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    Across The COVID-Ravaged South, High-Level Life Support Is Difficult To Find

    ECMO, the highest level of mechanical life support, functions as a temporary heart and lungs for some of COVID-19's sickest patients. But the waitlist is too long for many patients who need it.
    by Blake Farmer Sep 06, 2021 5 minutes
    ECMO is the highest level of life support — beyond a ventilator, which pumps oxygen via a tube through the windpipe into the lungs. Instead, the ECMO process basically functions as a heart and lungs outside of the body — routing the blood via tubing to a machine that oxygenates it, then pumps it back into the patient.

    Hospital discharge day for Phoua Yang was more like a pep rally.

    On her way rolling out of Centennial Medical Center in Nashville, she teared up as streamers and confetti rained down on her. Nurses chanted her name as they wheeled her out of the hospital for the first time since she arrived in February with COVID-19, barely able to breathe.

    The 38-year-old mother is living proof of the power of ECMO — a method of oxygenating a patient's blood outside the body, then pumping it back in. Her story helps explain why a shortage of trained staff who can run the machines that perform this extracorporeal membrane oxygenation has become such a pinch point as COVID-19 hospitalizations surge.

    "One hundred forty six days is a long time," Yang says of the time she spent on the ECMO machine. "It's been like a forever journey

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