Posted on 07/26/2011 10:12:11 PM PDT by nickcarraway
An unconscious South African man, presumed dead by relatives, had a rude awakening Sunday when he came to his senses in a morgue, officials said.
His cries for help terrified employees at the mortuary in the Eastern Cape province of Libode.
"Two workers heard screaming from the refrigerators," Sizwe Kupelo, a spokesperson for the Eastern Cape Health Department, told ABC News. "They thought it was a ghost and they ran for their lives."
The man, who did not want his name released but is described as a grandfather in his 60s, had apparently suffered an asthma attack and fell unconscious.
"The family called a private undertaker who took what they thought was a dead body to the morgue," Kupelo said, according to South Africa's News24.
Relatives did not call paramedics, but instead phoned the mortuary, assuming he was dead. The morgue's owner told The Associated Press that the worker who picked up the supposedly dead man "examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing."
Ayanda Maqolo was there when the elderly man woke up and started screaming after having been in the refrigerator with other corpses for at least 21 hours.
"He asked, 'How did I get here?'" the owner recalled the man saying. The owner added that the chilling experience even gave him "nightmares."
"I couldn't sleep last night," he told AP. "But today I'm much better."
Kupelo said the health department wanted to publicize the incident because it exposes a real problem.
"This is why we're saying as a health department that people should call health services to have their relatives declared and certified dead, and not these private mortuaries," he told ABC News. "Those guys aren't trained paramedics. They're about business."
The "dead" man, who suffered from dehydration, was hospitalized briefly after the incident. He has since returned home to his family, Kupelo said.
The South African man was fortunate. Last month a woman in Russia was mistakenly declared dead and woke up at her own funeral. The shock caused her to suffer a heart attack, which officially killed her.
Wasn’t this a “Twilight Zone” episode?
Has anyone checked to see if this guy can light cigars without a match...?
“He’s dead, I tell you.”
“No he’s not, he’s just sleeping.”
It happens more than people think, mostly in third world countries but also in some western ones. I have a book of stories just like this one.
>>“No he’s not, he’s just sleeping.”<<
Beautiful plumage...
From now on, he'd better sleep with one eye open.
>>It happens more than people think, mostly in third world countries but also in some western ones. I have a book of stories just like this one.<<
It sort of makes you say “let me go if I flatline but DON’T EMBALM ME!”
We’ve sent how many billions over there and they can’t tell if someone’s alive or dead?
Hell... I can do that and have no medical training.
LOL.
What was Tim Pawlenty doing in South Africa?
Do they still bleed people in South Africa?..
Maybe leeches.. maybe a shaman on the Peters principle..
I hate when that happens.
Well, I’ve told this story at least one time here.
My Grandma was declared “dead”...the family was called to come over (so that we could take my 95 year old Grandpa down to see her one last time before she went to the funeral home).
They even propped her up in the bed nicely (it was in a nursing facility attached to a hospital...yes a hospital) so that she would look nice when Grandpa came to say his goodbyes.
I was charged with calling all of the out-of-state cousins; which I did...everyone was very upset.
Thankfully, Dad went to look in on her before he went to break the news to Grandpa. I’m told there was quite a scene at the nurses’ station when he saw that she was breathing. Then, I got to call everyone back (an hour later and about 11:00 PM by this time)...”Guess what...Grandma’s not really dead!” She lived for a few more months after that; I don’t think anyone told her that she had “died.”
I wonder if the cold was in any way beneficial to him? I know that when people drown in freezing water, they can be revived, without serious brain damage, after an astonishingly long time. If his pulse was truly undetectable, I wonder if cooling his body for 21 hours allowed his system to slow enough to keep him alive?
More evidence that South Africa is continuing to go downhill. The schools are broken, the health care system is broken, and crime is out of control. Now it looks like the racist youth wing of the anc will be taking over soon under Julius Malema, he of “kill the Boers”. South Africa is 10 years behind Zimbabwe but that is only because they have had a 10 year head start. Malema wants to take everything from the whites despite the remaining whites paying 90 percent of all taxes. All the farms that have been bought by the state to date are a disaster and the next step, under Malema, will be forcing the white farmers out with no compensation. The really sick part is that white South Africans are routinely denied asylum in the Western world in favor of political correctness.
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