This 66-year-old man felt unwell when he took office at the end of March. After a long cardiac massage, he was pronounced dead before the emergency services realized that his heart was beating. A rare event.
His colleagues and the emergency services thought him dead. The 66-year-old man had started his service very early in the morning of March 29, and “didn’t have time to start that he felt unwell”explains a spokeswoman for Sepur, his employer. “Colleagues from the Neuilly-sur-Marne agency performed cardiac massage before help arrived”specifies Sepur, which specializes in the collection and sorting of waste.
The Seine-Saint-Denis Samu teams then took charge of the garbage collector and provided “a prolonged cardiopulmonary resuscitation of more than fifty minutes taking into account the age and the presence of good prognostic factors”explains Professor Frédéric Adnet, head of the department’s Samu.
“It was when the body was lifted that the rescue team realized that he was still alive”according to Sepur.
Half an hour after being declared dead, “the police indicated that there were signs of the patient’s life”confirms Prof. Adnet. “We dispatched a team and we found that there was a heart that was beating efficiently and therefore we transported him to intensive care at Montfermeil hospital”. The garbage collector is in a “desperate state”nowadays.
What happened is “a rather exceptional thing, I had not yet had a case in my career”says Professor Adnet.
This phenomenon is called “phenomenon of Lazarus”, in reference to Lazarus of Bethany, resuscitated by Christ according to the Bible.
“The explanatory hypotheses are not yet convincing but, nevertheless, we think that when we do intensive resuscitation and the heart does not restart and we disconnect the patient, we suddenly modify the regime of intrathoracic pressures”explains the professor and former head of emergencies at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny.
“The interruption of resuscitation can therefore allow the heart to regain effective activity”, he adds. But “Looking at the literature, we see that there are no cases where the patients made it out alive”.
Another phenomenon could be similar to that of“a miracle”thirty years ago. “We saw people waking up in their coffins. It was due to barbiturate poisoning which gave ‘pictures’ of a deceased patient”.
A psychological unit has been set up for the garbage collector’s colleagues who are subject to “that emotional lift”said his employer for whom he had worked for ten years.
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