A 36-year-old mother without brain activity woke up after hearing the voice of her one-year-old daughter, one of many incidents that calls into question the long-held medical understanding of so-called “brain death.”
Father Michael Orsi, who has heard the play-by-play of the remarkable episode from one of the nurse anesthesiologists involved, told LifeSiteNews that the woman recently went to the hospital for a double endoscopy. While patients normally wake within five to 10 minutes of the end of the procedure, the mother did not wake up – hospital staff found her heart had stopped.
She received CPR, and soon her heart was beating on its own again. Believing she had suffered a stroke, they sent the mother to receive an MRI and found she had no brain waves. She was then transferred to the intensive care unit (ICU) and put on a respirator to help her breathe.
After two days in ICU, the husband told the nurse on duty that if his wife could only hear the voice of her one-year-old daughter she would be OK. Amazingly, when he prompted his daughter to speak over his cell phone to her mother, she woke up. She was “in perfect condition,” according to Orsi.
The priest has verified the details of the chain of events with the woman’s doctor, Omar Hussein, who has also confirmed to LifeSiteNews that the mother woke up upon hearing the voice of her daughter. Hussein has said there is no way he can scientifically explain what happened.
However, the longtime medical “consensus” on brain death in the U.S. has been contested by various doctors, some of whom point out that patients can indeed go on to recover consciousness after meeting what has been considered official criteria for brain death.
Dr. Heidi Klessig recently explained that such cases of recovery after flatline EEGs (no brainwaves) can likely be attributed to a condition called Global Ischemic Penumbra, or GIP:
Woman without brainwave activity wakes up after hearing her daughter’s voice
Like every other organ, the brain shuts down its function when its blood flow is reduced in order to conserve energy. At 70 percent of normal blood flow, the brain’s neurological functioning is reduced, and at a 50 percent reduction the EEG becomes flatline. But tissue damage doesn’t begin until blood flow to the brain drops below 20 percent of normal for several hours. GIP is a term doctors use to refer to that interval when the brain’s blood flow is between 20 percent and 50 percent of normal.
During GIP, the brain will not respond to neurological testing and has no electrical activity on EEG but still has enough blood flow to maintain tissue viability – meaning that recovery is still possible. During GIP, a person will appear “brain dead” using the current medical guidelines and testing but with continuing care they could potentially improve.
Just last month, the New York Times shared the results of a large study that found at least a quarter of unresponsive patients (those diagnosed with a coma, vegetative state, or minimally conscious state) have some awareness.
During the study, teams of neurologists asked 241 such unresponsive patients to do “complex cognitive tasks,” such as imagining themselves playing tennis. Remarkably, 25 percent of the patients exhibited the “same patterns of brain activity seen in healthy people.”
“It’s not OK to know this and do nothing,” remarked Dr. Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, the Times reported.
“This puts a whole new light on the Terri Schiavo case,” Fr. Orsi told LifeSiteNews, referring to a court’s decision to allow the husband of a cognitively disabled woman in a persistent vegetative state to have her refused nutrition and water so that she would die a slow and painful death of dehydration.
The priest pointed to the implications these findings have for the care of unresponsive patients, including in response to their capacity for mental distress.
“Imagine the terror of that, listening to what they’re going to do,” he said regarding times when the decision is made to pull the plug on an unresponsive patient. “Or hearing how it’s time to call in the organ transplant team. This is horrible.”
“Brain death” guidelines in the U.S. were revised this year to state that it occurs in individuals with catastrophic brain injury, and no evidence of function of the “brain as a whole,” a condition that must be “permanent.” Klessig has pointed out that “under the ‘brain as a whole’ formulation, people can be declared dead while parts of the brain are still working, as evidenced by electrical activity on EEG.”
Klessig has also highlighted the fact that, according to the new guideline, “(t)he panel chose to use the term permanent to mean function was lost and (1) will not resume spontaneously, and (2) medical interventions will not be used to attempt restoration of function.”
“The fact that medical interventions ‘will not be used’ implies that they might have been used and might have been successful if used. This fact alone reveals that these people are not dead, since there exists a possibility of resuscitation!” she wrote.
Klessig noted that the diagnosis of brain death becomes “a self-fulfilling prophecy: most people diagnosed with BD/DNC very quickly have their support withdrawn or become organ donors.” She is calling for AAN guidelines to be scrapped in favor of “the traditional definition of death: cessation of cardiopulmonary function.”
“Brain death is a legal fiction that removes civil rights from vulnerable brain-injured people, who, under the United States Constitution, possess an ‘inalienable right to life,’ deserve protection, and should be treated as mentally disabled persons,” Klessig maintains.