As medical procedures go, cooling therapy is simple: Chill the patient about six degrees Fahrenheit — using cold intravenous saline, cooling blankets or ice packs — and wait 24 hours; then re-warm the patient slowly. But it's having lifesaving effects.
It was a cold, drizzly March morning this year when Ed Sproull's heart stopped beating.
At 58, he had arrived at work feeling fit and healthy. As he stepped into the elevator at De Lage Landen Financial Services in Wayne, Pennsylvania, he had no reason to suspect he would end up in a limbo between life and death.
By the end of the day, however, it would take a novel medical procedure, therapeutic hypothermia, to send Sproull's body temperature plummeting in a dramatic effort to bring him back.
In the elevator, Sproull collapsed without a sound. He didn't grab his chest, he didn't indicate any pain or discomfort, he just closed his eyes and slumped down, coffee in hand. Unbeknownst to the colleague riding with him, Sproull's heart had entered a state of electric anarchy, no longer pumping out blood.
Responding to the 911 call from De Lage Landen, EMS Captain Chris Griesser of Berwyn Fire Company arrived less than 15 minutes later. He had to cut through a crowd to get to Sproull.
"We shocked him with the AED and we think we have a pulse," one woman kneeling next to the body told Griesser. Sproull's shirt had been ripped open, and electrodes from a so-called automated external defibrillator, or AED, were glued to his chest.
Within a few minutes of the cardiac arrest, a company employee trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation had jolted Sproull's heart back to its normal rhythm.
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Similar application of cooling is said to help in spinal injuries as well. I remember hearing about it after Kevin Everett(Buffalo Bill's tight end) suffered a break between the third and fourth vertebrae during a kickoff.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteJust as an FYI the Salisbury Fire Department was the first agency in the State of Maryland to recieve State approval to perform Neuroprotective Hypothermia to post-cardiac arrest victims back in July. We currently have freezers on all 5 ambulances that keep IV fluids at a constant 34 degrees F. PRMC has the capability to continue this therapy for several days until definitive care has been given.
Like the commenter said above; its being used in conjunction with steroids to reduce swelling in spinal injuries as well. In my opinion Maryland EMS agencies will be instituting similar processes within the next 5 years.
Science & Medicine is amazing stuff!!
Rob Frampton BS/NREMT-P
Acting Lieutenant
Salisbury Fire Department
FYI, what's described is not a heart attack -- which is a mechanical malfunction of the heart. Except in cases of "massive" malfunction, there's time to help the patient.
ReplyDeleteThe description here sound more like sudden cardiac arrest -- an electrical malfunction of the heart, hence the "no-warning," symptomless collapse.
Google the terms -- it could be life-saving.