Suspended Animation

I often thought my husband expected us to all be in a state of suspended animation when he was out to sea on a sub and returned to find his parking place in the driveway occupied by my car or one of our kid’s vehicles. The suspended animation I recently read about is even more significant for people with major gunshot wounds or heart trauma. Surgeons in Pennsylvania want to suspend patients between life and death in order to buy time to save their lives by fixing lethal injuries. Rather than calling it suspended animation they are referring to this process as emergency preservation and resuscitation. During this process the patient’s blood is removed and replaced with a cold saline solution in order to rapidly cool the body and stop cellular activity. Induced hypothermia has been around for decades and this is how people who have fallen into icy ponds have managed to survive, sometimes more than 30 minutes after falling in. Now doctors buy up to 45 minutes using icepacks to rapidly cool the body but this is a slow planned process and it would take too long to benefit a person whose heart has stopped beating due to blood loss from a gunshot or stab wound. Putting a person in suspended animation, a place where they are no longer alive, yet not yet dead either could give doctors more time in an emergency. Rapid cooling to 10 degrees C using a cold saline solution to replace blood has been done successfully with animals. When the blood was returned and the body warmed some of their hearts spontaneously began beating and some were given a jumpstart. The plan is to try this technique on ten people and compare the results to ten others that met the criteria but did not receive this specific treatment. If successful (and I think it will be) we will need to adjust the definition of dead once again.