New emergency technique saves a life

Early the morning of January 3, Agnes Phillips was sleeping next to her husband Bernie, when she noticed his breathing sounded strange. "I heard an irregular breathing sound, and I thought he was in the middle of a bad dream," recalled Agnes Phillips, 47, a chemistry teacher at Schenectady High School. She tried to awaken her husband. When she got no response, she called 911 and started cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. Minutes later, emergency medical responders from Colonie and Latham arrived at the couple's Latham home and determined that Phillips had gone into cardiac arrest - the abrupt loss of heart function. Death usually begins within four to six minutes. They established an airway, got his heart beating again and rushed him to Albany Medical Center Hospital. Phillips then made history, becoming the first cardiac arrest patient in the Capital Region to be revived using therapeutic cooling - a process by which the temperature of the body is lowered to a near hypothermic state in order to prevent or reduce brain damage. - Daily Gazette Co