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This is the machine on which your life could depend upon if you are struck down by swine flu. The treatment of last resort is delivered by a battery of pumps and monitors, festooned with tubes and wires, to patients with the severest illness, whose inflamed and congested lungs have ceased to function under assault from the virus.
The first thing that strikes the visitor to London's only Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (Ecmo) unit, in the intensive care ward at the Royal Brompton Hospital, is the youth of its patients. In the first bed a young pregnant woman, her cheeks aflame, lies sleeping. Two thick plastic tubes emerge from her chest at the base of her neck, one carrying bright scarlet blood, freshly oxygenated, back to her body, the other dull bluish blood on its way to the Ecmo machine.
She will lie like this, heavily sedated, for seven to 10 days while her lungs recover. Some patients take up to 40 days. She is receiving five drugs, including morphine for pain relief and Tamiflu to combat the H1N1 virus which has invaded her body. Her life, and that of her unborn child, hang in the balance.
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The first thing that strikes the visitor to London's only Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (Ecmo) unit, in the intensive care ward at the Royal Brompton Hospital, is the youth of its patients. In the first bed a young pregnant woman, her cheeks aflame, lies sleeping. Two thick plastic tubes emerge from her chest at the base of her neck, one carrying bright scarlet blood, freshly oxygenated, back to her body, the other dull bluish blood on its way to the Ecmo machine.
She will lie like this, heavily sedated, for seven to 10 days while her lungs recover. Some patients take up to 40 days. She is receiving five drugs, including morphine for pain relief and Tamiflu to combat the H1N1 virus which has invaded her body. Her life, and that of her unborn child, hang in the balance.
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