Read Online Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack - Free Book Online

is a sleep-like state from which an individual has not yet been aroused.”
    Refined from the Hippocratic idea of coma as “a sleep-like state from which an individual
cannot
be aroused,” LeWinn’s definition facilitates the growing corpus of documented and anecdotal evidence which testifies to individuals making various degrees of recovery from deep coma. Furthermore, it accommodates the use of medically induced coma in certain surgical procedures.
    Routinely used in cases of seizure and intracranial hypertension, barbiturate comas induce deep central nervous system depression beneath level-three thresholds of surgical anaesthesia. A medium IV dosage of 10mg/kg/hour of Thipentol maintains the subjects in the deep end of the Glasgow Coma Scale. The delta wave signature of depressed synaptic activity at this level lies within a spectrum of 0.3—5HZ. The duration of the coma is reckoned within such recovery indices as the resumption of normal intracranial pressure and against such limiting factors as acute muscular atrophy, cardiovascular and renal damage. In the case of the
Somnos
project a further limiting consideration is that one-third of all inmates in Irish prisons serve an average of three months.
    Speculation has been voiced that the growing use of barbiturate comas in cases of radical surgery is now dictated by insurance rather than clinical concerns. The worrying incidence of litigation from patients who, following resuscitation after surgery, testify to consciousness of acute agony while undergoing surgery is now seen as a defining consideration as to the level and type of anaesthesia used in surgical theatres. The medical community deny that medical procedures are compromised by cost-benefit considerations.

KEVIN BARRET TD *
    There was never a percentage in it, not in terms of public profile or column inches or first preferences or anything else either. That was obvious to me the minute my senior colleague landed that project on my desk—a blue folder with the word SOMNOS stencilled on it. I didn’t know what the word meant then but I do now and when I read through it I thought of what that journalist said to me that day on the steps of the Dáil: a poisoned chalice right enough.
    No, I didn’t wonder at it or think twice about it and I’ll tell you why. On the evening I got my portfolio I was sitting in the Dáil bar talking to Emmett Cosgrave—he was junior environment minister at the time and he told me a story which has stood to me since. Emmett was back from anenvironmental conference in Düsseldorf, of all places. He’d put in a hard morning’s work in front of some watchdog committee explaining why this country wasn’t meeting EU legislation in agricultural pollution and groundwater contamination. Emmett had pointed to pending legislation and greater enforcement of existing laws and so on. All morning on the defensive and that wasn’t the half of it. In the afternoon, as part of a subcommittee, he’d met a delegation of Green Party activists from France and Germany concerned about the levels of mercury emissions from crematoriums throughout the EU. Seemingly, crematoriums are the single biggest violators of mercury emission codes across the whole EU, bigger even than heavy industry which, by and large, has cleaned up its act. But because of what they do crematoriums have managed to escape censure and this is what was worrying these people. Now I didn’t know there was mercury in the human body. There isn’t, Emmett said, or at least there shouldn’t be. But there is mercury in prosthetics: breast implants, pacemakers, false limbs, false teeth,teeth fillings, glass eyes, glasses, hearing aids and God knows what else we’ve been fitting ourselves out with. And with an ageing and more beauty-conscious population across the EU there are no shortage of these. The problem arises when crematoriums cannot burn off the latent mercury in these things. If a crematorium burns above a certain