Hannah Cheriyan was born with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Just hours old and in respiratory distress, she was airlifted to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at U-M’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
For four days, Cheriyan relied on a machine to perform the work of her heart and lungs, giving her lungs necessary time to heal. That machine, known as ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, saved her life.
Twenty-one years later, Cheriyan was at U-M again — this time walking the stage in the 2015 White Coat Ceremony, a ritual welcoming students into medical school. And Robert Bartlett, M.D., the Michigan doctor who devoted his career to developing ECMO, “cloaked” Cheriyan with her first official white coat.