The basis for this question comes from a couple of TV shows, so bear with me. On the recent Stephen King stories show, John Boy is bitten by a snake and lies in the morgue ready to be autopsied. In Chasing Jordan, evil mean and nasty Ron Silver lies on the slab and gets his arm cut and when he bleeds, the coroners realize he is paralyzed, not dead. Of course they verify he’s alive by holding a slide to his nose and seeing the condensation. :smack: Dr. Macy says
"There were absolutely no indications that he was alive."
Now, wouldn’t a dead body have a certain coldness and pallor? Wouldn’t experienced coroners see and feel a real difference between a paralyzed dude and a dead one? I understand someone pronounced them dead based on heartbeat? but surely a dead body just feels different?
I also saw “I Woke Up in the Morgue” about the woman who goes into cataplexy when she feels strong emotions, and she got declared dead a few times because her heart rate becomes so slow. No one tried to autopsy her though!
I guess if they are working under some fancy shmancy floor lamp that has that bright bluish tinted light, a human will look pallid under it…
You would think so. But he might have had his/her mind made up for him/her by the EMT’s and orderlies all telling him/her “Hey. The stiff is prepped for ya, Doctor…”
Again, the body may be prepped in some manner (stripped of clothing, laid out on the examining table, etc, before he/she first see’s it, and he/she is already predisposed to assuming the victim is dead based on the statements of folks he/she trusts, as they work together (almost) daily…
You’d think a lack of post-mortem lividity would make most coroners pause. (The lower part of the body takes on a reddish cast from the blood settling therein. Rigor mortis as a sign is no good since it comes and goes.)
Oh, I thought of another wrinkle. In the Crossing Jordan* case, they put Ron Silver in the refrigerated ? drawer for a while. Would a paralyzed person shiver or have some other reaction trying to stabilize its temperature?
*I know it’s not real reliable; after all they have the coroner running fingerprints and ballistics, and sometimes even out on the street chasing the bad guy. :smack: :rolleyes:
If one is paralyzed, one is not breathing. If one is not breathing, one is dead within a matter of minutes.
The TV shows that show paralyzed people on slabs are bogus.
There have been cases of people with hypothermia being mistaken for dead, but they have been unconscious, cold and pale, with slowed heart rates and respiratory rates. Usually, the person pronouncing was a rooky. I’ve seen one case in 40 years. An old woman was found down at home in the winter with no heat in the house. The medic who found her looked and felt her skin, and assumed she was dead. he never put her on a monitor. When she warmed up at the funeral home, a janitor heard her moaning. She was then transported to the ER, then ICU where she died (again) 4 hours later.
When a person is pronounced dead, the health care provider must listen with a stethescope for a full minute, to assess that there is, indeed, no heart or breath sounds, or they must attatch a cardiac monitor to see if there is any sort of cardiac rhythm.
BTW, medical examiners, and CSIs never have contact with the criminals. Also, different labs to prints, DNA and such. The ME only examines the body.
AND Coroners are untrained, elected officials. MEs are trained pathologists.
There are conditions where a person can appear to be quite dead to medical experts. In Japan, if someone dies from eating fogu (puffer fish), the law requires the body to lie undisturbed for 3 days before anything like an autopsy is performed on the deceased. It seems that the toxin in puffers such that a person can be put into a deep coma, with no signs of life for that long.
Also, there’s a thread here, where a Doper posted an account (which they claimed was true) of one of their uncles passing out in a snow drift because of a diabetic coma and coming to just as the ME was about to cut into their chest.
I read about a case somewhat similar to picunurse’s example, which happened sometime fairly recently (last couple of years). I don’t remember the circumstances, but a woman was thought to be dead by EMTs and nobody bothered to check her thoroughly enough when she arrived. She went to the hospital morgue and woke up inside one of the metal drawers. Unlike picunurse’s example, this one sorta has a happy ending. The woman was whisked to the ER and lived happily ever after. Well, maybe not happily. The only reason I read about it was because she was suing the city for pain and suffering for the trauma of waking up inside the metal bin, and her lawsuit made the news.
That’s what it was in the Crossing Jordan one; thanks for the reminder. They had to examine the stomach contents after the fact when they were trying to figure out why he was paralyzed.
Cite please? I really have to call BS on this, either your heart is beating or it isn’t, and it surely doesn’t take three days to figure it out. No “deep coma” ever masquerades as heart failure, AFAIK.
My source for this is the bookThe Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis, who’s a noted ethnobotanist and probably deeply regrets selling the film rights to that book. Heart rates can slow down a great deal and it might be possible to miss it without a heart monitor, I suppose. Heart rates are funny things and probably not as well understood as we might think. One of the Apollo astronauts was originally rejected for the space program because his heart rate was thought to be too low, eventually, the docs realized that his heart rate was so low because of how physically fit he was.
Where do you get “fictional”? Wiki merely states that it’s controversial and suggests that there may be other mechanisms at work. Davis’s book is extensively documented and footnoted. Nor does he claim any odd phenomina at work. Paralysis from fugu is well known, and he was sent to Haiti to investigate a rather famous documented case of a “zombi.” (I forget the name of the victim, but he was declared to be dead, buried, and then some years later turned up alive. He’d been drugged by a witchdoctor and appeared dead, so he was buried, with a nail from the coffin lid being driven into his cheek, when he returned, no one would have anything to do with him, feeling that he was a member of the undead. It’s a rather famous case AFAIK, no one’s ever been able to prove that it was a hoax.)
Nor does it sound to me like Cecil’s read Davis’s book based on Cecil’s column. (Admittedly, it’s been a couple of decades since I’ve read it myself, so my memory’s a bit fuzzy.) IIRC, Davis didn’t have quite the easy time that Cecil implies, and he readily admits that he might have been scammed at times, especially since he got several powders which had no effect at all in his tests. He doesn’t know if they were just putting him on, or if the guy who sold him the stuff really thought that he was producing the genuine article.
Cecil also says that analysis of Davis’ samples showed only trace amounts of the toxin- something Davis should have thought to test before proclaiming the toxin the cause of zombie-ism. As to whether he read the books, I dunno.
In Colorado a guy crashed some kind of aircraft into a small pond in the winter and was under water for something like 40 minutes. He survived. (Actually, we have a mutual friend, who says he’s doing okay, although it took him a long time to come back. By “okay” I mean functioning. I don’t think he still flies or anything like that.)
The paramedics thought he was dead but the protocol was to warm him up anyway, so they did–fortunately. I was discussing this with a doctor who said something to the effect that “Yeah, when you find somebody in the cold, like water or a snowbank, you don’t pronounce them dead until they’re warm and dead.”
there was a case in philly where a woman was pushed into an oncoming subway, by a man who heard a voice telling him to push her. she was pronounced dead at the scene, there were massive head injuries amoungst other trauma. at the morgue the m.e. opened the body bag, took a look and said, get her to the e.r.! she’s still alive.
the woman remembers hearing him say that and was quite a fasinating witness at the trial. she was still recovering from her injuries then and was hoping to resume a somewhat normal life. the guy who pushed her ended up in a mental facility, release from there doubtful.
