Cardiac Arrest A&E Resus, ETA 5 Minutes

12:30pm, 01/07/05: I was on call today, and as always I'm part of our world-class (my foot) cardiac arrest team. The bleep goes off and the announcement says "Cardiac arrest, A&E resus, ETA 5 minutes". Well at least I don't have to run half way across the hospital to get there, and I still have 5 minutes to go.
Wobbled down to resus and found a lot of people hovering around waiting for the so-called arrest. A 55 year old biker had fallen into the river with his motorbike, and was taken out of there by air ambulance. The general thought was that he had a heart attack on the road and the bike went out of action. In comes Mr Arrest and his heart wasn't pumping. He was also profoundly cold (temp 32 centigrade, normal 36.5)... shoot. We CPRed him and he needed some electric shocking to the heart, and for a few moments he looked like he was coming back to life, but that wasn't to be. Problem is, when someone has a temp of 32 you are legally obliged to continue resuscitation until they're temperature is "compatible" with life, ie 35 and above.. using tons of warm fluids and very hot blankets all over the poor guy, it took us ONE HOUR AND 30 MINUTES to get his temp up to 35, to then declare him dead. That's 90 minutes of jumping up and down his chest, running lots of blood tests, and generally chaos.
Moral of the story: DON'T DRIVE A MOTORBIKE