Death - the final frontier

I don’t know if you remember way back to when all I could talk about was death; beheading, drowning, heart attack, death in the vacuum of space. If there was a “morbid” category on Trivial Pursuit, let me tell you I could clean up. Anyways, the reason for all this lethal research was that I was writing a feature on the physiology of various modes of death in order to give a weeee insight into what it might feel like to die. It’s all done and published now (actually last week, sorry).

Now I shall share with you my favourite findings (some of which didn’t make it into the actual article):

1) The shock of falling into cold water (especially if you are all warm and clothed) can set you on the road to death in a couple of seconds; cold shock screws up breathing, makes you hyperventilate and fiddles with heart rhythms. This effectively leaves you inhaling a lethal lungful of water (for an average 155 pound man, with a lung volume of about 5 liters, it takes only 1.5 litres of inhaled saltwater and 3 litres of freshwater to kill you) and even going into cardiac arrest. Wear your life vest.

2) People wait a really really really long time before they seek emergency treatment for a heart attack. It’s obviously terrifying to admit to yourself that you are having a heart attack, but YOU HAVE TO. Tell your parents and your grandparents and every single person you ever meet: learn the symptoms of heart attack and if you feel them, call freakin’ 911. Don’t drive yourself, don’t wait for the feeling to pass. We have an amazing arsenal of treatments available that, if used in time, can effectively STOP a heart attack in its tracks and make it like it never even happened. And WOMEN!! are the worst delayers. They are most likely to experience less-than average symptoms. Heart attacks are also still thought of as a man’s disease, even by health professionals. So women are less likely to think they are having a heart attack, and so are the doctors!!! This is not good. Be proactive. If something is wrong, get help. We are talking about your heart here.

3) Bleeding to death. It feels, kind of, gross. Quick, yes, and depending how well you cut, not so painful. But exsanguination is not considered a humane way to kill animals by the American Veterinary Medical Association, it’s too stressful for them. Blood loss can induce feelings of anxiousness in people, too. Ew.

4) In Britain a couple hundred years ago, they used to burn women to death who killed their husbands. As opposed to just hanging for all other kinds of murders. This is because killing your husband (not killing your wife, mind you) was considered “petit treason” - a crime against king and country. We’ve come a long way ladies.

5)Decapitation is of course on of the most intriguing modes of death; painless? instant? really? At the upper estimate, we have about 7 seconds worth of oxygen left in the blood in our brains before we’d pass out. Which means at the upper max, we could have a whole 7 seconds to look at the crowd and smile or frown or whatever before we lost consciousness. But experiments with decapitated rats found that the electrical activity in the brain post head-severing was the same in awake rats as it was in anesthetized rats, meaning there is no brain activity suggestive of conscious feeling of pain. Or consciousness at all. Given that even the most reputable anecdotes about movement/reaction post decapitation report effects far after the 7 second cut-off, it seems very unlikely to me that they were anything more than postmortem twitches.

6) The electric chair was designed by a dentist. A dentist. 

7) Hangmen were seriously proud people, even verging on cocky. They were professionals and prided themselves on doing their jobs well. They were also kind of famous, especially the English hangmen from the 17 and 1800s. Fun times. I think it might have been cognitive dissonance over how horrid their job actually was - if you could perfect the skill, make the death as clean and painless as possible, it wasn’t really that bad, right? Also, if you drop a man too far (give him too much rope) his head will rip off. Which was just totally embarrassing. For the hangman.

8) One day, two dudes in Oklahoma just sat down and decided on the lethal injection protocol based on hunches and previous experience..but with seeming little understanding of biology. It’s more than likely that larger inmates are not given a high enough dose of the initial injection - the anesthetic - meaning they are kind of awake and conscious during the next two shots. The first paralyzes your lungs, meaning you can’t breath and would feel like you are suffocating. The second shot is potassium chloride, which should stop the heart instantly, but it also burns like a son of a bitch when injected. Like if you have to give it to patients in the hospital, they scream their guts out. Oh...and because of the Hippocratic Oath, doctors don’t assist in executions, which means that sometimes the lethal injection assistants can’t find a vein, which means even more pain and suffering.

9) Competing with decapitation for the most pondered about death form, we have death in a space vacuum. Some notable findings include, you swell up A LOT as the water in your body tissues vaporizes. Bloat like a balloon. Some pilots have experienced this when they lost pressure in their gloves (but no where else); it hurts. If you go whole hog into the vacuum you’ve got about 12 seconds before you pass out. If you hold your breath or are at the peak of inspiration when you loose pressure/fall out the space lock, your lungs will probably explode.  If someone pulls you back in before about 90 seconds, you’ll probably live and be totally OK. Any longer and you’re dead. How do we know this? Because of all the dogs and monkeys and squirrels etc that gave their lives in a vacuum chamber at some NASA or military research centre. Nice.