Last month Patty Segeda lay at her coronavirus-infected father’s bedside and was told it might be the last time she would see 74-year-old Glenn Perkins alive. She begged doctors to not give up on on him.

Now, one month later, she said there’s talk of him coming home.

Perkins is the first COVID-19 patient at St. Luke’s Warren Hospital in a national Mayo Clinic trial to be injected with the plasma from another virus-recovered patient. The plasma therapy has led to recoveries in other world health crises like Ebola.

“Plasma is the clear part of the blood and it contains antibodies when you have a patient who has had COVID-19 and recovered. Antibodies are the fighting soldiers that are used against the virus. Our patient was on a ventilator for about 20 days. He had been on many of the therapies that we have used on other patients and he had plateaued,” said Dr. Jeffrey Jahre, infectious disease specialist at St. Luke’s Warren Hospital.

The plateau came last week when Perkins stopped following Patty’s commands by FaceTime.

The family got the kind of phone call from the hospital that no family ever wants to get — certainly not in a pandemic. They said to start preparing to say goodbye.

“We were discussing end of life care for my father. After we hung up the phone, my sisters and I had a cry together and we started making telephone calls,” Segeda said.

The family started making funeral plans. But then heard about plasma in the news and asked St. Luke’s about it. Miraculously some donated plasma became available and the hospital gave it try.

“He received the plasma that was antibody rich and two days later we were able to get him off the ventilator. So, does that mean that it was the plasma that did that? We certainly hope so, but we can’t be absolutely certain, sure with only one patient as a series at this point in time,” said Jahre.

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Perkins’ response to the plasma injection led to an Easter phone call from Nurse Practitioner Dan Taylor to Segeda.

“They said ‘your father is awake and alert. He is the person we saw 23, 24 days ago. He’s back. We have a window and we think we should take it now […] This is our window, let’s take your father off the ventilator. If we have a window, that window is now.’ They called within the hour and said he’s off,” she said. “I started crying. I didn’t know what to do.”

She says her dad is regaining his strength and ability to talk and has asked for an iPad to FaceTime with the family. She adds that he will need therapy and time while Jahre and his team assess whether Perkins will have any long-term effects from coronavirus and being on a ventilator.

In the meantime, Seguda’s sister is recovering from the virus and plans to donate plasma to help someone else. The family suspects it’s responsible for injecting joy in their lives amid a pandemic.

“It’s nothing short of miraculous,” she said.