"Miracle Baby Undergoes Hypothermia, Cheats Death"
I originally intended to write about Obama's new health care plan, but knowing really nothing about it, I decided to not make a fool of myself.
To summarize the story, an unattended child drowns in a bathtub. CPR efforts by the mother fail, and he is pronounced dead at the hospital. That particular part of this story caught my attention; the idea of pronouncing someone as "dead", especially when it turned out to be a less-than-final verdict. A medical technique called therapeutic hypothermia was called into play as a last effort to save the boy's life. It involves placing the patient under an induced coma, significantly lowering his body temperature, and then, over an extended period of time, brought back to a normal state through a very gradual rise in body temperature. The idea behind it is that when oxygen rushes back to a human brain that has lost circulation, cells in the brain are overwhelmed and are often permanently damaged. Damage is avoided through this technique.
What makes this story special is that the boy has made a nearly full recovery; most patients, if they wake up at all, come back into the world with damaged cognitive function.
Now, what makes this story interesting, at least to me, is the very human concept of what is dead, and what is not. The idea of when a human is dead beyond any medical effort on our part, and when is actually unavoidably passed on, seems limited only by the human knowledge of medical science. And the ceiling for medical science seems pretty high; we're researching how to grow functional human organs- at what point will we be able to synthesize entire human bodies and simply transport the human conscience from one body to another? If, or when, that does indeed happen, it'll surely destroy any concept of religion or God or any of that.
Things will be a lot less romantic, I think. But having a new body any time I need it, and just the general idea of immortality; I can deal with that.
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