Alcor member A-1546 was pronounced on Wednesday November 9, 2011. A neurocryopreservation case, he became Alcor’s 109th patient.
A-1546 had been on our watch list for a couple of years. He originally went into the hospital with a pulmonary embolism and it was discovered that he had gastric cancer. He said that a follow-up PET-CT exam showed that he was free of any problems. However, he went back into the hospital on November 3, 2011 with difficulty breathing, and was treated for pneumonia, hypotension, and tachycardia. Doctors discovered that his lungs were riddled with metastatic gastric cancer and that he had a hepatic lesion.
Alcor was alerted to the worsened situation by means of a medical alert message on November 5. The doctor estimated that A-1546 had perhaps two or three weeks remaining to live and wanted to transfer him to a hospice. The $5,000 available for moving to a Scottsdale-based hospice was mentioned; the member’s wife did not favor the idea but was otherwise cooperative. Alcor faxed written directions to the doctor for review and later spoke to the hospice director. A-1546 was being cared for by a hospice-at-home program from November 7.
At 12:55 PM on November 9, A-1546′s wife reported that he was having severe breathing difficulties. Although just a couple of days earlier, doctors had estimated that he had several more weeks, the Deployment Committee decided on November 8 that a standby was indicated. Since Aaron Drake could get there before Suspended Animation, he left Phoenix at 10:33 AM to fly to Washington (state) with a mini-med kit. A-1546 declined even faster than expected, so that Aaron arrived just an hour and a half before clinical death (which was around 5:30 PM PST). The SA deployment, which wouldn’t be possible until the next day, was canceled. Aaron dealt with the situation on his own, although SA handled arrangements with the mortuary.
A-1546 was delivered to Alcor at 10:44 AM on November 10, with a pharyngeal temperature of about 6C and no sign of clotting. The time from arrest to on the pump was 17 hours, 52 minutes. Good perfusate flow was observed, with even perfusion of both hemispheres and even skin coloration. Cryoprotection was completed at 4:31 PM MST.
