Judith was turned down for ECMO support due to her severe idiopathic aplastic anemia and recurrent DAH with profound decompensation, with a likely component of sepsis. It was felt that her prognosis was extremely poor and she was not a candidate. Yael expired the following day.

Patients with complete bone marrow failure and very low cell counts from malignancy, aplastic anemia, bone marrow transplant who develop overwhelming sepsis and frequently bleeding complications have very poor survival, and results with ECMO attempts to rescue them have not yielded positive results, to date. Some larger experienced centers continue to explore ECMO strategies for these complex patients, particularly in pediatric leukemia and post bone marrow transplant sepsis, but results are still very poor.