Man Comes Back to Life After Doctors Prematurely Declare Him Dead

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 22, 2013   |   12:35PM   |   Kettering, OH

He wasn’t dead yet. An Ohio man came back to life less than an hour after doctors gave up attempting to revive him and just moments after his son, who was at the hospital, shouted that he wouldn’t die.

From ABC News:

When 17-year-old Lawrence Yahle learned his father was dead earlier this month at Kettering Medical Center in Ohio, he ran down the hall to see nurses around his father’s body. They weren’t trying to revive him anymore.

Distraught, Lawrence pointed and shouted, “Dad, you’re not going to die today.”

Moments later, Anthony Yahle’s heart monitor showed signs of life, Dr. Raja Nazir, his cardiologist at Kettering Medical Center, told ABCNews.com. It wasn’t a regular heart beat, but once or twice a minute, the monitor would pick up tiny electrical movements.

“When I looked at the electrical activity, I was surprised,” Nazir said. “I thought we’d better make another effort to revive him.”

Nazir gave one of Yahle’s hanging medicine bags a squeeze to restore his blood pressure and the team began working on him again.

“Very slowly, the heart rate was picking up,” Nazir said.

That was more than a week ago, on Aug. 5. Doctors thought Yahle, a 37-year-old diesel mechanic, would need a heart transplant or be in a vegetative state the rest of his life, but he’s home resting and seems fine.

“I’m calling it a miracle because I’ve never seen anything like it,” Nazir said.

The prospects of being declared dead too soon are even more scary for those who are declared organ donors. In a rush to get organs, patients who are prematurely declared dead could find themselves having vital organs removed — perhaps without anesthesia — as they come back to life.

That happened to Steven Thorpe. Doctors rushed too fast to attempt to take the organs of a man who was thought to be “brain dead” but recovered — this time thanks in part to the dedication of his family.

The case reminds of one that received attention in December in which a 20-year-old man awoke from a coma just hours before doctors were ready to shut off life support and take his organs for donation purposes.

Sam Schmid, an Arizona college student who was thought to be brain dead, recovered from injuries sustained in an automobile accident in October just hours before he was slated to be killed and his organs given to other patients.

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The accident took the life of his best friend and college roommate and Schmid’s injuries were thought to be so grievous that a local hospital could not treat him and he was sent to Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Phoenix to receive surgery for a life-threatening aneurysm.

As hospital officials began palliative care and talked with his parents about organ donation, Schmid began to hold up two fingers on command and started walking with the aid of a walker. Now, his speech has improved and doctors say he will have a complete recovery.

The case provides yet another example of what pro-life bioethicists like Wesley J. Smith have warned about misjudging patients as too far gone too soon and relegating them to organ donor status:

For years, organ transplant ethicists and some in the bioethics community have agitated to change the definition of death from a purely biological determination, to one based in utilitarianism and desired sociological narratives. Why mess with death? Too few organs are donated for transplant, leading to long waiting lines and the deaths of some people who might be saved were organs more readily available.

But why redefine death? The point of this reckless advocacy — although they don’t put it this bluntly — is that there are thousands of perfectly good organs being used by people who really don’t need them anymore, by which they mean patients with profound cognitive impairments who will remain unconscious or minimally aware for the rest of their lives. Why not harvest such patients, this thinking goes, for the benefit of people who could return to normal lives?

The problem is that would break the “dead donor rule,” the legal and moral pact organ transplant medicine made with society promising that vital organs would only be harvested from patients who are truly dead. Hence, if the definition of death were loosened to include, say, a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, more organs could be obtained — and the dead donor rule could still appear to be honored, deemed essential for transplant medicine to retain the trust of society.

Of course, that would be fiction, and the redefinition actually a betrayal. What these “ethicists” really propose is killing for organs, a view now being promoted in some of the world’s most prestigious medical, science, and bioethical journals. For example, Nature recently editorialized in favor of liberalizing the rules governing brain death.

Currently, brain death requires the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain and each of its constituent parts. Nature’s editorial claimed — without proof — that doctors obey “the spirit but not the letter, of this law. And many are feeling uncomfortable about it.”