Posted on 08/23/2013 9:46:13 AM PDT by Innovative
Yahle, a diesel mechanic from West Carrollton, Ohio, "coded" - a term meaning emergency -- on the afternoon of Aug. 5, after arriving in the hospital that morning in cardiac arrest. A team of doctors rushed to his hospital bedside and used chest compressions, a bag connected to a breathing tube and medications to force blood and oxygen through his body. After 45 minutes, they gave up and declared him dead.
"He was truly flatlined at the end of that code. He had no electrical motion, no respiration, and no heart beat, and no blood pressure," says Jayne Testa, director of cardiovascular services at Kettering.
But five to seven minutes later, the team noticed a trace of electrical activity on his heart monitor and resumed their efforts to resuscitate him. Yahle is now home recovering, according to Testa.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Talk about your gutters and strikes kinda day!
In my 20+ years as an ambulance medic, I probably worked around 100 cardiac arrest cases. I can count on one hand the number of times I saw the patient survive even after extended resuscitation efforts. This case raises some profound questions about what we think we know about cardiac arrest.
I can attest from personal experience that non-professionally administered CPR can work. I have done it successfully.
People so willing and quick to pull the plug remind me of gun control dummies, everyone else but me!
God is doing something.
maybe he was only pining for the fjords
When I left the scene as the ambulance left I thought he was gone only to learn later in the evening from a fellow fireman that he came to.
Been a ff for 33 years and that was my first of many attemps at CPR. Members who were involved in CPR were acknowledged by the NYS Fire Chiefs Association.
What a rush for this old guy!
Miracles still happen. Maybe he has a wonderful life-after-death story to tell.
Not just cardiac arrest but no electrical motion, no respiration, no heart beat, and no blood pressure. Pretty definitive signs that the mortal coil has been shed ... and yet!
Something inside him was still ticking and kicked off a resumption of electrical activity.
The chest compression is the important part, because it keeps blood with oxygen flowing around the system, and there is a lot of oxygen in the blood.
Years ago, doctors may the extraordinary discovery that a “pulsed” movement of blood around the body was unnecessary, as long as there was oxygenated blood flow.
A recent discovery is of gas-filled microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate the blood. It can only be used for 15 to 30 minutes to keep the blood oxygenated, as long as the blood flows, but that can be a very long time.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120627142512.htm
There is also now an automatic chest compression machine, that maximizes blood flow to critical parts of the body like the brain (video).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj77L08BHug
So it seems that these two things, combined together, would be just what is needed in emergency circumstances.
If someone could devise a cheap oxygen ventilation system to fill the lungs with oxygen, and maybe integrate a defibrillator into the chest compression machine, they would really be getting somewhere.
With our new protocols (pit crew) we are delivering almost half our patients ,to the hospitals, with a pulse.When doing CPR properly a patients SPO2 stays at or near 100%. Along with capnography perfusion can be confirmed.I have seen many saves lately.
Or a coffin that can keep doing it forever, with a built-in intercom in case the occupant wakes up.
Kids, on the other hand, were a whole other matter.
The person in this article likely doesn't have a clue how lucky they are, I think.
One other thought....the article doesn’t mention anything at all about brain damage. Starts occurring in 4-6 minutes - at least that’s what I was taught about a million years ago.
“If someone could devise a cheap...”
I did try to a devise cheap emergency respirator system once. I had good opinions about the devise from doctors and medical providers. The army even said nice things about it but their developement funds were allocated elsewhere. I stopped developement due to my costs.
Medical devises developement costs are not as bad as drugs but it’s still a cost versus return process.
bookmark
The big jaw drop is the statement that x-rays taken later showed no fractured ribs after the CPR
I do wish you had continued. American hospitals work on a push supply system, and in total I believe that of about 102,000 respirators in the US, 100,000 are needed and used during a typical flu season. A surplus of just 2,000 units would cost many lives in just a “bad” flu season.
In a killer flu epidemic, with tens or hundreds of thousands of Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) cases caused by cytokine storm, it would be a huge disaster.
H5N1 still maintains its 60% mortality rate with treatment. Without respirators, I have no guess how high that figure would be.
Even that H1N1 epidemic that turned vicious in Ukraine had many of their doctors convinced it could not be influenza, because on autopsy the lungs looked burned black. They had never seen anything like it. But those were just the fatalities. In the future I imagine Ukraine will be tormented by lung disease from the lungs damaged by the epidemic.
America desperately needs at least the plans to quickly fabricate tens of thousands of respirators.
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