Dead on Arrival

We will be having an audit for our charity cases for the month of January in a couple of days, and Ill be assigned to ICU admissions for the said month. Sometime in the middle of last month, a 42 year old male, who was a hospital personnel, admitted to the ICU and came in due to unresponsiveness. It was noted that a couple of minutes prior to arrival at the emergency room, the patient was doing moaning sounds and was noted lying on the floor. Suddenly one of his roommates stood up, and called for help to bring the patient to the hospital. It only took the patient's group of roommates around 5-6 minutes to reach the emergency room but upon arrival, patient was noted to have no heart rate and no blood pressure. He was declared dead on arrival.

Upon arrival, resuscitation was immediately done, CPR was done, epinephrine given, intubation was done and eventually after 10 minutes, patient responded and eventually was revived. On work-up it was noted that he suffered from an acute myocardial infarction, hence myocardial infarction regimen was started and patient was admitted to the ICU. Upon arrival at the ICU, he was noted to be with stable vital signs, but seizure episodes were noted to be starting. Seizure were attributed to hypoxic encephalopathy since a patient was noted to be asystole (no heartbeat) for some minutes. Anti-seizure medications were added to his treatment regimen. I endorsed the ICU to the incoming resident knowing that this patient won't make it to next day.

Next day came, I went to the ICU to put my things and upon seeing him the next day, I big smile formed in my face, he was awake, although a little bit disoriented, he has stable vital signs and no seizure recurrence was noted. Patient was eventually extubated and transferred out of the ICU in the next days and eventually discharged. When I asked him if he remembered anything, he told me the last thing he heard were people screaming to bring him to the hospital. A second chance of life happened infront of me, hope he could nurture and take care of it.