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Posted: 07-09-2012 11:55 Post subject:

Good news, the baby is released from hoospital.

Posted: 23-10-2012 23:10 Post subject:

Posted: 24-10-2012 02:13 Post subject:

Posted: 31-10-2012 05:19 Post subject:

Posted: 09-11-2012 12:00 Post subject:

Fabrice Muamba recalls the day he 'died' and tells how grateful he is to the people who brought him back
The last thing Fabrice Muamba recalls hearing on March 17, as Bolton played Tottenham in an FA Cup quarter final, was his colleague Zat Knight screaming at him to “come back”.
By Jim White
6:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2012

He tried to do as Knight had suggested, to back-pedal and fulfil his defensive duties. But, gripped by an inexplicably severe headache, he found he couldn’t run. He felt horribly confused; his head spinning, his vision scrambled, he saw two Scott Parkers ahead of him.

And then he just went down. He doesn’t recall collapsing. But one thing is certain: by the time his head hit the White Hart Lane turf, technically he was dead.
It was one of the most shocking things seen at a football ground: a young player dying in plain sight.
In front of 35,000 spectators and millions watching on television, Muamba, a player renowned throughout the game for his fitness, had suffered a massive cardiac arrest.

As the Bolton and Tottenham medical teams, augmented by a leading heart specialist leaping from the crowd to help, attempted to resuscitate him, for over an hour his heart did not function. He was gone.
Nothing sparked it back into action: adrenalin injections, massage, the vigorous application of a defibrillator, he was not responding to anything.

But then, in the hospital operating theatre to where he had been rapidly dispatched, the doctors tried one last thing. Under an electrical stimulus, fully 76 minutes after it stopped, his heart burst back into a beat. As inexplicably as it had stopped, it started again.
Those words of Knight’s were prophetic: Fabrice Muamba did come back.

And here he is, eight months later, in the players’ lounge at Bolton’s Reebok Stadium, tall, slim, healthy and definitively returned.
“I feel great,” he says. “I have good body shape, I’m not getting fat, which is good.”

Not many of us are granted a reprieve from death, let alone one played out on national television.
“I’ve watched it once,” he says of the footage of his collapse. “It was tough to watch.” You would imagine, after watching it, he must feel the luckiest man alive.
Except Muamba is quick to dismiss any idea that his survival was down to good fortune.
“For me there is no such word as luck in the dictionary,” he says. “When it happened, the right people were there for me. They did an unbelievable miracle on me. If this could have happened in any place for me, it was a football pitch because I had the right people there to help. The ambulance, the doctors and the machine. If it happened to me in my house I don’t think we would be having this conversation.”

Muamba does not remember a single second of the 76 minutes his heart had stopped.
But he recalls his remarkably rapid recovery, the excellence of the medical care, the astonishing support he received from those within the game (he cherishes a picture of Lionel Messi wearing a T-shirt before a Barcelona game bearing the legend “Fabrice!!!! We are behind you”).

All of it is detailed in a book he has written about the experience – and the life he led before it as a young refugee from Congo – called appropriately I’m Still Standing.
“I wanted to put a good closure to the situation I had over the last year,” he says of the book. “To be able to stand here just shows the amount of effort people put in to my health and I thank God that I am able to be here.”
Unlike watching the tape of his collapse, Muamba says compiling the book was not difficult. “It was not really an emotional strain,” he says, “because I have already changed my life.”

The book suggests that Muamba’s recovery has been something of a medical marvel. Despite being deprived of oxygen for so long, his brain is not damaged.

At first difficult, his physical movement is now once again that of the athlete. Yet the condition which caused his attack has not gone away. His heart is still prone to an irregular beat. To counter it, he was fitted with a pacemaker which has already kicked in a couple of times.
“Wow, it hits you,” he says of the device he calls his physical seat belt. “You start to feel a bit low then bang it’s like being kicked in the chest and you’re OK again.”

