Three years ago, a four-year-old Alberta boy contracted Group A strep and was taken to the emergency department at the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary.

The child, James, went from feeling sluggish in the afternoon to going into cardiac arrest at the hospital and ended up in the intensive care unit.

“Some of these times, you have a severe infection — it makes all the organs in your body sick,” said Dr. Laurance Lequier, the medical director of the Stollery Extracorporeal Life Support (ECLS) team.

In some cases, toxins produced by Group A streptococcus bacteria, also called strep bacteria, also can cause a rapidly-progressing infection involving shock and multi-organ failure.

“His heart wasn’t working well, his lungs we knew weren’t working well and it can make your whole body sick,” Lequier said.

Doctors told parents Dianne Fang and Matthew Lui their son James, or JJ, needed ECMO and without it, he may not live.

“He was in daycare the day before and the next day, he’s in the emergency room and they’re saying to us if we don’t do the treatment, he has very low probability of survival,” Matthew Lui said.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, is one of the most advanced forms of life support available, taking over the work of the heart and lungs for patients with severe failure of those organs.

The highly specialized machine temporarily oxygenates and circulates the patient’s blood outside of the body when their own organs can’t sustain life.

It gives the organs time to rest and heal, helping the patient recover. Sometimes, patients need to be on ECMO for several weeks.

“The artificial heart and the artificial lung that are in this machine basically become the heart and lungs of that patient until their own heart and or lungs recover on their own and they’re able to be separated from that machine,” Lequier explained.

The Stollery doesn’t just bring in sick kids from across Western Canada for ECMO — a specialized team also travels with a mobile unit to bring kids back to the Stollery with them.

“We get referrals of patients for really significant acute illnesses — that includes all the patients in the Prairies that need congenital heart surgery, heart surgery — and some of those patients will need this type of support.”

It was that team who rushed down to Calgary to help within two hours of being alerted and by that evening, JJ was in Edmonton receiving treatment.

“It was a very stressful situation for our family,” Lui  said.

“So just at that point, we realized we had to have kind of complete faith in the team and their capabilities.”

Now the Stollery team is being recognized for excellence in life support.

First introduced at the Stollery Children’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in 1988, the Edmonton facility is the only children’s hospital in Canada to received international recognition for its ECMO program.

The ECMO team has been awarded the platinum level center of excellence award for excellence in life support from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO).

The award recognizes centres “that demonstrate an exceptional commitment to evidence-based processes and quality measures, staff training and continuing education and patient satisfaction.”

It’s granted to select programs that meet the most rigorous standards of performance, innovation and quality.

“I think when you’re faced in this life-or-death situation and it’s your child, you want to know that the team taking care of your child is following the highest standard of care,” Dianne Fang said.

Even hooked up to the machine, JJ was given a 50 per cent survival rate.

“It was terrifying, to be honest — but it is very comforting to know that there are so many capable experts involved,” Lui said.

Now, JJ is a healthy, thriving little boy.

“I was so happy to see him today,” Lequier said.

“You can’t tell he ever had ECMO, had any complications — he looks amazing.”

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.