New technology at St. Rita’s saves new mom
LIMA — One new mother is celebrating the gift of life; not only because of her newborn, but because of her own medical miracle.
St. Rita’s Medical Center in Lima recently installed and trained medical staff on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines, which are meant to provide oxygen to a patient’s blood outside of the body, taking stress off of the heart and lungs in an emergency.
The mother checked into St. Rita’s on Mother’s Day with the new baby on the way, but due to a rare and unpredictable condition known as amniotic fluid embolism (AFE), the mother’s survival became top priority for all medical staff at the hospital, and the ECMO machine was the most vital piece of equipment.
“I think more people realize the utility of being able to provide complete lung, complete heart, or simultaneous lung-heart bypass in a single patient for days to weeks at a time to allow people to recover,” said Dr. Sandeep Patel, who is a cardiologist at St. Rita’s. “The game here is not, ‘how do we fix the heart,’ it’s ‘how do we let the body fix the heart while we keep everything else going?’”
The lead doctors at St. Rita’s credit everyone on the medical staff for the mother’s survival, saying that their team worked longer hours and used their own free time to get training on the ECMO machines.
Dr. William Cole, who was one of the lead doctors caring for the mother with Dr. Patel, said it was that extra training that saved her life.
“A colleague was covering for me. She doesn’t do ECMO, but she knew that we did ECMO and said ‘hey, we need to have a discussion, is (ECMO) a possibility here?’” Cole said. “So just the fact that everybody is aware of it and knows the skill set that is actually here, that we can perform these things, is paramount to success.”
The mother and baby were released from St. Rita’s on Thursday morning and were sent off with hugs and cheers from every contributing member of the medical team, a team that Dr. Patel hopes the Lima community can be confident in going forward.
“It’s a one in 80,000 diagnosis, where the mortality is more than 80 to 90 percent, a patient who’s a new mother on Mother’s Day, her first kid, and she walked out of the hospital completely functional. That’s not something we take lightly,” Patel said. “The community should understand that we’re definitely ready to handle the common stuff.”
“If we’re prepared to take care of one in 80,000, we’re prepared to take care of everybody here,” Cole added.
Medical staff at St. Rita’s cheer on an infant and mother, who underwent ECMO treatment which saved her life.
Gloss