FARMINGTON - When Kathy Kerr walked into the Children’s Hospital Boston’s reception area for the first time in nearly 20 years, she was struck by the memories. She was accompanying her daughter, Lauren, who was interning at the hospital over the summer.

Lauren Kerr didn’t have any memories. The last time she was there, she had been the patient.

In 1990, on her due date, Kathy Kerr went to her doctor to discuss inducing labor. While taking her pulse, the doctor detected the baby’s heartbeat. Concerned that the rapid heartbeat indicated the baby was under stress, the doctor had Kerr rushed to Franklin Memorial Hospital. Lauren was born hours later, through an emergency c-section procedure.

Her odds of survival were set at roughly 10 percent. Lauren was suffering a condition called meconium aspiration syndrome, caused by intestinal waste leaking into the amniotic fluid. This causes an inflammation in the baby’s lungs. Perhaps even more dangerous, Lauren had suffered from an infant maternal transfer, caused by the stress of her condition, which resulted in a loss of a third of her blood.

“I kept asking the nurses what her Apgar Score was,” Kathy recalled, referring to the simple indexing system used to assess the health of newborns, “and no one would tell me. She flunked it, I guess.”

“It was probably the only test you ever flunked,” Kathy joked with Lauren.

With their child on a ventilator at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Lauren’s parents were informed that the best hope for a full recovery rested in a relatively new treatment, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, more commonly known as ECMO.

In 1990, ECMO for infants had only been conducted for five years. Lauren later learned that only 200 infants had undergone ECMO at Children’s Hospital Boston. The procedure is expensive, requiring specialized equipment to pump blood out of the body, oxygenate it and pump it back in. While interning at the hospital, Lauren helped tape a discussion between doctors on “ECMO ethics;” that is, if four infants came to the hospital’s three ECMO suites, who gets the treatment.

“They were discussing morality rates, scenarios and stuff,” Lauren recalls. “Like, ‘Baby C has an 80 percent chance and this baby has a 5 percent chance.’ Later, the nurse came up and said that one of the babies had basically been [my] scenario.”

Luckily, there was space for Lauren in 1990. She was hooked up to the machine for three days, leaving the hospital in just under two weeks. She was home in time for Easter Sunday.

Over the next couple years, Lauren went in for regular check ups and the occasional ECMO reunion. After they moved, however, Children’s Hospital Boston lost track of the Kerrs. Years later, bearing only a scar on her neck to remember the procedure by, Lauren was accepted to Colby College, majoring in International Studies. The Kerrs aren’t certain if Children’s Hospital tracked her down through the college or some other way, but last year they received a notice of another ECMO reunion.

Lauren wasn’t able to attend, so Kathy sent pictures instead. At Children’s Hospital, one of Lauren’s nurses, Nancy Craig, wrote back.

“She wanted more,” Kathy said, “wanted more of everything. ‘What else do you have?’ she asked. This was the sort of thing they said keeps them going.”

Through this back and forth, Lauren eventually ended up writing Traci Wolbrink, a doctor at Children’s Hospital, who was putting together a series of video demonstrations of medical procedures, for use in the developing world. Lauren, with her background in languages, agreed to intern at the hospital over the summer or 2009. There she helped edit and dub the videos; French, for instance, for distribution in Cambodia.

“I was thrilled to have something to do over the summer,” Lauren said. She met the doctor who oversaw the ECMO procedure, Jay Wilson, who remembered his old patient. The staff let her know whenever an infant was going to go through the ECMO procedure, and she met one child’s parents.

Lauren has been invited back to Children’s Hospital next summer.

“It was humbling,” Lauren said. “I don’t think that feeling is ever going to go away.”