But it has meant that he has been advised a comeback is impossible. While that has its compensations – “I don’t have that worry of not knowing if I’m going to start, or being on the bench, I don’t have to get up early for extra training” – he admits that has been the most difficult part of his recovery: he has yet to find a purpose. Some have suggested that a man as academically sharp as him might be drawn to coaching.

“Nah,” he smiles. “My heart is very small, I don’t need another heart attack. Coaching can wait. For me it is best I take care of my heart first before I go on to something else.”

Not that his heart was the reason he refused an offer to go on ITV’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. He said he baulked at the idea that dying on a football pitch somehow made him a celebrity.
“I’d have been on the plane there right now,” he says. “But I told them I’m not into that sort of thing. You have to parachute in. Nah. I can’t swim. What would I do? You have to know yourself. No thank you.

"People may have seen what happened to me, but I’m the same old Fabrice, buying my orange juice at the supermarket, looking forward to the new ‘Call of Duty’ coming out. I’m not a celebrity.”

He certainly does not exhibit any of the desperate need for attention of the has-beens, never-will-bes and Tory MPs heading to the jungle. He seems centred, happy, philosophical.
As he says, there is nothing like a close brush with death to make you appreciate life. But when he is asked about his future and if there was one thing he would like to do, for a moment his smile disappears.
“One thing?” he says. “Put my boots on and go out training. If I knew that the doctors gave me the all-clear to go out training tomorrow that would be great.” Then he pauses.
“But hey,” he says, grinning widely once more, “there’s more to life than football, right?”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/9665055/Fabrice-Muamba-recalls-the-day-he-died-and-tells-how-grateful-he-is-to-the-people-who-brought-him-back.html

Posted: 10-11-2012 00:02 Post subject:

I like this guy, dont you?

Posted: 10-11-2012 15:15 Post subject:

Posted: 11-11-2012 00:38 Post subject:

He has unwittingly stepped into the spotlight. But its a type of phenomenon that brings out the good in people. Hence Liobel Messi wearing a t shirt saying "Muamba we're with you".

Posted: 13-11-2012 10:20 Post subject:

Sam Ledward turns 106 after being declared dead in 1936

Sam Ledward is more grateful than most to celebrate his 106th birthday given that he was declared dead 76 years ago.
The former joiner crashed his motorbike in 1936 and says he was in a coma so deep that doctors ordered his body to be taken away.
He was being taken to the mortuary when a hospital porter noticed his "corpse" move and returned him to the ward.

Mr Ledward, of Flintshire, puts his long life down to "sheer luck" - as his fortune all those years ago suggests.
As he celebrated turning 106, he said: "I'll be all right for a while yet. You don't get rid of me like that." Cool

He said: "I was riding on 500cc Triumph. I hadn't had it more than two months. I bought it off a farmer. One of his sons had come to grief on it.
"I just tuned it up and put a new rear tyre on it. I thought the front tyre would be okay but it wasn't. It bust."

He was thrown into the road and his coma was such that doctors concluded that he had died. So they gave the order for the body to be taken away.
Mr Ledward said: "They put me on a trolley and this chap saw something move and took me back. I came to five days later.

"My first recollection of anything was seeing someone stood round the bed and me knocking something out of someone's hand.
"I had knocked a feeding cup out of a nurse's hand."

He was carried back to the ward where he stayed unconscious for another five days. His head and face injuries took six months to heal.

"I've had a good life since," he added.
Most days he catches a bus into town with his companion Millie Minshall, 90, the cousin of his late wife, from the house they share in Gwernaffield, near Mold.

Born and brought up in Cheshire, Mr Ledward and his late wife, Edith, lived in Blackpool. Mrs Ledward died in 1993 but not before telling her husband that her cousin would look after him.
He said: "She said 'go to our Millie,' I'm well treated every day.
"We're doing very well. We knock about together. We used to go abroad a lot but I think I'm too ancient for that now.
"But I'm not too bad for an old codger."

