I think I’m thinking of a different program.
I’m kinda afraid to think of what would be more insane a scheme than that!
Heck, I was barely out of diapers when that program was demonstrated. I was a bit precocious a child, but not by that much. 
Stranger
I’ve done a few weeks in the NICU (neonatal ICU) where the disasters are the unfortunate cases that end up on ECMO. It is a scary, scary machine. A tech has to be present 24 hours a day. There are established protocols on what to do if the machine breaks, which it tends to do quite often. The two problems is that a significant percentage of the body’s blood is actually outside of the body during ECMO. This, as others have described, leads to all kinds of problems. IIRC, there is actually a crank on the ECMO in order to run it by hand if the motor dies or power goes off.