68 minutes with chest compressions, full recovery. Plus recommendations from a 5-member panel on cardiac arrest.

The following is told with full permission of the patient, who is a paramedic who also started, owns and runs with his wife a company for teaching CPR.  He has taught CPR to over 100,000 people.  And he's a wonderful guy.   Here is his story:Near midnight in December, this 56 yo very healthy and vigorous paramedic was out on a run with a critical case when his partner found him unresponsive in the front seat of the ambulance.  The partner began manual chest compressions immediately and called for help.  He was found to be in ventricular fibrillation and was defibrillated 4 times, unsuccessfully.  After a few minutes of manual chest compressions, the LUCAS device was applied.  Due to jaw clenching, he could not be intubated and so was ventilated with bag-valve-mask.  He received 1 mg of epinephrine and 300 mg of amiodarone and still could not be defibrillated.  On arrival in the ED, he was in full arrest and undergoing LUCAS CPR.  He had been in arrest for 30 minutes at this point.  O2 saturations were 70% with a waveform.  He was given succinylcholine and intubated and the inspiratory threshold device (ResQPod) was attached to the end of the tube.  Slow ventilations were guided by the timing light on the ResQPod.  Continous cardiac ultrasound revealed good cardiac contraction with each compression.  CPR was very briefly held and the rhythm was ventricular fibrillation with no ultrasonic cardiac activit...
Source: Dr. Smith's ECG Blog - Category: Cardiology Authors: Source Type: blogs