Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, commonly abbreviated as ECMO, is a lifesaving therapy that provides support to patients whose heart and/or lungs are so severely diseased or damaged that they can no longer serve their function. It is often considered as a “last hope” for patients in critical condition.
Lloyd Vines was only 33 years old when severe abdominal pain landed him in the hospital. He was diagnosed with a bowel obstruction and underwent surgery to untwist his small bowel. That’s when things took a turn for the worse.
“He was crashing basically. It kind of just escalated from sepsis to septic shock quite quickly. He was close to death,” remembers Lloyd’s partner, Katrina. “It was 4 or 5 in the morning when the physician on staff came in and said I’m going to put in a call to the ECMO team at INTEGRIS Health.”
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Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, commonly abbreviated as ECMO, is a lifesaving therapy that provides support to patients whose heart and/or lungs are so severely diseased or damaged that they can no longer serve their function. It is often considered as a “last hope” for patients in critical condition.
Laura Swant, D.O., is a critical care physician at INTEGRIS Health Baptist Medical Center. “I remember getting the call. It was early in the morning and one of my former colleagues called me and told me about his case. He was in desperate need of some mechanical circulatory support. His lungs were so sick, as well as he was just in profound shock.”
The INTEGRIS Health ECMO team, that consists of an ECMO physician, ECMO coordinator, ECMO specialist or perfusionist and a respiratory therapist, mobilized to retrieve Lloyd and bring him to the Nazih Zuhdi Transplant Institute at INTEGRIS Health Baptist Medical Center, where the ECMO program is headquartered.
“In Lloyd’s case, both his heart and his lungs were both severely impacted by his disease. The night that we got called his heart was only functioning at about 10 percent and his lungs had a severe infection as well,” says Zac Reaves, an ECMO specialist. “He was so critically ill in that moment, that he would not have survived just a conventional transport by ambulance to our hospital.”
The odds seemed to be stacked against Lloyd, but after five weeks on ECMO – his body started to respond. He was literally brought back from the brink of death. It’s been a long, hard journey but just recently Lloyd returned to INTEGRIS Health to thank the care team who saved his life.
“He came to the unit a couple of weeks ago and I happened to be working. I recognized him and I obviously recognized Katrina, and it was great to see him back thriving,” states Swant.
Reaves agrees, “We don’t always have the luxury of seeing how patients improve once they leave our ICU. Seeing how far they come after they get out of rehab, long-term acute care facilities, it’s very special to see how far they’ve come.”
Lloyd is just thankful for each new day. “When you come that close to lights out, it makes you question a lot of stuff. People ask me now, ‘Oh are you going to go climb Everest or something,’ and it’s like no. I value a Sunday morning in bed drinking a cup of coffee with Katrina and the dog. Those little things are what it is all about. I feel very grateful and lucky that we were oddly in the right place at the right time. Today is a gift in itself.”
INTEGRIS Health was the first in Oklahoma to establish a specialized life support program solely devoted to adult patients facing imminent death. The system has a 24-hour ECMO hotline: 844-436-ECMO (3266). ECMO physicians are available 24/7/365 for consultation with other hospitals and doctors throughout the state.
