Book Excerpt: ‘Cheating Death’

It’s all about time. When the heart misses a beat, the hourglass starts running.

Up to now, we’ve been measuring time in seconds and minutes, an hour or two at most. CPR might stop the falling sand for a few minutes. Zeyad Barazanji and Mike Mertz are alive because someone used those precious minutes to pump on their chests, keeping the blood and oxygen going to their vital organs.

Anna Bagenholm got an extra three hours. She’s alive because she was doused in a freezing waterfall, and her metabolism slowed enough that there was time to get her to a hospital before too many cells inside her brain and heart could die.

Seconds, minutes, hours. Sure, these are great achievements, in a crisis where every second counts. But let’s use our imagination to take it a step further, to see if we could stop the sands of the hourglass entirely—at least, slow it to an imperceptible trickle. There are a handful of tantalizing examples, which suggest there might be a way to do just that.

One especially dramatic story of survival belongs to a 35-year-old man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, from Nishinomiya, Japan.

One afternoon in October, 2006, he joined colleagues from the city office for an afternoon of hiking and grilling out on Rokko Mountain, part of a park near the city of Kobe. After the meal, Uchikoshi decided to walk down alone; unfortunately he fell, struck his head on a rock and lay undiscovered on the side of the mountain for 24 days. By the time he was found, he was unconscious; he had an extremely faint pulse, most of his organs weren’t functioning and his body temperature was just 71 degrees.

But within just a few hours of being taken to Kobe City General Hospital, he woke up.

Excerpted from Cheating Death, by Sanjay Gupta, M.D. Copyright © 2009 by Sanjay Gupta, M.D. Used by permission of Wellness Central, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.