the end of ecmo?

After seven days of ventilation, heavy drug therapies, and a slow decline, Ellis was put on ECMO (a heart-lung bypass machine) on September 4th. This machine will give his lungs a chance to heal. This treatment comes with serious complications like, bleeding on the brain.


While on the machine, Ellis has had to overcoming many set backs. He has had bouts of bleeding (thankfully, not on his brain), which required heparin to be stopped for sometime. Heparin is used to keep the blood from clotting while on ECMO and stopping its use rarely happens. Some parts of the machine had to be replaced because of the presence of blood clots. When this happened, the machine was stopped and Ellis was kept alive by hand bagging air into his lungs. The surgeon told us a few days after this event that, “Generally, sick lungs, bleeding and ECMO is a lethal combination. His nurses did a good job of getting him through that situation.” My heart sank! We are very lucky to have Ellis with us today.


After over two weeks of ECMO treatment, Ellis has started to show some signs of improvement. This is good news, but the ECMO machine is showing some signs of wear. So much that it has been recommended to either move him off of ECMO or replace the machine. The surgeon will make his decision on Monday or Tuesday.