The Days You Can't Remember Aren't Gone. They're Missing.
You have the discharge paperwork. You have the dates. What you don't have is any memory of most of what happened in between, because you weren't there for it, not in any way you can recall. Somewhere between the last clear memory before things went wrong and waking up to tubes, a scar, and a body that doesn't move or feel the way it used to, days or weeks disappeared. Nobody handed you a summary of what happened during them.
If you're reading this at 2 a.m. trying to piece it together, you're not doing anything wrong by not remembering. You're describing what extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, ECMO, actually involves for the person on it.
What the gap is
ECMO is a machine that takes over the work your heart or lungs could not do, for as long as your body needed to survive and start recovering. Being on it typically means being sedated, often for days, sometimes for weeks. When the sedation lifts, most people are handed a hospital course they can't verify against their own memory. The machine, the incisions, the muscle loss, and the missing time all arrive at once, usually without anyone walking them through what was happening to them while they were under it.
One page here is written for that gap. The public page at heartrestarted.com/ecmo-recovery covers what ECMO recovery commonly involves: muscle weakness, fatigue, memory gaps, and the emotional weight of it. It is open to anyone, so the people around a survivor can read it too.
Why "cardiac patients" isn't the right category
Most material written after a heart event is written for people who had a procedure, recovered on a fairly predictable timeline, and remember the hospital stay. ECMO survivors are a much smaller group, and the recovery is a different shape: longer sedation, more physical loss to rebuild from, and a memory gap that a standard cardiac recovery pamphlet doesn't address because it wasn't written with that gap in mind.
Heart Restarted exists for that smaller, specific group: people who were on ECMO, and the spouses and adult children who sat in a waiting room while it happened and are now home managing what comes after. Alongside the recovery tools it shares with cardiac arrest survivors, it carries material written specifically about ECMO at heartrestarted.com/ecmo-recovery.
What this is, plainly
Heart Restarted is a free community built for ECMO and cardiac arrest survivors and the people caring for them, with a place to talk to other members and tools for organizing the recovery nobody explained.
None of this is medical advice. Nothing here replaces a cardiologist, a rehab team, or a care plan. The self check-ins do include validated screeners, PHQ-9 for depression and GAD-7 for anxiety, the same instruments clinics use, and they show you a standard score band afterward. That band is a starting point for a conversation with your own doctor, not a diagnosis. Before you start, one thing to know: these check-ins are not entirely private. If any answer indicates a risk of self-harm, or your depression score is 15 or higher, or your anxiety score is 10 or higher, that result is flagged and the people who run this community are notified. Always talk to your own care team, including your cardiologist and your ECMO or rehabilitation specialists, about medical decisions in your recovery.
It is a place to write down what happened, talk to other members about it, and start organizing the parts of recovery that don't fit on a discharge form.
If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the United States, or call 911. Heart Restarted is peer support, not emergency care.
Make a free account and set up your first check-in tonight. It takes about three minutes.