A chilly lifesaver

Gerald Myers is happy he can't remember what his hospital stay was like, since his wife's recollection of his five-day stay gives him the chills.

Shirrie Myers said she remembered feeling upset and shook up after her husband collapsed Dec. 7 near their front yard. Even more so while the paramedics came to do CPR on him to little avail.

Then for a bit, she was frightened even more to see him in the emergency room.

"They had him packed in ice from head to toe. His whole body," she said. "I didn't know what had happened to him ... it surprised me, but I felt they were doing what was best."

At that moment, Gerald Myers underwent what Dr. Nick Azarov called the "initialization" stage for induced hypothermia, a procedure MCH and Midland Memorial Hospital are experimenting with in order to keep a patient's brain alive after the heart stops beating for any period of time.

John Alvarez, the assistant Odessa fire chief who oversees the OFD's EMS, said paramedics began in October carrying ice chests and blankets to drop a cardiac arrest victim's body temperature. He said it works off the same principle that allows for some drowning victims in icy waters to be brought back to life after being technically dead for up to two hours.

Gerald Myers, who also had a triple bypass surgery after another heart attack in 1994, said he never heard of this treatment, and for that matter, he never knew he was literally put on ice until his wife told him.

"What was I doing packed in ice?" he said he first thought.

Azarov, an MCH doctor and Texas Tech assistant professor, said he trained the MCH staff and some paramedics to use the technique before anyone begins operating on the heart. In over-simplified terms, the brain is better protected when it's cold after cardiac arrest since most of the damage is actually caused by toxic reactions made after the blood flow is restored rather than by its lack of flow, and by keeping it cold, the metabolism is slowed down so that less of this happens.

EMS paramedic and firefighter Ken Hawley said they try to cool off the patients immediately by injecting ice-cold saline into them while putting them on ice pads or a blanket pumped full of ice water. By the time they get you to the hospital, they hope to drop your body temperature to 93 degrees. Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees.

In the hospital there are several ways to bring it down further, from inserting catheters into the arteries to putting on body suits similar to the blanket used in the ambulances. Azarov said MCH prefers the body suits.

The treatment had been used on more than two dozen people since the hospital began a year ago, Azarov said.

It's not only catching on in Odessa. According to a New York Times story published in December, New York's ambulances would take cardiac patients only to hospitals that use the cooling therapy, even if meant skipping closer emergency rooms. Still, Azarov said, as of 2006, the most recent stats available, only 28 percent of hospitals in the country currently practice the treatment.

They only use the cooling therapy on those who had a cardiac arrest because of a heart attack. They're still studying its effects on those whose hearts stopped beating over physical trauma, drug overdoses and some other causes, Azarov said.

Five days after Myers' heart attack, he was out of the hospital, he was back on his feet with a new defibrillator. He started working again at the U.S. Post Office the day after Christmas.

"I felt good after I got back home. I don't feel like I went through this episode I went through," he said. "If it wasn't for the defibrillator, I wouldn't have realized I had a problem."