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Mariette Selkovitch becomes Alcor’s 136th patient on May 5, 2015

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Mariette Selkovitch, Alcor member A-2830, was pronounced clinically dead on Tuesday May 5, 2015 at 1:30 am in California. Mrs. Selkovitch, a neurocryopreservation member, became Alcor’s 136th patient later the same day.

Around 1:16am on Tuesday May 5, 2015, we received an alert from Ronald Selkovitch, a 21-year member of Alcor. His wife, Mariette, had gone into cardiac arrest and resuscitation was being attempted. There was no membership paperwork for her and no funding arranged but he was insisting that we come for her. Normally, the absence of prior arrangements would rule out Alcor accepting such a case. However, on checking our records, some important details emerged. Something similar happened in 2008, when Mr. Selkovitch’s 101-year old mother died, also without having any membership paperwork signed or funding arranged. Nevertheless, we accepted the case. Mr. Selkovitch followed through as promised and paid for her. His mother is still our oldest patient at time of clinical death, just short of 102 years old.

Medical Response Director, Aaron Drake, contacted Suspended Animation to put them on the alert. However, SA’s Suspension Services manager said that (especially given that any team would likely arrive post-mortem) SA would not deploy without complete paperwork and agreement from the board and from Alcor’s Chief Medical Advisor, Dr. Steven Harris. I called and was able to consult with a majority of directors in the middle of the night and secure agreement from everyone, along with Dr. Harris, but the shortage of time meant that it would be impossible to fulfill the conditions for SA and so Alcor deployed a team directly.

It must be stressed that the decision could easily have gone the other way, and in just about any other circumstance, would have. As it was, due to this being a third-party signup (by a member), Mr. Selkovitch was faced with the standard third-party fee (the primary purpose of which is to compensate for family and legal risks). He said he would gladly cover this if we would accept his wife’s case.

We were fortunate in that the sheriff said that no autopsy was needed and she would be released immediately to a mortuary (the same one where his mother was taken in 2008). The one living son of Mr. and Mrs. Selkovitch was on his way and Mr. Selkovitch said he was on the way there and would very likely sign the Relative’s Affidavit (which he did). Mr. Selkovitch was diligent in that he filled out the membership paperwork that I gave Aaron to take with him. Funding followed very rapidly.

The Alcor team set out for California at 5:21 am and were able to administer and circulate medications while packing the head in ice. The team returned to Alcor with Mrs. Selkovitch at 7:38 pm. Cryoprotective perfusion was ended at 12:13 am on May 6 and cool down immediately initiated.

–Max More

alcor

Alcor’s 118th Patient

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On Friday, November 1, 2013 a newly signed up international member became Alcor’s 118th patient. A-2694, a confidential whole-body member, was declared clinically dead on October 27th in the Czech Republic.

A-2694 completed sign-up paperwork just four days before being pronounced and we confirmed receipt of payment for his cryopreservation on the day of pronouncement. The patient was admitted to a hospital in the Czech Republic on Wednesday October 23. Initially, a relative told us that doctors had claimed that conducting cryopreservation procedures in that country would be illegal. That turned out to be incorrect, although there is a requirement to conduct a postmortem. Fortunately, either because of the patient’s dual citizenship or because a close relative was physically present to dismiss that requirement, no postmortem was required. Although payment for cryopreservation had not yet been received, the patient’s brother had the wisdom to wire sufficient funds to allow us to begin preparations (with the invaluable assistance of international funeral directors Rowland Brothers in London) and to send Medical Response Director Aaron Drake to the Czech Republic.

We had hoped to perform a field cryoprotection for the first time. This would have allowed us to cryoprotect the patient and ship him on dry ice. Just recently, we had positioned supplies in England for this purpose. Unfortunately, this turned out to be impossible. In part, this was due to the extremely close time frame for the patient’s sign-up. More critically, however, we ran into incredibly bad luck in that on the day our supplies were to be moved from England to the patient’s location, England was hit by the massive St. Jude storm. Winds of up to 80 mph led to cancelled flights and other major travel disruptions. Even if the patient had been well enough to move him to Germany (as we had suggested), field cryoprotection would not have been feasible.

The patient’s location in the Czech Republic added further difficulties. It turned out that the hospital lacked any ice facilities – a situation that would never happen in a US hospital. When the patient’s condition (based on very limited medical information) seemed to be critical, Aaron Drake got on a flight to the Czech Republic on Sunday October 27. The patient was pronounced while Aaron was still in transit, then placed in the hospital morgue at around 2 degrees Celsius. All the dry ice in the area was purchased and used to cool and pack the patient for air transport to Alcor. A-2694 arrived at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport early in the evening of Friday November 1 and at Alcor around 9:00 pm. The transfer into cool down took a little over an hour. At the time of writing (November 7), the patient is close to completing the cool down process.

[MM]