Chapter 196: 【196】Take care of family members’ emotions
Suddenly, a voice interrupted their conversation.
“The brainstem is known as the life center of a human being, controlling autonomous breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and other vital functions. Once it dies, the person, of course, cannot live.”
Therefore, to determine brain death, the most thorough standard should be brainstem death, a more accurate position being medulla oblongata death, because all those basic physiological functions of the human body are concentrated within the brainstem’s medulla oblongata. Other parts of the brain have other functions.
Sure enough, this statement also hit the nail on the head. The others, hearing this, turned around to see who had spoken.
They saw it was Xie Wanying standing there, eyes on the patient, murmuring to herself, “I wonder how long the heart was resuscitated for.”
Her demeanor reminded Cao Yong of the first time he had met her.
“Share your opinion,” Cao Yong said, turning to her.
Zhou Junpeng was startled: How come all of a sudden a deputy senior was asking for the opinion of an intern?
Looking back at Fu Xinheng, Fu Xinheng didn’t speak up against it either. It seemed he thought that since they had invited someone for a consultation, it was up to Cao Yong to make the decisions, not himself.
When the teacher asked, Xie Wanying answered, “Generally, if a heart attack patient experiences a sudden cardiac arrest and the heart is promptly compressed back into action, consciousness will recover because of the timely resuscitation. If the resuscitation is not prompt, the entire heart dies, and no amount of compression will bring it back. Cases one, where the heart is resuscitated but the brainstem is dead, are relatively rare.”
Listening to her, it seemed to make some sense to everyone.
“Only when resuscitation is untimely and the golden period for treatment is missed, resulting in irreversible brain damage, do patients experience brain death. But this patient was discovered and attended to immediately in the cath lab, so this outcome seems unlikely. If the heart was compressed back to functioning twice, there might be more than just cardiac issues. Is it possible that the patient had a pre-existing brainstem issue that caused the heart to stop a second time? Because the likelihood of going on mechanical ventilation directly in the cath lab is slim.”
Her words were an awakening, suddenly opening another line of thought for everyone present.
Zhou Junpeng and Huang Zhilei exchanged glances, then observed the two deputy seniors and the candidate for deputy senior all deep in thought.
“We could do a CT scan,” Cao Yong suggested.
“Go contact the CT room,” Fu Xinheng said to Zhou Junpeng and then added, “I had planned for you to do it after the consultation.”
They were going to perform the CT anyway, but the doctors on the scene were wondering how to explain brain death to the patient’s family; Xie Wanying’s words had given them another possibility.
When it comes to brainstem issues, aside from delayed resuscitation leading to hypoxia, medulla oblongata infarction is also a common cause. This can be due to vertebral artery occlusion, which is closely related to high blood pressure and heart diseases. This patient definitely had hypertension and hyperlipidemia, making a vertebral artery occlusion highly probable. They could trace back the patient’s medical history, ask if there were any symptoms similar to cervical spondylosis, dizziness, or instances of frequently falling to the same side.
Cao Yong lifted the patient’s pant legs and saw on both knees, clearly one side had a bruise.
This seemed to further confirm their speculation.
The big bosses at the peak of their lives worked even harder than the average person, seldom going to the hospital for examinations unless they were on the brink of death. Therefore, Xie Wanying’s conjecture was quite logical.
Zhou Junpeng escorted the patient to the CT room.
Cao Yong and Fu Xinheng headed to the cardiothoracic surgery’s conference room, discussing as they walked that they needed to report to the hospital administration to organize a consultation with the core members of the hospital regarding the situation. Without a clear explanation, the family wouldn’t let the matter rest.