Italian boy survives being trapped underwater for 42 minutes
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The case of Anna Bågenholm [1] is similarly fascinating. She was in cold meltwater for 80 minutes before being pulled out, and made a ~full recovery. Her core temperature was around 56 degrees when they began resuscitation. It is truly amazing how effective hypothermia is at preserving bodily function!
After 80 minutes, though, how much difference is there? Still some, I'm sure, but water is really good at conducting heat.
and to my point, perhaps younger people have better ability to not suffer the ill effects of such temperatures? I am sure many can remember being in snow or sweltering hot weather where adults all went indoors or such. Is it ignorance or something physical?
Ignorance is an interesting question. Does it not bother them because they haven't been conditioned that it bothers them? It makes me think of pain. The anxiety of anticipating pain and of what experiencing the pain will be like is often as or more significant than the pain itself and can cause significant impact on the sufferer's life irrespective of the pain itself. Dogs, on the other hand, do not anticipate the pain, so, even when they hurt, it doesn't have the same impact on their lives.
That's a long way around to get to this: maybe it's not the discomfort of the cold itself that is highly uncomfortable, but the anxiety of the anticipation of what the cold will be like, and that is not something kids have the experience to, well, experience.
I have similar thoughts when playing music, whenever I get a nice sound, I don't feel pain or exhaustion, but every time I fail it suddenly become tiresome.
The brain as an amplifier ?
Maybe I had bad shoes though.
13 c is however an insane body temperature.
- Clean and cold water is ideal: pneumonia and metabolism.
- If you revive a drowned person, insist they go to the hospital: CPR can push the fluid in their lungs into their blood, only to return later on, drowning them all the same, "parking lot drowning."
- Quite often, water doesn't enter their lungs as their vocal cords spasm.
~ Paramedic in another life
It's a bit surprising that a 14 year old would ask for alcohol in a country where the drinking age is 18. But hey, it's Italy, perhaps there significantly more relaxed about kids drinking than Americans like me!
Alcohol isn't a social problem and it's tolerated for young people to drink (or to smoke weed) despite not being yet 18 - at least in Milan.
Actually alcohol IS a social problem, but in a way smaller size than in countries who had Prohibition. Young americans, australians and brits usually once in Italian land set their desire to drink free, causing a lot of problems (personal multiple experiences).
He wouldn't be the first drunk who decided to do something stupid. I recall a British tourist who died in Venice after thinking it was a good idea to take a swim in the lagoon a few years back.
This is always the question: very nice you are able to survive x y or z, but in what condition do you get out of it: like a vegetable or like a human being?
"The team also used a technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) to extract oxygen-deprived blood, warm it up and add oxygen, before pumping it back into the body, The Times reported.
After 10 days of using the technique, which mimics the function of the heart, while Michael was in an induced coma, he survived."
You can't just take someone who has been dead for 40 minutes and slap 'em on an ECMO machine...
http://www.today.com/id/36190954/ns/today-today_news/t/mirac...
Dying somewhere cold cools your brain, giving you a better chance when you are resuscitated.
Worked a 3 year old a couple weeks ago with an unknown downtime in a pool (up to 15 minutes). He was dead from the outset (initial rhythm was asystole), and he stayed dead (much warmer water in this case), but you still try...
This is especially true for cold-water drownings. Downtimes even longer than 42 minutes with full recoveries are not unheard of. You're not dead until you're warm and dead.
But anyway, thank you for your life-saving service.
If there is no electrical activity, then we'll go through a couple 'rounds' of ACLS, and it there is no response, we'll just pronounce them. Very rarely do we transport an adult in cardiac arrest. CPR in a moving ambulance is very difficult to perform adequately, and in most cases we would just be bringing them to a facility that would be providing the same level of care that we are in the field (albeit with more hands available to help, but the tradeoff in time and poor quality CPR isn't worth it).
The only exception to this are cases of traumatic arrests. If something is physically broken, no amount of CPR, drugs, or electricity are going to help, and their only hope is bright lights and cold steel (in a surgeon's hand). Needless to say, the survival rates for out of hospital traumatic arrests are _vanishingly_ small.
Kids are different though... They're easier to move, and easier to do CPR on. This means in most cases a pediatric arrest is a 'scoop and run', with any interventions being performed on the way in. This is in part because the resiliency of kids means they are a _little_ more tolerant of the time, and scene's with dead kids tend to be extremely chaotic. It can be very difficult to concentrate with an (understandably) distraught parent yelling at you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_cardiac_life_support [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pediatric_advanced_life_suppor...
Paramedics/EMTs can't declare anyone deceased (they are not doctors) and on ambulances there are no doctors. This means that, as paramedics are first to arrive on the scene, they HAVE to perform CPR and defibrillation over anyone until a doctor declares death (only exception is with conditions that are "incompatible to life", example: decapitation). Two more details: no doctor would declare a boy dead on the place - they would AT LEAST require the ambulance to bring the person to the closest hospital, which implies that CPR and Defibrillation is performed for several minutes anyway (usually, ~10-30mins to reach the closest hospital). Last detail, doctors are anyway required by law to ensure that at least 45 mins of CPR has been performed before being able to declare anyone formally dead.
All this procedure may seem overkill but I can assure you that I personally experienced at least two cases where I thought the person didn't stand a chance but then actually fully recovered.
So, the whole story makes perfectly sense :)
It sounds very much like 'journalist-speak'. When they start with "He fell into a canal", they're establishing the boy's innocence - i.e. he wasn't trying to kill himself, wasn't up to anything dodgy, etc. They're also establishing plausible deniability in the event of a libel suit. When they add 'who is said to have jumped off a bridge", they're probably adding conjecture from bystanders, but holding back from saying this as fact, perhaps because of the risk of a libel lawsuit (maybe it's a criminal act due to a byelaw forbidding jumping from that bridge), perhaps because they haven't had enough confirmation to say confidently that he chose to jump - they just know he ended up in the water. So they end up beginning with "He fell into the canal", followed by the reports they've had from one or more witnesses "He is said to have jumped".
praise the lord for that