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Comment by _ihaque | Hacker News Reader

  If somebody’s been pronounced dead and then you start CPR, you don’t want the
  embarrassing situation where they start to wake up again. For older people that
  are really far gone it’s not a concern, but sometimes life can start
  to come back a bit so general anesthetic takes care of that.

That someone is coming back to life is considered "embarrassing", and ought to be stopped with a general anesthetic? That doesn't sound like someone I'd want in the emergency room by my bed...

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The idea here is that you know you are in your final days, so coming back to life for a few more hours or days isn't ideal. What you want is to be frozen as close to the time as you are pronounced dead (and preferable pronounced dead as quickly as possible).

This person's purpose is to store the patient/client's brain in cold storage in the hope that future technology will allow the personality to be recovered. Their job starts after people are clinically dead. Struggling through reviving someone might cause more damage to the brain compared to the anesthetic approach.

That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list. Have heard of people 'coming back to life' after being incorrectly pronounced dead (even young ones) and from memory there has been a few cases where people were buried alive, waking up in the coffin only to find out that they will come out of it alive again. If that is the common practice I think that medical practitioners should start questioning their suitability for this job!

This just reminded me of a short story called "Guilt" by Judy Budnitz. This American Life has a transcript of a reading, scroll down to "Act Four."

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/256/t...

>That's exactly what I though! Holly cow......maybe I should take my name off the organ donors list.

Heh, doctors have been known to be eager to "be done" with organ donors in some cases that look dead or dying enough. What's a seemingly dying person compared to all those that get to get new body parts, after all?

Combine it with stories of people coming back from comas or near-death, and it doesn't sound that good.

There are stories of people who ate fugu and were presumed to be dead but woke up after a few days

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