TRINITY — Last Thanksgiving Day, Trinity teenager Caleb Dulin lay motionless in an ICU hospital bed, seemingly tethered to every flashing, beeping piece of technology in the room.
With Caleb in a medically induced coma — necessitated by a car crash that had left him in critical condition nearly a month earlier — the sophisticated equipment monitored, regulated and operated his bodily functions for him, from the bolt monitoring his brain pressure to the dialysis machine doing the job of his kidneys. The most critical of those instruments was the ECMO machine — ECMO stands for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — that kept Caleb alive by supporting his heart and lungs, which were too weak to function on their own.