This popped up on one of the nursing forums I lurk on so I can’t absolutely vouch for its authenticity, but it seems unfortunately plausible. Someone wants to put themselves on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation at home rather than get vaccinated.
As a point of information, this is what someone on ECMO looks like:
And just for further fun, this is what happens when a component on the ECMO circuit fails and you have to swap it out for a new one:
That was a real patient (I was filming) and once my two colleagues there put the clamps on the circuit the patient was, by some quite reasonable definitions, dead and wasn’t really alive again until they took the clamps off.
So yeah, go ahead and do this at home. Good plan. WAY better than getting vaccinated.
Edited to add – Looking at the picture and video above, I am almost positive they are the same patient. I remember when we were getting set up to change the oxygenator there was a great deal of unease because the patient was entirely dependent on the pump to keep his blood circulating. His heart was not actually beating at all.
A normal person with even a minimally functioning heart will produce a tracing on an arterial blood pressure line that looks similar to this;
The red line there measures the pressure changes in an artery (usually the radial artery in the wrist, the same place you feel for someone’s pulse) with every beat of the heart.
If you look closely at the two monitors in the picture above that have an art-line tracing on them, you will see this;
Those lines are, in fact, flat. This is not all that unusual for people with bad hearts that have a pump doing all the work for them but what it does mean is that if something stops the pump, like someone clamping the circuit so they can change the oxygenator, all the patient’s blood pressure goes away. Not “low blood pressure” but “no blood pressure”.
So again, go ahead. Do this at home. What could possibly go wrong?
If you want to learn more about extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, check your local library!
Or just ask and I’ll talk about it for as long as you’ll let me.