A man from California is very sick after getting an unknown illness during a trip to the Philippines. In early August, Armando Ramos, who is 53 years old and has three kids, went to the Philippines because his mom had died.
While he was busy arranging his mom’s funeral, he started feeling like he had the flu. He was tired and had a sore throat.
Five days later, he had to go to the hospital. At first, doctors thought he had pneumonia. They put a tube down his throat to help him breathe and a machine called a ventilator. But he kept getting worse. His lung collapsed, his brain got swollen, his heart and liver had problems, and his kidneys started failing.
He got tested for COVID and the flu, but he didn’t have those. Doctors only knew he had some kind of breathing infection.
His daughters, Emma and A.J., feel really helpless because they don’t know what’s wrong, and it reminds them of when COVID first started, and nobody knew what was happening.
Right now, doctors are still doing tests to figure out what’s wrong. Ramos is very sick, but there are some small signs that he’s getting better with his kidneys and breathing.
He’ll probably have to stay in the hospital’s special care unit for at least two more weeks. His wife flew to the Philippines to be with him. They started a GoFundMe page to help pay for his medical bills and hopefully bring him back to the United States. His daughters say he’s very stubborn and will keep fighting, and they’ll be there with him all the way.
