Quote Originally Posted by FIREball View Post
Nothing is dead until its warm and dead.

In the field we are using new techniques that actually put cardiac arrest patients into induced hypothermia and the results are shocking. The survival rate increases dramatically.
That's what happened to my nieces fiance. 20 year old kid, his heart stopped while playing ultimate frisbee with some friends. Nobody knew what the heck they were doing until the paramedics got there 20 minutes later so he had no CPR. They were able to get his heart going again, but he was in a coma. They airlifted him to Rochester Mayo and they cooled his core temperature down really far and left him that way for a while. Then when they brought his temperature up again he came out of the coma. He's alive today which is pretty miraculous, unfortunately that's a awful long time for the brain to be without oxygen and he suffered substantial brain damage. He'll have to be on 24 hour care for the rest of his life so in retrospect I'm not sure it was a kindness to bring him back. But it was pretty amazing at the time.