I’m sort of amazed he didn’t cause a heart attack.
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Hmmm… Isn’t this how the whole ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE starts?
This actually happened to a colleague of mine. Not the coming back to life part…but the declaring people dead when they ain’t. He was (still is) a paramedic and the patient in question was really old, really comatose and from what I’ve heard really smelly with many ants and maggots in evidence.
Par for the course…except of course: not dead. The unfortunate patient did expire not long after; but the fallout from that incident was felt department wide: each and every corpse regardless of the condition must be hooked up to an EKG monitor.
This led to some…interesting and may I say particularly unpleasant ‘obvious DOA’ calls. ‘but boss…this guy jumped from 12 stories up!’ ‘Don’t matter…hook him up.’
The one I remember most was from my ambulance driving days: we got a call in the Mission to a shooting gallery in a basement apartment. PD was there already…some handcuffed youths were in the front room. Walking in the place got a whiff of dead person: it’s an unmistakable smell. Walked deeper into the basement, thin plywood walls scrawled with graffiti…some cops joking ‘can you believe those two kids were screwing in the room right next to it?’
‘It’ was a body. Covered in rubbish and full black plastic garbage bags. Very ripe. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to ‘get busy’ in all the stink but anyway…the story was that about a week previous two guys showed up to get their fix. One guy ODed, his buddy left…and the residents not being prepared to deal with a dead body, just left it and covered it with trash.
This was at best a temporary solution. The putrefaction got to a point where the neighbors got wise and called the police…and so here we come to ‘check on the body’. Dude is D.E.D. dead: bloated up huge…face missing important parts due to rodents. My paramedic partner has a conversation with a Rescue Captain; basically ‘Do I gotta? Really?’ ‘Yup. Sorry…’
It was gross. But the rules were followed. And that watch actually spiralled downwards into a series of unfortunate events (mostly for my partner) that he, a 20 year NYC medic, plus a decade in SF…to this day cringes from the memory every time we cross paths. Poor guy: he performed a rescue later that night from under a flipped over Miata…but got himself covered in HIV+ blood and many auto glass nicks: an awful combination (nothing came of it thank goodness).
Well, that was a jolly trip down memory lane…
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“I’m not dead yet!”
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Even in the Bible Belt, coroners don’t use the word “miracle” lightly.
Bullshit. Ah, well, that sentence does indicate the use of the word specifically by coroners, but still, in the bible belt, there is absolutely no fucking shortage of that word’s usage:
“Got pulled over for speeding today, and didn’t get a ticket! What a miracle!” “Flyin’ from Atlanta to New Orleans we hit a lot of turbuluence–it was a miracle we landed safely!” “Oh, the sun came up in the East again. A Mir-A-Cule!”
And if I might find particular offense with the deputy dawg coroner Howard:
The only reasonable explanation he could think of, Howard said, is that Williams’ defibrillator, implanted beneath the skin on his chest, jump-started his heart after he was placed in the body bag. “It could’ve kicked in, started his heart back,” Howard said. “The bottom line is it’s a miracle.”Pro-tip to you, sir. Before claiming that the final answer is intervention by the unseen hand of the FSM, don't offer up an entirely plausible solution to the issue. Guess he doesn't buy his scalpels from the Occam's Razor Co.
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The notion that the implanted defib might have kicked him back to life makes me a little sad, because it means they just let it keep doing its job as he was (in this case, not) passing. With my father-in-law, they held a magnet over the defib because he was very obviously getting painful shocks at a point where there really was no saving his life; all it was doing was making his death a painful one.
(OK, I’m going to go off and be sad somewhere else… 
)
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When I hear stories like this, I become wary of signing my organ donor card.
For all of the emphasis and importance placed on signing that card, the prospect of being over-eagerly harvested while I’m not actually dead is a troubling one.
Well firstly they typically need brain-dead people as the organs need to stay ‘fresh’ for a bit and you’re typically not going to come out of that with any kind of quality of life, let alone sentiency, and they don’t even know [if you’re a donor] until they declare you dead.
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