I woke up and I felt like I had been stabbed in the back.
They told me that I had pneumonia.
My lungs weren't functioning properly,
it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
The chance of surviving was the percentage of being struck by lightning.
The doctors had done pretty much everything that they could.
Your life can change in an instant.
I had no idea how critical the situation was.
The one last chance we can try is the Penn Lung Rescue unit.
Dr. Vernick got up in the middle of the night and came and got me.
Penn Lung Rescue came busting through the doors I heard the helicopter land,
it was like cavalry arriving.
Doctors were always like just at the perfect timing
in the sequence just a step ahead of where we needed to be to save her life.
The ECMO machine is one of the key things that saved my life.
ECMO is a complicated way of saying it's a device that exchanges gas with your blood.
So you basically take a patient's blood, run it through a machine that has a pump,
and what's called an oxygenator and is able to put oxygen in the
patient's blood and take carbon dioxide out.
Now mobile ECMO is a way of saying,
we're gonna do this procedure which we normally do in our hospital on super sick people
and do it in someone else's hospital.
This is a portable device and we can take somebody whose lungs aren't working at all
and basically do the job of their lungs,
or if their heart's not working do the job of the heart and lungs.
For the lung rescue program we're targeting the patient's lungs.
Prior to the beginning of the lung rescue program,
patients that were in need of our expertise would often have two options
one: continued consultation with our team,
or in a very creative fashion work with our PennSTAR team
to bring these patients here in a very acute fashion.
Often times these situations were very clinically challenging
and when they arrived here in our ICU patients often were in a worse shape
than they were when they started because of the transfer.
There was a number of reports coming out of Europe regarding successful mobile ECMO programs.
So we really looked ourselves and said not only does our region need this,
but this is something we can do and something we should do.
This is one of the most fulfilling things I do. When I get to the outside hospital,
the families are very scared to be able to reassure them like ok if there's a shot,
we can give it to you.
What was happening before is when the patient would get that sick,
they wouldn't call us because they know they'll die in transport.
So the real key to the continued success of the program.
is the amazing team and resources we have access to here.
What makes our lung rescue program unique is our commitment
to the best quality of care for our patients.
We feel that if we cannot offer our expertise, by bringing it to them,
we should bring the patient to us.
Transport success is the key.
The lung rescue program is something that really
changes the course of what can take place in an illness.
We're gonna expand the indications with new technology perhaps expanding the footprint
expanding the distance, helping more patients.
We can take somebody that,
almost everybody by any measure thinks is definitely going to die and save them.
There's no reason a young woman who gets pneumonia should die from that.
Our outcomes are some of the best in the country we know that from our databases,
but what we'd like to build is even better.
We'd like to get as close to perfect as possible.