If you are removed from a ventilator, CO2 builds up in your system, essentially suffocating you. When blood CO2 levels reach 55 mm Hg, a living brain will usually tell the body to spontaneously breathe. Dead brains have zero electrical activity. A radioactive isotope is injected into your bloodstream. After a period of time, a radioactive counter is held over your head to see if blood is flowing to your brain. If there is blood flow to the brain, the brain cannot be called dead.
A person has to fail a lot of tests to be declared brain-dead. And more than one doctor has to confirm brain-death. Having seen thousands of dead bodies in my career, let me tell you — dead people are very dead in a very predictable way. Not that my words sound all that comforting. Or scientific. But I feel confident saying that this is not going to happen to you.
Published by W. TED Talk of the Day. Al Gore How to make radical climate action the new normal. We humans The planet clearly needs help, so what can you do? Demand change We humans Feeling stuck? A few days later, as she was lying in her casket at her own funeral, she woke up. She saw the mourners around her, crying and praying for her, quickly twigged to what was happening, began yelling, and was rushed back to the hospital.
She lived for an additional 12 minutes in intensive care prior to dying once more, this time for good. The cause of death? Heart failure. Walter Williams of Mississippi was pronounced dead on February 26, As CNN reported, the correct paperwork was completed, his body was put into a body bag, and he was taken to a funeral home. When his body was taken to the embalming room, his legs began to move.
Then, the coroner noticed him lightly breathing. Williams was alive. It was, as it turned out, a short-lived reprieve. Just over two weeks later, he passed away for real. In the 19th century, master story teller Edgar Allen Poe exploited human fears in his stories, and the fear of being buried alive was no exception. He makes friends promise that they will not bury him prematurely, does not stray from his home, and builds a tomb with equipment allowing him to signal for help in case he should be buried alive only to wake from one of his episodes.
There were arrangements also for the free admission of air and light, and convenient receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault-door, with the addition of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty.
Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse. He was buried quickly and his own parents were not allowed to see his disfigured body. Two days after Angelo was buried, he was exhumed for an investigation. The theory is that Angelo had been in a very deep coma which slowed his breathing way, way down.
It was that slow breathing that allowed him to stay alive while buried. But while the tests may show that you are technically alive, your new status may be small comfort to you and your kin. I must decide whether to pull the plug. Not true! Not only have you lost all the upper brain functions that create your memories and behaviors and allow you to think and talk, but you have also lost all the involuntary stuff your lower brain dos to keep you alive, like controlling your heart, respiration, nervous system, temperature, and reflexes.
You cannot recover from brain death. There is no gray area brain matter joke : either you are brain dead or you are not. If you are in a coma, on the other hand, you are legally very much alive. In a coma, you still have brain function, which doctors can measure by observing electrical activity and your reactions to external stimuli. In other words, your body continues to breathe, your heart beats, etc. Even better, you can, potentially, recover from a coma and regain consciousness.
Okay, but what if I fall into a deep, deep coma? Will someone eventually pull he plug and send me off to the mortuary? Will I be trapped in both a casket and in the prison of my mind?
We now have a whole battery of scientific tests to confirm that someone is not just in a coma, but really, truly brain-dead.
0コメント