SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Fitri Sho described her 24-year-old daughter, Hanny Virginia, as a vibrant and caring nursing student who was healthy besides living with Type 1 diabetes.

Virginia had been traveling between Indio and Texas for a master's program when she decided to hold off on being vaccinated. Sho said her daughter promised she would get vaccinated after her summer studies fearing she may have a bad reaction to the vaccine while attempting to focus on coursework.

However, in early August, Virginia contracted COVID-19 and was almost immediately hospitalized in the intensive care unit. She spent a month and a half on a ventilator at JFK Hospital in Indio, where her family lives.

Sho spent almost every day by her daughter's bedside, not knowing if it would be her last.

"Some days [doctors] would call us to say goodbye to her because there's no way that she's going to make it. There's no hope because her lungs were destroyed," she said.

When things were not looking promising, the family thought there had to be another option.

They researched a treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO. It is only offered in a few hospitals in the region, and there is a long list of critically ill COVID-19 patients waiting for a machine.

Only a select group of severe COVID-19 patients is eligible. Patients must be younger than 60, have a body mass index under 40 and be intubated for less than a week.

Virginia only met two of the requirements because she had been on a ventilator for nearly five weeks.

Still, Dr. Terese Hammond at Providence St. John's Medical Center in Santa Monica decided she would take on Virginia's case, hopeful she would be a good fit.

"I think all of us as frontlines identify with other people that maybe put their health aside because of work or classes," she said.

Hammond described ECMO as similar to a lung bypass machine. The technology and machine are costly and require 24-hour specially trained personnel, which most rural hospitals do not have.

It works by pumping blood through an oxygenator then returned to the right side of the heart, pumping oxygen-enriched blood through the rest of the body. 

"It's not perfect. Only about 40% of people that are sick enough to require ECMO for COVID will survive," Hammond said. "It's really a group of patients that have nearly 100% mortality without the therapy."

Hammond said young people are the most rapidly rising group contracting severe cases of COVID-19. St. John's had five critically sick COVID-19 patients on ECMO in late September, some younger than Virginia.

Sho traveled more than 100 miles every weekend to visit her daughter, praying her condition would improve. On Oct. 5, Virginia died after nearly two weeks of ECMO therapy.

It was a devastating time for her family.

"It's just not worth it not to get [vaccinated]. You put your life at risk, you put others life in danger too," Sho said.

Virginia was just shy of her 25th birthday and had so much life ahead of her.