Robert H. Bartlett, big damn hero. He was one of the pioneers of ECMO.
An ECMO machine consists of an external circuit of tubes, a pump that functions as a heart, and a membrane that serves as an artificial lung. The device continuously pumps blood out of the body, adds oxygen, removes carbon dioxide, warms the blood and returns it to the body.
ECMO treatment can continue for days or weeks or longer, allowing the heart and lungs to rest and try to heal from traumas like acute respiratory distress, a blood clot, a heart attack or an injury from a car crash. It can also be used for patients awaiting a heart or lung transplant, and it is increasingly being used in emergencies for people experiencing cardiac arrest.
According to a registry kept by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization, which Dr. Bartlett founded, more than 260,000 critically ill newborns, children and adults around the world have received the treatment, and roughly 800 medical centers in 66 countries offer the procedure; about 54 percent of patients treated with ECMO survive to leave the hospital, and more than 100,000 lives have been saved.
…
In 1975, while he was at the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Bartlett and his surgical team, including Dr. Alan Gazzaniga, successfully used ECMO treatment for the first time on a newborn who was experiencing lung failure and had been left at the hospital by her mother, an undocumented immigrant.
The infant — named Esperanza, or Hope, by the nurses — recovered after spending six days on the machine. Over the years she remained in touch with Dr. Bartlett, joining him at conferences and attending University of Michigan football games with him, one of his favorite activities.
Thanks to ECMO, what had once been a mortality rate of 80 percent in newborns struggling to breathe became a survival rate of 80 percent.
“If Dr. Bartlett wasn’t there that day I was born, I wouldn’t be here today,” Esperanza Pineda, who is now 50, said in an interview.
Betty Harford, actress. Other credits include “T.H.E. Cat”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.
Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the NFL. ESPN.