It sounds like you have a medical background. One word you used piqued my interest: sedation.
The woman I have written about was deliberately cooled to 91 degrees, I think as an attempt to prevent brain damage. This is apparently very painful, so she was also sedated.
After a day in the hospital, she was warmed up, and they tried to take her off the sedatives. But, each time they did this, her body would tremor so badly, they couldn’t accurately monitor vital signs.
I don’t think they ever took her off the sedatives. Could the presence of sedatives affect the ability to monitor brain function?
“Could the presence of sedatives affect the ability to monitor brain function”
Somewhat, if one is trying to assess for spontanoues return to neuro functioning/ increased level of consciousness. But the brain, damaged by severe anoxia due to a prolonged time without oxygen can go into status epilepticus when sedation is taken off which is also a sign of very poor prognosis. The brain, being severely injured is severely irritable, (think of damaged wiring with arcing and shorting between the various exposed strands), and by reducing the sedation, the dampening effects of the drugs disapates and the entire nervous system goes haywire...not conducive to life. A forty minute code, especially occuring suddenly without the knowledge of what caused the collapse is not conducive to liefe generally.
Now I’ve seen codes as long as 40 minutes where the patient survives, but usually, in a hospital situation when it happens, we know the patient’s issues and correct for them during the code, we pump 100 per cent oxygen and get them intubated right away and good CPR is important. The out of the blue collapses are problematic, so during the code we try to account for all possible causes while trying to maintain an open air way and give good CPR...hoping that we can blow the dying embers into flame again.
Early icing is important to preserve brain function and we are seeing excellent results, not just folks surviving a code, but increased numbers of these folks walking out of the hospital with almost if not all neuro functions intact! The key is chilling the brain early enough and keeping it flooded with good circulated oxygenated blood immediatly once a spontaneous pulse and circulation have been restored.
If too much time had passed and much brain death had occured before ROSC(return of spontaneous circulation)...say with a major stoke or brain bleed or just too much time without oxygen, as what might have happened with this lady you spoke of...then there is not much left that could ever be done medically.
They could have let the lady continuously tremor and tried some anti-convulsant drugs(which they may have probably tried but they probably didn’t work; if they did everything they were supposed to have done) but a continous status epilepticus just fries more brain cell, causes even more cerebral edema, raises the fever to dangerous levels and well just about everything you don’t want to see in loved ones just prior to their deaths.
Sometimes in anoxic brain injuries, you don’t get seizures but the hypothalmus is damaged and you get enormous fevers/sweats, blood pressure and rhythm changes. You get brain swelling and herniation of the brain into the spinal canal. It all depends on where the damage is, patient factors....etcetera.