This needs to be in the P&E thread – or else a link posted in that thread to Folacin’s post here.
Also, if I’m following Orcutt correctly … strictly, McConnell DID, indeed, die and was dead when paramedics arrived. Rationale: Orcutt tells us explicit that CPR is (only?) performed on dead people. Here he writes about positioning a body for CPR (my bolding):
When someone is in cardiac arrest, and you determine that they have no pulse and they are not breathing, that means it is time to take over for their failing body part. You place them flat on their back. If they are on a soft surface like a couch or bed, you try to be as gentle as possible when pulling them to the floor, but currently they are dead. You dropping them to the floor won’t make them dead-er.
Yes; it’s not really something you think about, but technically, yes. CPR is only for someone who is technically or clinically dead. Dead in the sense that the body is no longer properly performing the functions of living… Breathing, heart beating, etc. It’s an attempt to manually start or continue the process of living to the point where the body takes back over, or you can get a person to machines that can continue it. The longer a body stays clinically dead, the more damage is risked (particularly brain damage through prolonged oxygen deprivation).
It’s not for people who are “deceased”, and no longer capable of being revived. But yes, it is only for people who are clinically dead; that is why the “R” stands for “Resuscitation”, which by definition means restarting a person’s heartbeat and/or breathing.
I have never done CPR for real but I have had the training on a dummy, one fancy enough to give feedback on whether you’re doing the compressions deep enough. I leaned two things.
Those medical shows where the person doing the compressions is using only their forearm strength and the chest is moving perhaps a half-inch is laughable.*
If I can’t be spelled off my victim is gonna die because I don’t have enough stamina to keep it up more than four or five minutes.
*It might be they didn’t want to injure or kill the actor.
And without the machines, the body almost certainly won’t take over. In the movies, someone does CPR for a while, and then the victim wakes up. It’s not like that. At best, they wake up when someone uses a defibrillator on them. The CPR is to maintain them until that happens.
The other parts, the parts after breaking ribs and they sound like twigs snapping, is that, even if you get the person’s heart going again, there’s a good chance they will have pneumonia, lesser possibilities of a punctured lung or spleen, and they’ll be in the hospital quite a while, and not acting like the subject of Weekend At Mitch’s. And definitely not going home, by plane or otherwise.
The article is unfair for people that are not flatlined, and only in V-fib. While they are technically dead, they are not most certainly dead, and can be revived, and CPR will keep them alive until you can defibrillate them. But yes, whatever caused the heart attack in the first place (if it wasn’t an electrical shock) is still there.
Considering what I have whished Moscow Glitch an his ilk in my fantasies, CPR as described sounds about right. Reminds me of Franco’s death (and he is still dead, fuck, yeah!), but back then the doctors were more sincere in their daily bulletins. Next one, please!
Back to the memes: this one elicited a chuckle from me:
This one is less spot-on than the Beetlejuice one–but still well-done:
The newspaper text is on-point.