Prasad arrived back in town to manage McClelland’s care and told the family that healing would take some time. We had no idea if he’d suffered brain damage or would ever be the same.” Dr. “Tom was still alive, but we knew his chance at survival was only about 30 percent. “The hardest time was the second day,” said McClelland’s father. Placing the device was just one piece of the puzzle. He was like someone who knows everything about an airplane but has never actually had to land it. He just hadn’t done this particular procedure. With his years of heart surgery experience, he knows all about the heart and how it works. “It was the middle of the night and Sirish needed me to walk him through placing the device. Sirish Parvathaneni raced to the hospital, making calls to assemble the ECMO team. Parvathaneni called her husband, another Mercy cardiac and thoracic surgeon, to help. The only problem was that he was out of town when Tom McClelland arrived at Mercy. Prasad has done countless ECMO procedures. Along with his experience as a successful heart transplant surgeon, Dr. Prasad arrived as the last piece of the puzzle, with the necessary expertise. Mercy Hospital Springfield began offering ECMO in February of 2014, after a team of providers worked to get the right training, equipment and staff in place. “Just like you would use a crutch to give a broken leg time to heal, this machine supports your body to give those vital organs time to heal. Sunil Prasad, Mercy cardiac and thoracic surgeon. “It’s the world’s fanciest crutch,” explained Dr. Machines oxygenate a patient’s blood outside their body and pump it for them - giving their heart, lungs or both a chance to heal. His only option was something called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation – or ECMO. Lakshmi Parvathaneni knew McClelland’s heart had significant damage and was too injured to pump enough blood through his body. McClelland’s father, Ted, raced to Mercy where doctors told him his son was dying. McClelland was headed to Mercy Hospital Springfield, the only facility in southwest Missouri that offered a treatment that gave him a chance at survival. Fellow officers and paramedics performed CPR all the way to the nearest hospital, where staff called for a helicopter. It’s a good thing the ambulance was nearby.

I don’t remember anything from the next three to four weeks.” I know I passed out once and woke up, but I passed out again. “The last thing I remember was serving that search warrant. Without incident, they completed the job – until 22-year-old McClelland dropped to the ground, apparently from cardiac arrest. With an ambulance parked nearby in case of violence, they went in.

It was a regular day on the job for Deputy Tom McClelland, with a little more excitement than usual: officers were set to serve a search warrant on a Miller County, Mo.

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