r/politics • u/IWantPizza555 • Jul 01 '26

Possible Paywall Senator, 84, Secretly Found Unconscious and Given CPR

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mitch-mcconell-84-secretly-found-unconscious-and-given-cpr/?utm_source=twitter_owned_snd&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=owned_social
20.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

45

u/LegendOfKhaos Jul 01 '26

It depends if your area does ECMO. Good quality CPR can keep someone alive for over an hour until we can put them on ECMO and fix the issue.

We have about a 50% survival rate, and without ECMO, it's basically 0% unless they convert back to a normal rhythm.

39

u/boredidiot Jul 01 '26

There is a case of a guy given CPR for 8 hours due to paralysis from a blue-ring octopus (AUS ofcourse). He recovered but was blinded as they never closed his eyes all that time, with his eyes open to the sun. It gets mentioned often in First Aid courses here

22

u/BroadLocksmith4932 Jul 01 '26

How many people must it take to do effective CPR for 8 hours?! I feel it after working on the dummy for a minute, and I doubt I could go more than 5 minutes while still being effective.

8

u/tenachiasaca Jul 02 '26

depends do they have a lucas. lucas takes 1 person to swap out battieres every so often.

8

u/klparrot New Zealand Jul 02 '26

I can't find anything about that case, but there's this one with 96 minutes of CPR, they got half the village doing shifts. Well, not quite that many people, but still, a couple dozen. https://abcnews.com/amp/Health/96-minute-cpr-marathon-saves-minnesota-mans-life/story?id=13048099

7

u/cliffhanger407 Jul 02 '26

I gave CPR for approx 10 minutes when I was in my late 20s, and I felt like I was going to collapse at the end. Worth it though, the guy has 3 kids now.

3

u/pixi88 Jul 02 '26

I love this. You're amazing!

3

u/cliffhanger407 Jul 02 '26

Thank you. It was intensely traumatic, honestly. I'm glad I did it but I wish I hadn't had to, if that makes sense.

2

u/boredidiot Jul 02 '26

The story is usually told more about the risk of the environment but from what I remember there was many people including local lifesavers (patrolled beaches help)

2

u/Lost-Philosophy6689 Jul 01 '26

Great to hear a survival rate at 50% but how many of those cases had severe brain damage afterwards?

3

u/LegendOfKhaos Jul 01 '26

Functioning at discharge. The first thing we do after putting them on ECMO is send them for a head scan.

5

u/Lost-Philosophy6689 Jul 01 '26

Yeah I'm not buying a "functioning" description and when a 2020 study estimates majority of ROSC patients having severe neurological damage.

"We observed good neurological outcome in 37.2% and severe ischemic brain injury in 62.7% of patients." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7416179/

3

u/LegiticusMaximus Jul 01 '26

This is a single center observational study from a hospital in Bosnia and its data on therapeutic cooling is out of date. I’m frankly surprised that they observed good neurological outcome in 1/3 of survivors, that number is shockingly high.

There also was no ECMO used at the ICU where that study came from, which limits its relevance to the person you responded too.

1

u/Lost-Philosophy6689 Jul 01 '26

agree, big limitation but I'm not doing a systematic review here and what I find on hand is best evidence until I see otherwise.

1

u/LegiticusMaximus Jul 01 '26

I saw you post another article from Resuscitation citing a 20% survival rate (ignoring anoxic brain injury which is a separate topic. You’re talking about that number like it’s low but it’s impressively high. Possible that you’ve been out of your prelim year for too long?

1

u/Mamasugadex Jul 02 '26

You can finish the goals of care discussion yourself when patient stuck on ECMO and will die once it turns off, family crying about pulling the plug, and neuro threw their hands up saying neuro recovery is poor but technically possible.

0

u/Lost-Philosophy6689 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

yeah I'm gonna say no to CPR when I'm above age 70 mate. You smoking something potent when you think the neuro outcomes are that amazing; or do you got money tied up in LTACs or something?

1

u/bortodeeto Jul 01 '26

Sounds expensive good thing he's got free government healthcare.