When Simone Day was in the ambulance taking her to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in 2016, she looked into the bright lights and thought “I had died.” Like other patients with sickle cell disease, the 27-year-old Baltimorean had made many trips to the emergency room for pain crises and worsening organ damage. This time, she ended up in a hospital bed for more than a month and hooked up to a life-saving ECMO machine that was circulating blood through her body.
