Woman Resucitated After Heart Stopped for 45 Mins

http://www.emsresponder.com/web/online/Top-EMS-News/Woman-Resucitated-After-Heart-Stopped-for-45-Mins/1$11890

Her condition became so bad she and her son Justin, 13, needed to move into her parents' home in north Waterloo. That move would be her first stroke of luck.

The second came on the night of Aug. 30, when Kristine, Justin and parents Howard and Maggie were watching The Stone of Destiny. Kristine was too tired to finish the film and went to bed. Luckily, Justin followed her, with plans to tuck her in. Kristine barely made it to her room before she collapsed on the bed. Her heart had stopped. Justin shouted for help.

That brings us to her third stroke of luck. About 35 years ago, her mother had taken CPR lessons when Kristine was learning to swim. She never needed to use those lessons. Until now.

Maggie burst in and immediately began recalling those CPR instructions that had been buried deep in the recesses of her brain.

As Howard called 911, she frantically worked to bring her daughter back to life. Kristine was already turning blue.

"Justin was saying ‘Mom! Come back! Come back!' " Maggie said.

Paramedics and firefighters soon came, and began using a defibrillator to shock her heart into showing some movement on their monitor. They applied the device 11 times. For the family downstairs, it felt like hours. When they finally carried Dyck out of the house on a stretcher, the paramedics had found a weak pulse. But her heart had stopped for a full 45 minutes, and the chances of anyone recovering from that are never good.

An ambulance rushed her to Grand River Hospital, where a team of emergency room doctors surrounded her bed. Around midnight, one of them pulled Justin, Maggie and Howard into a little room. They braced for the worse.

"I remember thinking this is the kind of place where they tell relatives someone has died," Maggie said.

Instead, they explained their plan. They would immerse Kristine, still in a deep coma, in ice. They wanted to drop her body temperature from 37 C to 32 C to reduce swelling in her brain and slow all neurological activity. Brain damage is a very real danger for anyone whose heart has stopped that long, and the doctors saw no other choice.

Justin sat there, trying to absorb what they were telling him. Earlier that month, his estranged father had died, and he lost the chance to get to know him. Now, barely a teenager, he was facing the prospect of losing his mother, too.

The doctors began pumping Kristine's body full of drugs. One would induce paralysis, because without it she would shiver in the ice, and that would increase blood flow to her brain. The other would wipe her memory of this brutal procedure, to reduce her trauma.

"As they're telling you this, you feel kind of numb," Howard said, remembering that sleepless first night in hospital. "It just doesn't sink in."

The following day, the doctors slowly raised Kristine's body temperature. Three days later, they started easing off on the drugs that kept her in a coma. Remarkably, though still unconscious, she started responding to doctors' instructions. They said wiggle your toes, and she wiggled her toes. A week after she arrived in hospital, she began breathing on her own.

But Kristine's recovery was not close to over.

"That week was hard because I didn't know if I was going to say another word to her," Justin said. "And I knew if she did make it, it was still possible she'd kind of forget everyone."

He had a feeling, though, that his mother recognized him. It was something in the way she looked at him as he held her hand.

In the coming weeks, after batteries of tests, doctors finally found what had caused Kristine's illness. She had a tumour the size of a mandarin orange on one of her parathyroid glands at the back of her throat. It was parathyroid cancer - an extremely rare, and difficult to diagnose, disease. The tumour was affecting her glands' ability to regulate calcium in the body, which eventually caused her heart to stop.

Kristine spent nine weeks in hospital. It was a long, blurry stretch of operations at three different hospitals. They removed her tumour - an extremely delicate task, especially for a singer who so prizes her vocal chords. Kristine had been singing for most of her life. Her father was conductor of the choir she sang in.

The doctors dealt with her pancreatitis, which she developed while sick. She was heavily medicated with morphine to treat her pain. She remembers very little of what happened during this period.

Her parents, meanwhile, spent most of this time by Kristine's side, amazed at this recovery that doctors called a miracle. They didn't need to cook much. Waves and waves of food kept showing up on their doorstep from worried friends. Their phone rang steadily, emails of support poured in.

In early November, Kristine spent her first night outside of a hospital since summertime. Her parents looked after her "like a newborn baby," Maggie said. Her scars were beginning to heal, she was getting her energy back. She felt fresh air on her face, something she had longed for all those weeks when she stared out the hospital window. She would learn how to eat on her own again, and slowly, gingerly, get back to a good place.

But Kristine tried not to overthink what she had been through, or why she had survived, with no brain damage, when so many others would not.

"I don't question it too much," she said. "It happened. And it's all good now."

11 days trapped in Haiti

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7063228/Haiti-earthquake-survivor-tells-of-11-day-burial-ordeal.html

For Emmanuel Buteau, the moment when he realised that he was not a ghost but still a living human being came when he heard his mother crying out for him.

Trapped for 11 days under the rubble of his Haitian home, he had listened to people above saying there was no chance anyone underneath could have survived so long. Delirious from lack of water, his mind began playing tricks on him, and soon he concluded they must be right. He was dead, he reasoned, and the voice inside him that said otherwise was simply his own ghost.

Then, some time on Friday evening, the voices outside became nearer again - and this time were joined by that of his mother, Marie Yolène Bois de Fer, 46.

"I could hear her voice and then she heard my voice too," said Mr Buteau, who was dragged out from the rubble by an Israeli rescue team. "That's when I believed I may be saved after all. I shouted out "Mama, mama, mama, I'm alive!"

Mr Buteau, who was recovering in a hospital bed last night, now counts himself as the luckiest of all the 130-plus people to be extracted alive from the debris of Haiti's earthquake. He may also be among the last. Rescuers, who described Mr Buteau's case as a "miracle", believe that it is highly unlikely that many more will have survived.

