(uplifting piano music)
(people chattering) (machine beeping)
- We've focused on life saving
techniques for an acute organ failure.
There's a technology called ECMO
that allows you to keep people alive
for a day, or a week, or a month.
- ECMO stands for Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation,
so what we do is we put patients on,
that either need support where their lungs don't work
or for cardiac support or a combination of two.
- I think of it as a second chance for maybe the heart
to recover, or the lungs to recover.
- [Bill] So what we really do is we buy those patients
time to either get better or for the medical team
to figure out if there's something that they can do
to help them get better.
- [Robert] When I started out, there was no ICU,
there were no people who took care of really sick patients.
- I was a respiratory therapist, in the SICU,
before I came to ECMO, and I got to the point
where I was looking for something more.
- One of the reasons I went in to nursing
was because I learned something new everyday.
- [Robert] Nowadays, it's a full medical specialty
and a whole lot of people who do nothing
but critical care.
So, we're very good at it.
- [Gretchen] It's just opened up
my eyes to so much more that the machine does.
- [Bill] The people that work in our department
are detail oriented and self-driven.
So, if we don't know something, we make the effort
to find it out.
- [Gretchen] We are all equal, we're all peers.
- [Bill] Right now, our team is about 60/40
respiratory therapists to RN's.
So we both bring a different background together,
to do really the same thing.
- I don't think there's a typical day,
we can put a patient on in every unit.
- It all depends on what they have going on.
Our goal is to be there as fast as we can.
So we have prime circuits setup
in the cardiovascular center, and prime circuits setup
in the children or women.
- We always have a cannulation cart,
that is mobile, we can take it anywhere
throughout the hospital.
And our circuit that is already primed and ready to go.
So it's just that adrenaline is what I love.
(laughs)
we monitor the patients for 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, for the unknown.
You can be sitting on a perfectly stable patient,
and all of a sudden, something will go wrong.
And you have to figure it out,
and you have to figure it out quick.
- We've been doing simulations ever since I started.
- [Gretchen] We try to make it as realistic as we can,
to make the team feel as though as they're in that situation
with a patient.
- [Bill] If you practice something, in a simulation,
you can learn from that, so when you do see it
you can do the right thing, or do better than what you did.
- [Gretchen] I love to be part of the learning
and the teaching, and working as group,
to help the group.
- [Bill] Gretchen, always has a smile on her face
she laughs very easily, so it's always a pleasure
to be working with someone like that.
- I love the team.
They're like a family.
I think you have to be a little off
to work in the ECMO department.
(laughs)
Because of what we do.
- You can work together and not even, hardly even
say anything, because you know
what the other person is gonna do.
- We get to spend some many years with individuals
and they learn from you, you learn from them.
- [Bill] We don't do the curing, we just help,
the healing part really comes from inside the patient.
- [Robert] We have unique expertise that can make
those things happen.
- But there are still limits,
the worse day is where something bad happens,
and then the only thing you can do is support the family.
So I consider myself blessed, that I have a job
that I love doing.
We have picnics every year, ECMO picnics,
where all the ECMO survivors were invited.
That's always very satisfying.
It's very rewarding to see people get better,
that would have died.
- There are really hard days, that you question what you do
but it's always that second chance
that you can give a family,
(applauding) that brings me back,
so, I'm here for the long haul, I love it.
(laughs)
(uplifting music)