COVID-19 is making amputations more common. Two survivors tell their stories

PHILADELPHIA -- When Candice Davis contracted COVID-19 in August, she quarantined herself in her South Philadelphia apartment and settled in for what she thought would be a short recovery. But within days, Davis, 30, was in the ER, shocked by the directive she’d just gotten from a doctor: Go on a ventilator, or risk death. Three weeks later, she woke up to her mother, Paige, standing over her. “Baby, I know this is going to be sad,” she said, “but you have to make a decision.” In the weeks she lay unconscious — during which doctors had to transfer her from a ventilator to an ECMO machine, a de...