However, there was a new flurry of activity last night as reports swept Port au Prince that six more people had been heard alive in the rubble of a hotel. Rescuers confirmed that they could hear the sound of faint tapping, but did not know how many people were buried underneath.

In an hour-long interview yesterday with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Buteau, a tailor, recounted his extraordinary ordeal and his amazing rescue. He ended up drinking his own urine, he said, but sang hymns to keep his spirits up.

He was at home alone in the family's three storey house in one of Port-au-Prince's poorest areas when the earthquake struck. "I had just removed my clothes to take a bath, then I heard a huge noise. The house was dancing, it was shaking and then it all came falling down," he said.

"I was knocked to the ground. It was completely dark all around. I believe I lost consciousness."

He said when he came to, perhaps a day or two later, he was in pitch darkness, unable to see anything. He was partially trapped under a bed, with collapsed debris around him, and he was lying on his left side.

"I lost hope, I thought I was dead, I really thought maybe I was a ghost, It was black all around. I was confused. Was I alive or not? Anyhow I was resigned to dying. I prayed to God."

A regular churchgoer, he sang an inspirational song about how God saved one of His apostles by sending an eagle to bring him water and food. But neither his singing, nor his shouts for help within his tomb-like confinement appeared to create much hope in the outside world.

"I was calling people but my voiced bounced back," he said. "I could hear them but they could not hear me. Every time I called them they did not respond so I became discouraged. That's when I started to believe I might be a ghost. I could not understand how I could hear them, but they couldn't hear me."

The arrival of the rescue team was partly down to the efforts of his mother, a street vendor who had been living in a refugee camp opposite Port-au-Prince's wrecked presidential palace. She returned to the shattered apartment building on Friday, and was astonished when she heard her son's distant voice. "At that moment, I knew it was possible to save him," she said.

She began frantically alerting everyone she could find – police officers, journalists, aid workers – ans soon help arrived. After cutting through rubble, pieces of furniture, one of the Israelis was finally able to touch his hand. He was eventually dragged out on a blanket looking emaciated, dazed and covered in dust. Rescuers later said that his appearance was so cadaverous that his mother initially thought he had died.

"I pulled him out and he weighed like nothing because he was so thin," said Major Zohar Moshe, 47, an engineer who led the Israeli rescue unit. "Then he was free."

Mr Buteau was then rushed to a nearby Israeli Defence Force field hospital, where his mother and sister were sat at his bedside yesterday. Rescuers said the furniture in his room had collapsed around him in such a way as to protect him from serious injury, and that he may have found water at some point to allow him to survive.

"When I came out, there were a lot of people there, they were all cheering," Mr Buteau added, with a smile. "It was like a big party and my mother was hysterical. She was making a lot of noise, embracing me, hugging me, kissing me all the time. She had been talking about me in the past, as though I was dead."

"While I was trapped I was always thinking about my mother and asked God to protect her. She's getting old and I wondered who is going to take care of her if I am gone. So thank God I'm still here, so I can continue to look after her."

Dr Anat Engel, one of the doctors who treated Mr Buteau said: "It is a miracle. It is amazing that he is still alive. It made us all very happy to see this."

The Haitian government declared the search and rescue phase of the relief operation officially over yesterday. As medical and organisations continued their work, emergency foreign rescue teams began to return home.

Among them were many of the 62 British experts who helped pulled four alive from the rubble, including a two-year-old toddler called Mia trapped for three days in debris.

Onlookers broke into applause as members of the UK International Search and Rescue Team emerged at Gatwick Airport. Search and rescue experts from nine fire brigades took part, along with medics and volunteers.

Dad Credits 'Hand of God' for Wife and Baby's Miraculous Revival

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10010403.html

A Colorado family's brush with tragedy Christmas Eve transformed into a dramatic celebration of the gift of life when a father says he witnessed his wife and newborn child revive after both appeared to die in the midst of delivery.
Mike Hermanstorfer, 37, said there was no sign anything was wrong as his 33-year-old wife Tracy was being prepped to give birth to her son Coltyn, the couple's third child, the morning of Christmas Eve. Hermanstorfer was holding his wife's hand as she lay back in her bed, saying she felt tired.
Moments later, doctors discovered that Tracy had stopped breathing and lost a pulse. Hospital staff rushed to revive her with chest compressions and a breathing tube, but eventually told Hermanstorfer that their best efforts had failed.
"I was holding her hand when we realized she was gone," Hermanstorfer said. "My entire life just rolled out."
Doctors quickly delivered Coltyn by caesarean section, but he appeared lifeless as he was given to his father. After a few agonizing minutes of doctors trying to revive the baby, the father says he saw his son begin to stir in his arms, and soon learned that his wife had also miraculously revived.
"My legs went out from underneath me," he recalled Tuesday. "I had everything in the world taken from me, and in an hour and a half I had everything given to me."
Dr. Stephanie Martin, a maternal fetal medicine specialist who was called in for the ordeal at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, said that Tracy's malady, and her recovery, were both mysteries. "We did a thorough evaluation and can't find anything that explains why this happened," she said.
"[Tracy] had no signs of life. No heartbeat, no blood pressure, she wasn't breathing," said Martin. "The baby was, it was basically limp, with a very slow heart rate."
Tracy, whose heart began beating as she was being rushed to surgery, says she remembers nothing in between suddenly feeling sleepy and waking up after the ordeal. "I just felt like I was asleep," she said.
While medical science was left without an explanation, Mr. Hermanstorfer credited "the hand of God" for making a miracle of a near tragedy.
"We are both believers ... but this right here, even a nonbeliever - you explain to me how this happened. There is no other explanation," he said.
"Wherever I can get the help, I'll take it," said Martin, when asked about divine intervention