Mr Ledward celebrated his 106th birthday last Friday with Mrs Minshall and her daughter's family.
Mrs Minshall said: "He's not bad, not bad at all."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-20295971

Posted: 30-12-2012 12:36 Post subject:

Grandmother 'comes back from the dead just minutes before post-mortem' after spending THREE DAYS in the morgue
By Anna Edwards
PUBLISHED: 16:19, 29 December 2012 | UPDATED: 16:45, 29 December 2012
A grandmother has been brought back from the dead twice - and has even survived spending three days in a morgue.
The 61-year-old Russian woman has been declared dead twice by doctors, but each time has come back to life - and once was minutes away from being cut open for her autopsy. Shocked

Hardy Lyudmila Steblitskaya spent 3 days laying in a freezing cold morgue, while her family mourned the retired cook.
The mother's eery habit of returning to life has not only left her family torn between grief and hope that she may come back to life, but perplexed doctors too, The Siberian Times reported.

She has scared both doctors, friends and family once in November last year and in October this year.
The initial confusion began last year, when Lyudmila was taken to Tomsk Regional Clinical Hospital and spent days in hospital because she felt unwell.
When her 29-year-old daughter Anastasia, who has a daughter Nelli, nine, called on a Friday evening to ask about her mother's condition, she was informed by doctors that her mother had died.

The devastated woman began planning her mother's funeral and breaking the bad news to friends and family.
She spent 60,000 roubles (£1,223) buying flowers, a casket, arranging for a grave to be dug, and buying food for the mourners who planned to attend the funeral on the Monday morning, according to the newspaper.
On the Monday, she went to the hospital to collect her mother's body - only to be told to wait as doctors had not performed an autopsy.

She told the newspaper that a startled doctor then approached her and said that her mother was not dead, but was in her bed breathing and alive.
A disbelieving Anastasia went in to the room to find her mother calling her name, and screamed and dropped her bag.
She told The Siberian Times: 'My head was so fuzzy that I didn't even think about getting back into the room, and hugging mum. Or asking her about what happened.
'Instead I started calling everyone, saying things like "Er, sorry. Can you please stop digging the grave. Ah, is it done? OK... well, there won't be a funeral, my mother is alive".' Cool

Her mother cannot remember what happened, only that she was in hospital on the Friday and then woke up in a morgue on Monday to discover that her skin was peeling off from the cold.
Mostly, she is just grateful to be alive and be able to see her friends and family.
In October 2012, Lyudmila - who has a history of heart problems - had another 'apparent death' during a hospital stay but this time doctors brought her back to life after several hours.

On the morgue incident, chief doctor of Tomsk Regional Clinical Hospital Maksim Zayukov, said: 'As of now I cannot explain why this mistake happened,' The Siberian Times reported.
'This sad procedure has always worked in our hospital like clockwork: the moment of death is always registered by the intensive care doctor.
'Proper checks are always conducted. This all happens before the family are informed about the death'.
A hospital spokeswoman said: 'The checks were carried out and she was dead - or so it seemed.
'The papers could not have been signed unless this is what the doctors establish. We are still trying to understand what went wrong in Lyudmila's case'.
Ms Steblitskaya is not the only person to be given a second chance at life.

Earlier this year, mourners in Egypt cheered when the ‘dead’ body they were burying woke up. Hamdi Hafez al-Nubi, a 28-year-old waiter, had been declared dead after suffering a heart attack at work.
His body was being prepared for burial when another doctor, sent to sign his death certificate, discovered he was still warm and managed to revive him.

And in April a 95-year-old Chinese woman climbed out of her own coffin six days after she was declared dead following a fall.
Under Chinese tradition, Li Xiufeng was placed in a coffin kept in her house so friends and relatives could pay their respects. But the day before the funeral, neighbours found an empty coffin and later discovered her in the kitchen cooking.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2254595/Grandmother-dead-spending-days-morgue.html#ixzz2GX9FO33A
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

The story about the Chinese woman is also on this thread:
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1193152#1193152

Posted: 07-04-2013 11:13 Post subject:

[Double post deleted]

Posted: 07-04-2013 11:14 Post subject:

Sam Parnia – the man who could bring you back from the dead
This British doctor specialises in resurrection and insists outdated resuscitation techniques are squandering lives that could be saved
Tim Adams
The Observer, Saturday 6 April 2013 22.00 BST

Sam Parnia MD has a highly sought after medical speciality: resurrection. His patients can be dead for several hours before they are restored to their former selves, with decades of life ahead of them.

