7
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Woman presumed dead was found gasping for air in body bag at Iowa funeral home. After the 66-year-old was found to be alive, she was taken back to a hospice facility and died two days later.
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- Title
- Woman presumed dead was found gasping for air in body bag at Iowa funeral home
- Published
- Feb 3 2023
- Word count
- 480 words
I was with my mother when she passed. Her breathing had slowed by degrees, and her eyes were mostly closed. The exact moment of her passing will forever be a mystery, as none of us could tell precisely when she took her last breath.
This particular news article is about a ghastly situation, but I don't blame anyone for having difficulty being sure whether someone has passed if the nature of their passing was a quiet one.
If someone has no pulse and isn't breathing aren't they legally dead?
I don't know much about the legal side, but having no detectable breathing/pulse, and actually having no heartbeat, respiration, or brain function are not necessarily the same thing, since Nurses and Doctors can make mistakes, often have limited access to more definitive diagnostic equipment (like EKGs and EEGs), and the equipment they do have can be faulty or insufficient.
But even with no mistakes and perfectly functioning equipment, determining whether someone is dead is actually a lot more difficult and complicated (physically and ethically) than most people might assume. I wish I could find it again, but I remember reading an article posted here on Tildes a long time ago talking about that. It was about how what actually constitutes an irreversible, "true" death isn't something all doctors, medical ethicists, and especially neuroscientists have even generally agreed on yet. And the issue is made all the more complicated because several people have actually been successfully resuscitated after several hours of being "dead" (no heartbeat or breathing), without any significant brain damage. Though the key to success in those cases was extreme hypothermia, which supposedly dramatically increases the length of time before hypoxia causes irreversible brain and organ damage.