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Apr 3, 2019 · Daysi Marin, co-founder of Dreams Film Studios and Executive Producer of its major projects, is deeply engaged in community endeavors.
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una activista comunitaria en la ciudad de Houston, fundando...
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777 Followers, 511 Following, 635 Posts - Daysi Marin (@daysimarin) on Instagram: "President & Owner at @thedreamfilmstudios Community Activist and Latina Leader."
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Jan 15, 2015 · Daysi Marin | Facebook. About. Works at President & Founder Of Dia Del Salvadoreno Houston. February 1, 2021 - Present. Owner and Founder at Se Habla Español News. January 15, 2015 - Present. Online Newspaper en Español. Executive Producer and Co-Founder at Dream FILM Studios. 2009 - Present· Salt Lake City, Utah.
Daysi Marin. Producer: The Returned. Daysi Marin, co-founder of Dreams Film Studios and Executive Producer of its major projects, is deeply engaged in community endeavors.
- Producer, Production Manager, Cinematographer
- 3 min
- Overview
- 'Medical disaster'
- 'It happened again'
This article was published in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up to receive ProPublica's biggest stories as soon as they’re published, and sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on essential coverage of Texas issues.
HOUSTON — Mauricio Marin felt his heart tighten when the power flicked off at his Richmond, Texas, home on the evening of Feb. 14, shutting down his plug-in breathing machine. Gasping, he rushed to connect himself to one of the portable oxygen tanks his doctors had sent home with him weeks earlier to help his lungs recover after his three-week stay in a Covid-19 intensive care unit.
Between the two portable tanks, he calculated, he had six hours of air.
Marin, 44, and his wife had heard there might be brief, rolling power outages — 45 minutes or an hour, at most — as a massive winter storm swept across Texas last month, overwhelming the state’s electric grid. After more than two hours without electricity, he started to worry.
Marin tried to slow his breathing, hoping to ration his limited oxygen supply as he lay awake all night, watching the needle on each tank’s gauge slowly turn toward zero. The next morning, his wife, Daysi, made frantic calls to the power company and Marin’s doctor’s office, but nobody was answering in the midst of the storm.
For the next two days, Marin struggled for air and shivered under a pile of blankets. On the morning of Feb. 17, as they were still without power, his wife begged him to return to the hospital. But they feared driving on icy roads, and by then neither of them could get a consistent signal to call for help, as the widespread outages had knocked cellphone towers offline. And Marin didn’t want to go. He was terrified by the prospect of another hospital stay without visitors.
In an effort to reduce the strain on limited hospital resources during the pandemic, it’s become standard practice for hospitals to send most Covid-19 survivors home before their lungs have fully recovered, said Dr. Jamie McCarthy, chief physician executive for the Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston. Those patients often spend several days or weeks dependent on breathing equipment, such as oxygen concentrators or BiPAP machines, that require electricity.
As a result, McCarthy said, the number of Texas residents dependent on home oxygen was “at an all-time high” as the winter storm hit last month. With statewide Covid-19 hospitalizations peaking at more than 14,200 people in mid-January, medical experts say thousands of Texans like Marin had been sent home with plug-in breathing machines and portable oxygen tanks in the days and weeks before the electric grid failure.
When the power went out for millions of households, many recent Covid-19 survivors were left straining to breathe and unsure where to turn for help, setting back their recoveries, doctors say.
Unlike other patients with chronic lung problems who’ve spent years dependent on breathing machines and who have endured severe weather events and outages in the past, McCarthy said, patients recovering from Covid-19 likely didn’t have access to backup power sources or other contingency plans.
“Most of the people that had been sent home on oxygen concentrators related to Covid, especially this time of year, we were not sending them all home saying, ‘OK, you need to be prepared to be without power for two days, what's your plan?’” McCarthy said.
Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
Marin, a filmmaker who moved to the United States from Colombia two decades ago after meeting Daysi at a California film festival, thought he had a bad cold when he started feeling sick in early December. But then he awoke in a panic a few days later, unable to draw in a full breath.
His wife called 911 and an ambulance rushed him to Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with Covid-19 and admitted him to the ICU. That night, as doctors contemplated whether to connect him to a ventilator, Marin said he silently begged God to spare his life.
He called his wife from his hospital bed, barely able to speak, and told her to tell their two children, ages 18 and 20, that he loved them, and that he was proud of them.
“I truly believed I was going to die, but somehow I was given another chance,” said Marin, who slowly recovered over the next three weeks before being sent home with supplemental oxygen. “And not even two months later, it happened again.”
On the morning of Feb. 17, Daysi Marin said, after her husband had been without power for more than two days, she feared he was dying. He told her he was having severe chest pains after so many hours straining for air.
“I have never been in a situation like that, where you see somebody dying in front of your face, and you cannot do anything,” she said. “It was terrifying.”
una activista comunitaria en la ciudad de Houston, fundando varias organizaciones y planificando actos comunitarios que beneficien a los hispanos. Daysi Marin, co-founder of Dreams Film Studios and Executive Producer of its major projects, is deeply engaged in community endeavors.
Daysi Marin. Producer: The Returned. Daysi Marin is co-founder of Dream Film Studios and the Executive Producer of all of the major projects that are produced by the company.