Parnia is head of intensive care at the Stony Brook University Hospital in New York. If you'd had a cardiac arrest at Parnia's hospital last year and undergone resuscitation, you would have had a 33% chance of being brought back from death. In an average American hospital, that figure would have fallen to 16% and (though the data is patchy) roughly the same, or less, if your heart were to have stopped beating in a British hospital.

By a conservative extrapolation, Parnia believes the relatively cheap and straightforward methods he uses to restore vital processes could save up to 40,000 American lives a year and maybe 10,000 British ones. Not surprisingly Parnia, who was trained in the UK and moved to the US in 2005, is frustrated that the medical establishment seems slow and reluctant to listen to these figures. He has written a book in the hope of spreading the word.

The Lazarus Effect is nothing short of an attempt to recast our understanding of death, based on Parnia's intimate knowledge of the newly porous nature of the previously "undiscovered country from which no traveller returns". His work in resuscitation has led him logically to wider questions of what constitutes being and not being. In particular, he asks what exactly happens, if you are lying dead before resuscitation, to your individual self and all its attendant character and memories – your "soul", as he is not shy to call it – before it is eventually restored to you a few hours later?

When I meet Parnia, he is not long off the plane from New York after a night flight with his wife and baby daughter, and the particular revival he is craving is the miracle of strong coffee. He is both forthright and softly spoken, full of careful zeal for his findings. As I sit across the table from him, he can make even the most extraordinary claim seem calmly rational. "It is my belief," he says, "that anyone who dies of a cause that is reversible should not really die any more. That is: every heart attack victim should no longer die. I have to be careful when I state that because people will say, 'My husband has died recently and you are saying that need not have happened'. But the fact is heart attacks themselves are quite easily managed. If you can manage the process of death properly then you go in, take out the clot, put a stent in, the heart will function in most cases. And the same with infections, pneumonia or whatever. People who don't respond to antibiotics in time, we could keep them there for a while longer [after they had died] until they did respond."

Parnia's belief is backed up by his experience at the margin of life and death in intensive care units for the past two decades – he did his training at Guy's and St Thomas' in London – and particularly in the past five years or so when most of the advances in resuscitation have occurred. Those advances – most notably the drastic cooling of the corpse to slow neuronal deterioration and the monitoring and maintenance of oxygen levels to the brain – have not yet become accepted possibilities in the medical profession. Parnia is on a mission to change that.

The one thing that is certain about all of our lives, he says, is that we will all eventually experience a cardiac arrest. All our hearts will stop beating. What happens in the minutes and hours after that will potentially be the most significant moments of our biography. At present, the likelihood is, however, that in those crucial moments we will find ourselves in the medical environment of the 1960s or 1970s.

The kind of CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) that we are familiar with from medical dramas – the frenzied pumping of the chest – remains rooted, Parnia claims, in its serendipitous discovery in 1960. It remains a haphazard kind of procedure, often performed more in hope than anticipation. Partly, this is a question of personnel. Parnia is quietly maddened by the worldwide hospital habit, in the event of death, to send the most junior of doctors along "to have a go at CPR". It is as if hospital staff have given up before they have started.

"Most doctors will do CPR for 20 minutes and then stop," he says. "The decision to stop is completely arbitrary but it is based on an instinct that after that time brain damage is very likely and you don't want to bring people back into a persistent vegetative state. But if you understand all the things that are going on in the brain in those minutes – as we now can – then you can minimise that possibility. There are numerous studies that show that if you implement all the various resuscitation steps together you not only get a doubling of your survival rates but the people who come back are not brain damaged."

In Parnia's ideal world, the way that people are resuscitated would first take in the knowledge that machines are much better at CPR than doctors. After that, he suggests, the next step is "to understand that you need to elevate the level of care". The first thing is to cool down the body to best preserve the brain cells, which are by then in the process of apoptosis, or suicide.

