Inside ECMO: Supporting the Sickest Heart Patients

Since being diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 13, Kathy Johnson of Williston has lived an extraordinary medical odyssey. From pediatric cancer to cardiac crisis, the 65-year-old Williston resident has approached a lifetime’s worth of serious medical issues, diagnoses and treatments with an irrepressible, take-on-all-comers attitude.In 2025, Kathy and her care team faced a new challenge: How to make the risky and complex heart procedures she desperately needed possible at all. Damage to Kathy’s heart from cancer treatment decades ago not only gave her coronary artery disease – it had calcified her aorta along with her arteries, making many conventional and minimally-invasive surgeries impossible.Join us as we follow Kathy’s story of resilience through the years and meet the surgeons and interventional cardiologists who planned and performed a first-of-its-kind procedure in the catheter lab at University of Vermont Medical Center – where they used an advanced form of life support called Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) to sustain Kathy and repair major damage to her heart.