CI Case 126

CI patient #126 was a 91 year old male who died in a New Jersey hospital on September 8th, 2014. The patient was a CI member at the time of his death.

The Cryonics Institute and the patient had arranged ahead of time with a local funeral director to provide the initial cooling and transportation arrangements. The patient died at 8:15am on September 8th, 2014. The patient was packed in water ice and taken to the hospital morgue for further cooling. The funeral director reported that chest compressions were applied in order to help accelerate the cooling process. Heparin was not administered by the hospital due to their policy preventing it, but the patient was receiving high doses of Cumidin while in the hospital.

The patient arrived at the CI facility, packed in water ice at approximately 8 pm on the 9th of September. The deep nasal temperature of the patient was 2.6c. Sara Walsh, CIs local cooperating funeral director, and an assistant were both present for the perfusion, along with two CI employees, and the perfusion began at 8:30pm. Very little clotting of the blood was observed. The perfusion was a full body perfusion.

The perfusion was completed at 9:45pm. During the perfusion there were 2 liters of 10% Eg solution used, 6 liters of 30 % Eg solution used and 36 liters of 70% VM1 solutions used. The flow rate during perfusion was steady and averaged 1.37 liters per minute until the very end where it was reduced to .25 liters per minute in order to keep the pressure from rising in the patient. The pressure during perfusion was held at 120mm. The final refractive index of the effluents exiting the right jugular vein was 1.415. The final refractive index of the effluents exiting the left jugular vein was 1.419. Dehydration of was noted in the head, face and parts of the body along with a bronzing color of the skin where dehydration was present. Near the end of the perfusion there was some edema noted in the face, but no edema was noted in the brain by observation through the burr hole in the skull. The temperature of the nasal thermocouple was -2.4c at the end of the perfusion.

The patient was then cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature. The human vitrification program was selected on the computer controlled cooling unit and the time needed to cool the patient to liquid nitrogen temperature was five and a half days. The patient was then placed in a cryostat for long-term cryonic storage.

Comments: CI uses less perfusion solutions of lower concentration, and more of the higher concentration when the perfusion is conducted more than 24 hours after the death of the pateint. This helps to reduce edema and allows for more of the cryoprotective solutions to be absorbed into the tissue. The delay in having the patient sent to CI resulted in part because the funeral director did not have a Ziegler shipping case on hand and needed to to obtain one in the morning before shipping could take place. This was not the fault of the funeral director we used because he was actually a backup funeral director that filled in because the original funeral director backed out at the last minute. For those of our members who are relying on a local funeral director to transport them to CI, it would be best to confirm that they do keep a Ziegler shipping case on hand in case of an emergency in order to eliminate possible delays.