Seth Pratt retweetledi
Ms. Suzanne Chin, a lawyer and mother of two, suffered a heart attack in 2009 while she was living and working in Hong Kong. Despite intensive efforts at resuscitation, she remained comatose and was declared brain dead. Doctors advised her husband to remove her from life support.
“Then, three days after she was admitted, she woke up from her coma. She recovered within a week and left the hospital. According to publicly available information, Ms Chin is now living in Singapore, still working as a lawyer, still a wife and mum. She is well, and she is alive.”
There is a simple medical explanation for recoveries from “brain death” such as Ms. Chin experienced: global ischemic penumbra, or GIP, which is like a power outage of the brain.
During periods of low blood flow, the brain (like any other organ) shuts down its functions to save energy. When brain blood flow decreases below 50% of normal, the brain becomes quiet and unresponsive to testing, exactly mimicking “brain death.” But brain tissue destruction doesn’t occur until brain blood flow drops below 20% of normal for several hours.
People in the 20-50% GIP range of brain blood flow will not respond during brain death testing, but with continued efforts to improve cerebral blood flow, their condition is potentially reversible.
GIP is like a power outage in your home: nothing works, but the wiring isn’t destroyed. Get the current flowing again and the lights will come back on.
In the same way, with continued efforts to improve cerebral blood flow, the lights will come back on for some of these patients as well.
Unfortunately, most don’t get this chance because brain death is a self-fulfilling prophecy: these people very quickly either have their support withdrawn or become organ donors.
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