Adrianne Ayers to Celebrate “Home Run For Life” with OKC Dodgers
Midwest City resident received life-saving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) treatment at INTEGRIS Health for 119 days following complications stemming from the flu
The initial symptoms seemed routine enough to Adrianne Ayers, a registered nurse who remembers feeling tired, achy and running a fever in early 2018.
She self-diagnosed herself with the flu and continued to push on with her daily routine.
“I never got sick,” she said. “I thought this was something that would pass.”
However, she didn’t improve and eventually went to an urgent care clinic where she was indeed officially diagnosed with the flu. She then returned home to her bed where she stayed for the next couple of days.
But the single mother of three’s health took a turn for the worse late one evening and one of her teenage sons had to call 911 — a call that saved her life.
“They told us had he not called 911, I might not have made it through the night,” she recalled.
At the hospital, they learned that in addition to flu, Ayers had developed pneumonia and strep throat so severe that her body went septic. She developed necrotizing pneumonia, a severe complication from a bacterial lung infection that can cause lung tissue damage. Her lungs, heart and kidneys were all shutting down.
Doctors at SSM Health St. Anthony Hospital, where Ayers worked and was initially taken after her son called 911, determined that extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, known as ECMO, was necessary for Ayers’ survival.
She was transferred to INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center, which specializes in ECMO, to receive the last-resort, lifesaving treatment in February 2018.
ECMO provides both cardiac and respiratory support to patients whose heart and/or lungs are so severely diseased or damaged that they can no longer serve their function. The goal is to allow the heart or lungs to rest and recover while the machine does all the work.
“What it does is takes the blood out of the body on one side and puts oxygen into it and then flows back into your body through different tubes,” Ayers said. “It’s almost like dialysis — in one side and out the other.”
Ayers would end up being on ECMO for an INTEGRIS Health record 119 days.
The Midwest City resident said she doesn’t remember much from her four months on ECMO.
“They would bring me in and out of consciousness to check my neurological status, but it is like a medically induced coma,” she said. “I don’t remember a lot about it.”
When the heart and lungs have healed to the point they can work on their own, the lifesaving support of the ECMO machine is weaned, then eventually removed.
“In Adrianne’s case, this took longer than most,” said Michael Harper, M.D., with the Advanced Critical Care and Acute Circulatory Support team at INTEGRIS Health. “She was dependent on ECMO for 119 days, whereas a typical patient is usually on this therapy for 10 to 14 days.”
But her treatment at INTEGRIS Health extended far beyond ECMO and included extensive multi-disciplinary care and innovative thinking.
Throughout her five months at INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center, Ayers was also on a ventilator, had a tracheostomy and was on dialysis. There was talk of potential double kidney and lung transplants for her.
“It was scary,” Ayers’ son A.J. said. “She is the only parent I knew and I didn’t know what to do.”
Ayers was enrolled in the ATHOS 3 Expanded Access Protocol for Giapreza clinical trial for a medication that regulates blood pressure, becoming one of 10 patients in the world to have received the therapy while on ECMO at the time. She also became the first patient in the OKC area to benefit from an off-label use of Olympus Spiration endobronchial valves, which were inserted into her lungs, opening breathing passageways like they would an artery during a cardiac procedure.
Ayers remembers waking up in April 2018, around the time of the 13th birthday of her daughter and youngest child Alexis.
“I remember waking up … and I was so sad because she turned 13 and I missed her becoming a teenager and that’s really where my memories start, her birthday forward,” she said.
One special moment especially stands out in Ayers’ mind to describe the depth and range of care she received at INTEGRIS Health.
“The doctors and nurses at INTEGRIS are amazing. They are saints,” she said. “There was one point where I was tired and I was tired of fighting and I was tired of everything going on and (one of the doctors) took me outside just to get some vitamin D. Anytime they took me anywhere in the hospital it was a huge ordeal because I had the ECMO machine and dialysis and the vent and the chair, so it was like a small parade going down the hallway.
“Just for a doctor to do that, I can’t say enough good things about them…They are just amazing people.”
During her months in the hospital, her children tried to stay busy with school, work and sports in between making regular visits to see their mom.
Her son Tony is grateful to the staff at INTEGRIS Health for everything they did for his mom and for him and his siblings.
“I would just say thank you,” Tony said. “Every time we went there they would give us updates and they would try to be as cheerful as they possibly could in a dreadful situation. I always felt like they were trying to uplift and be as happy as they could in a hospital, in the ICU.”
Ayers was released from the hospital in July 2018.
“It was emotional,” she said. “It was overwhelming because I had gotten so small. All my muscles had atrophied because I had been lying in bed five months. I had no muscle tone whatsoever. Just walking five feet was hard even with oxygen on…it was also surreal because I was home again and my kids could come in without gowns and gloves and masks and this was all pre-COVID.”
Ayers still undergoes frequent checkups and there is a possibility in the future she will need a lung transplant, but says she is doing well now.
Ayers, 44, returned to work as a RN at St. Anthony in April 2021 and said she brings a new perspective with her to work after all she has been through.
“I have always been a patient person with patients and am even more so now,” she said. “I can’t even explain it. It’s like you walk into a room and see both points of view at the same time. You can empathize even small things, like tape coming off an IV. After it’s done 100 times, that hurts.
“It’s weird, but I am thankful for everything I have been through because I think it makes me relate to patients better.”