At the same time, it is necessary to keep up the level of oxygen in the blood. In Japan, this is already standard practice in emergency rooms. Using a technique called an ECMO, the blood of the deceased is siphoned out of the body, put through a membrane oxygenator and pumped round again. This buys the time needed to fix the underlying problem that caused the person to die in the first place. If the level of oxygen to the brain falls below 45% of normal the heart will not restart, Parnia's research shows. Anything above that and there is a good chance.

Potentially, by this means, dead time can be extended to hours and there are still positive outcomes. "The longest I know of is a Japanese girl I mention in the book," Parnia says. "She had been dead for more than three hours. And she was resuscitated for six hours. Afterwards, she returned to life perfectly fine and has, I have been told, recently had a baby."

etc...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/06/sam-parnia-resurrection-lazarus-effect

Posted: 07-04-2013 23:22 Post subject:

But all of this is just common sense, isn't it?

Posted: 07-04-2013 23:30 Post subject:

Posted: 11-04-2013 08:52 Post subject:

Hamster comes back from dead on Good Friday
A hamster has come back from the dead 24 hours after being buried alive in a garden.
By news agencies
3:40PM BST 10 Apr 2013

Lisa Kilbourne-Smith and boyfriend James Davis were looking after the pet hamster, called Tink, for friends when they found her lying lifeless in her cage.
They thought she was dead and wrapped her body in kitchen roll, dug a 1ft deep grave in their flower bed and laid her to rest.
The pair then phoned Tink's owners Nicki Gamble and Jamie Wynn to break the news that the two-and-a-half-year-old had passed away.

But the next day - Good Friday - Mr Davies called back to announce that the hamster had been 'resurrected' after going into hibernation.
She had eaten her way out of her paper shroud, dug her way out of her grave, edged along a narrow wall and then climbed a waste pipe to land in a recycling box.
She then crawled into an empty cat food cardboard box which became her shelter through the sub-zero night.

Tink was found by Ms Kilbourne-Smith's father Les the following afternoon as he went to flatten the boxes for recycling and her head suddenly popped out. Shocked

As well as surviving her burial, the freezing night and being accidentally crushed, the hamster also escaped becoming a snack for the family's pet cat Milo.

Ms Kilbourne-Smith, 23, a care home worker, said: "James came home from work and found her lying in the middle of her cage cold and lifeless and he thought she was dead.
"We wrapped her up in a load of kitchen towel and buried her about a foot deep in the back garden so that the cat couldn't dig her back up again.
"We were looking after her for Nicki and Jamie while they moved house.
"James then rang Jamie to tell him 'Sorry mate, but your hamster's passed away', which wasn't a very nice thing to have to do.
"The next day he rang him back to say 'Mate - your hamster's back alive' and Jamie thought he was trying to be funny."

Mr Kilbourne-Smith, 60, who lives next door, said: "It's amazing that she survived.
"She'd been out in that freezing cold all night - it was a good 24 hours.
"The energy she had to dig herself out of that hole, then get along the wall and climb up into that recycling box was remarkable really.

"I was taking the boxes to the shed to squash them all down for recycling when suddenly a little face popped out of one of them which gave me a big startle I can assure you.
"I brought the box into the house and said to Jim, 'Have you lost one of your pets?'
"That was when we discovered that it was Tink and she most definitely wasn't dead.
"We've nicknamed her Jesus because it was Easter when she came back from the dead."

Experts said that Tink had gone into hibernation which had made her appear dead.
Vet John Auld said: "This isn't the first instance of a hamster coming back from the dead that I've come across."
"If its body temperature drops below a certain level the animal can go into hibernation.
"It has been known for owners to mistakenly believe that their pets have died when in fact they are only sleeping.

"However, I'm amazed by this hamster. The animal's body temperature would have had to have risen to rouse it from hibernation.
"With the temperatures we experienced over Easter, one would think that the ground would have been far too cold for it to come out of its dormant state."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9984065/Hamster-comes-back-from-dead-on-Good-Friday.html