lat also made clear how thankful he was to the medical team at NYU Langone Hospital, where he has been a patient since March 16, for the care they’ve given him. And on Monday he’d credited them, publicly on Twitter, with saving his life. He wrote that “maybe 1.7 times” the doctors and nurses had saved him—a specific calculation that he laid out in a Twitter thread that bore the directness that his tweets have become known for.
Lat, long a widely known figure in the legal world and today a legal recruiter, appears to be making continued progress and, according to his latest conversations with NYU medical staff, he is on the verge of being discharged.
