A garbage collector, victim of a heart attack in March during his rounds in Neuilly-sur-Marne (Seine-Saint-Denis), came back to life after being officially declared dead.
His colleagues and the emergency services thought him dead: a garbage collector, victim of a heart attack in March during his tour in Neuilly-sur-Marne (Seine-Saint-Denis), came back to life after being officially declared dead. The 66-year-old man who had taken up his service very early in the morning of March 29, “did not have time to start that he felt unwell”, explains to AFP a spokesperson for the Sepur, his employer, confirming information from the Parisian. “Colleagues from the Neuilly-sur-Marne agency performed heart massage before help arrived,” says Sepur, which specializes in waste collection and sorting.
The Seine-Saint-Denis Samu teams then took charge of the garbage collector and provided “prolonged cardiopulmonary resuscitation of more than fifty minutes taking into account the age and the presence of good prognostic factors”, explains to AFP Professor Frédéric Adnet, head of the department’s Samu. “It was when the body was lifted that the rescue team realized he was still alive,” according to Sepur. Half an hour after being declared dead, “the police indicated that there were signs of the patient’s life”, confirms Prof. Adnet. “We dispatched a team and we found that there was a heart that was beating efficiently and therefore we transported him to intensive care at Montfermeil hospital”.
The garbage man is in a “desperate state”
The garbage collector is in a “desperate state”, to this day. What happened is “a rather exceptional thing, I had not yet had a case in my career”, says Professor Adnet. This phenomenon is called “phenomenon of Lazarus”, in reference to Lazarus of Bethany, resuscitated by Christ according to the Bible. “The explanatory hypotheses are not yet convincing but, nevertheless, we think that when we do intensive resuscitation and the heart does not restart and we disconnect the patient, we suddenly modify the regime of intrathoracic pressures”, explains the professor and former head of emergencies at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny.
“The interruption of resuscitation can therefore allow the heart to regain effective activity,” he adds. But “looking at the literature, we see that there are no cases where the patients made it out alive”. Another phenomenon could be similar to that of “a miracle”, some thirty years ago. “We saw people waking up in their coffins. It was due to barbiturate poisoning which gave + paintings + of a deceased patient”. A psychological unit has been set up for the garbage collector’s colleagues subjected to “this emotional lift”, said his employer for whom he had worked for ten years.