http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...-17-hours.html

"A 59-year-old American woman who was presumed dead after her heart stopped and she was taken off life support came back to life, stunning her doctors and family."


That's it. I'm getting cremated!

Why do you, let alone the Telegraph (an allegedly professional UK national paper) believe this without checking?

See the website of the newspaper cited asthe source, the Charleston Daily Mail. Search for "Velma Thomas" the woman cited in the Telegraph item.
See:http://dailymail.com/search

Lots of hits, nothing about a resurrection, back to three weks before the Telegraph item..
It's another urban myth.

John the data miner.

Obviously you didn't search for the right thing.
This story was all over the place, some with pictures of them.
With any of these "weird news" type stories, they tend to bounce around for a while since they usually sit on an editors desk waiting for a good opportunity.


I would say it's true, but very embellished. I'm not sure what it would take for rigor to start setting in, but it sounds like it was just an observation by the son.

I have a feeling the doctor made a mis-diagnosis, or the comments made by the doctor were mis-interpreted by the family.
While less than 10% sounds dire, it's still significant enough that there might be this kind of occurance quite often.

__________________
Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

it's obviously a miracle

__________________
'The eye can only see what the mind is prepared to accept'

The report keeps flipping back and forth on crucial details, such as whether her heart was stopped or just weak and supported by machinery instead of going on its own, and whether she was supposedly already dead or merely about to die sometime soon. In any contradictory pair of assertions, at least one must be false.

To me, that's a sign that the true facts are the relatively mundane and explainable ones, and the false contradictions come from somebody trying to make it sound more dramatic than it really is.

When I read this woman's story a couple of weeks ago, the article cited doctors as saying she had no brain activity during that time, too. So perhaps faulty or incorrectly implemented equipment, or something strange we know little about went on. I am pretty sure SOME blood had to be circulating, though.

CJSF

__________________
Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

I think these two bits from the original linked article are significant:
I think the lower body temperature was the key thing. There have been many cases of cold water drownings, where people were revived after long periods underwater, if their body temperature had dropped significantly. In my EMT days (over 20 years ago) we were taught "no one is dead until they are warm and dead".

I wouldn't want to deliberately go through what this woman did with 10% odds, but that is far from the level I would call "a miracle". It seems even the doctor (in spite of the miracle comment) realized this wasn't that far fetched.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

That wasn't to stimulate the brain at all, but to protect it by reducing metabolic rate. Therapeutic cooling after cardiac arrest has been shown to have quite dramatic effects on survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, so that it is now becoming a routine part of management.
The son may well have been reporting the appearances of a therapeutically cooled patient, mistaking them for rigor mortis.

So I'd reconstruct the back story to this as being a woman who had an out-of-hospital arrest, followed by a couple of in-hospital arrests, followed by therapeutic cooling with a rather gloomy prognosis because of initially poor EEG activity. The stuff about her having no cardiac output during that time is certainly some sort of misunderstanding, probably linked to the reduced brain activity and the periods of cardiac arrest.

Grant Hutchison

I once had a friend who came back from the Dead. He said it was a great concert. I didn't believe him.

__________________
The views expressed are the febrile product of an overactive imagination of a person who in shadows sees the gyrating Elvis-like ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

Was he grateful?

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Jesus came back after 3 days.
17 and 3 are both prime numbers so it must be true.
Seems logical ,or have I been didling too much?.
Time to start a new cult.

No, Greatful!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

People come back from the dead every day





All they have to do is take a bus from Eastbourne to anywhere else

__________________
Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

What the son described is not rigor mortis. When a body goes into rigor, the muscles basically lock in position... the body becomes rigid. The skin does not "harden" and the hands and toes do not curl.

I think Grant has it right. These were probably the result of cooling the body. And that same cooling could explain the lack of detected brain function.

Also, note that during those 17 hours, they were keeping her heart going, so her brain was not totally deprived of oxygen.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

The European Resuscitation Council issued a consensus statement in November 2005 which included 12-24 hours of therapeutic cooling for some cardiac arrest patients. The two randomized trials supporting this recommendation were carried out in out-of-hospital arrest patients who were shocked out of ventricular fibrillation but failed to recover consciousness promptly, so that's the group for which the recommendation is strongest.
The surprise and enthusiasm of the doctor in the report is understandable. There has been at least one similar recovery in our local ICU: a prolonged out-of-hospital cardiac arrest with no recovery of consciousness after the return of spontaneous circulation, a period of rather gloomy therapeutic cooling according to the guidelines, and then a patient sitting up drinking tea and reading the newspaper. Dr Eggleston (quoted in the article) maybe does need a tutorial on the difference between "less than 10%" and "a miracle", however.

Grant Hutchison

I think that risings from the dead may have had their origin in human's observations of nature. 3 lunar days after the winter solstice is when crops would come back out of the ground, "rising from the dead."

Only 17 hours without any brain activity? Pfft. I've passed out for at least 24 hours. I really need to stop combining speedballs and Zeiger.

Before or after you've died?

Why not register as an organ donor, this will mean at least a part of you gets to live a bit longer after you have died.

According to some press reports over here some recipients of transplants started to take on characteristics of the donor - One woman who only ever read trashy tabloids or autobiographies of celebrities found her self getting into the classics , the kind of stuff her donor was into

__________________
Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Story says she came from "Nitro" West Virginia. Obviously there was something in the water that kept her going.

Badda-bing, badda-BOOM!!!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson