When 19-year-old Diego Caballero walked back into University Medical Center of El Paso, it was more than a visit. It was a reunion with the medical team his family credits with saving his life.
Caballero had been treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, after being admitted for carbon monoxide poisoning. He had been discharged just a week earlier and returned to the hospital surrounded by family members and the team that cared for him.
“My heart strength was at 5%, it wasn’t pumping correctly,” Caballero said of being found by his father asleep in his car in the gym parking lot. “I’m very thankful because if it weren’t for that machine, I probably wouldn’t have recovered. I’m grateful to the machine for keeping me alive and to the doctors for everything they did.”
For Caballero’s family, the experience was frightening and uncertain.
“It was just as scary to find out that he had carbon monoxide poisoning and that it was pretty severe,” said his father, Jesus Caballero, who found him unconscious in a car. “They hadn’t told us the level, but they told us that it was a lot and that it would affect all of his organs, especially his brain, heart, kidneys and lungs. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if he was going to survive.”
ECMO provides oxygen to the blood and removes carbon dioxide when the heart and lungs are unable to function adequately. It is used to treat patients with severe respiratory or cardiac failure caused by conditions such as pneumonia, trauma or heart disease.
Dr. Tiffany Lasky, pediatric and associate adult trauma medical director at UMC and professor of surgery at Texas Tech Health El Paso, said the program has had a profound impact.
“It’s been a real life-changing journey for me. I knew ECMO was important, I knew it was exciting, and I knew it was something, a team that I wanted to be a part of. But it wasn’t until I really got involved with it that I saw what it could do for individuals like Diego,” Lasky said. “I am just really proud to be with a high-quality group of physicians that are able to do this and pull this off.”
Dr. Leo Mercer, associate trauma medical director at UMC and associate professor of surgery at TTHEP, said caring for ECMO patients requires an extraordinary level of dedication.
“This is what makes us stay up late, work overtime, come in in the middle of the night,” Mercer said. “The level of attention for these patients, it’s incredible.”
Jan. 31, 2026, marked the one-year anniversary of UMC’s extracorporeal membrane oxygenation program. UMC is the only hospital in the region to offer this form of life support.
During its first year, the ECMO program at UMC anticipated treating about 12 patients. Instead, the hospital cared for 30 patients since the program launched Jan. 30, 2025.
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