10 min read This piece is part of our first-annual Health Care Heroes series, where we spotlight people doing amazing things in the health care and medical fields. Read the rest of the stories here . IT WAS JUNE 5, 2020 and the mysterious and deadly coronavirus was spreading across America. Outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, the city was locked down—restaurants shuttered, streets near-empty. Inside a 28-year-old woman named Mayra Ramirez lay in a negative-pressure ICU room, kept alive by a ventilator and a machine called ECMO that was doing the work her lungs could no longer manage. She had been fighting COVID-19 for six weeks, struggling to breathe, heavily sedated. She wasn’t recovering. “It was like her lungs were melting away,” says Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery at Northwestern Medicine. Dr.…