Cheating Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

And then someone said, ‘Get the cold sheets!’ And I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ ”
    Next thing he knew, says Mayer, he was helping more than a dozen doctors and orderlies hold down the unruly patient, while
     someone else soaked the sheets in ice water and rolled the patient up like a caterpillar in his cocoon. “It was amazing. He
     immediately calmed down. It worked like nothing else. It was right away. [The young man] said something like, ‘Oh, I think
     I feel okay now.’ ”
    Curious, Mayer asked around and learned that cold sheets had been widely used in psychiatric hospitals in the early twentieth
     century. 9 The practice had been widely abandoned, but not by the elderly psychiatrist who ran the institution where Mayer spent that
     eventful fall. Mayer knew he didn’t really understand what he had witnessed, but something about it left a deep imprint.
    “I never saw it again, but I was very impressed that something natural and so simple could have such an impact. It was like
     his brain was boiling with rage, and they just cooled it down,” said Mayer. “I thought that for such a natural intervention,
     it was very powerful.” That little lesson would one day set the template for his life’s crusade.
    A hyperactive teenager who loved new wave bands like Blondie and the Ramones and rambling around the big city with his friends,
     Mayer was not the most focused student. But he was smart, ambitious, and knew from the first that he wanted to study medicine.
     The frosty winters were one reason he chose to go to college at Cornell University in frozen Ithaca, New York. Another reason
     is that he didn’t get into his first choice, Yale, or his second choice, Columbia. 10
    He did manage to get into Columbia for medical school and by his senior year was thinking about ways to make his mark. Internal
     medicine was fine, Mayer told me, “But I thought it might be too vanilla. Part of me wanted to do neurosurgery, but I knew
     in my heart that I would only be average at best with my hands. There are so many great doctors here. I figured if I did neurosurgery,
     I would never end up at Columbia—I’d be at some small hospital in the middle of nowhere. But in neurocritical care, I saw
     an opportunity. No one was doing it; it was so unexplored. And I got into this field when it was really just being invented.”
    Mayer got his appointment in the neurology department at Columbia but found he hated it. He felt it was too cerebral; most
     of the patients were comatose and the treating doctors spent most of their time in academic discussions. Mayer yearned for
     more action. He wanted to go back to internal medicine. By 1993, however, he discovered a project that would hold his interest.
     He designed a pilot study testing the safety of hypothermia for patients who had suffered middle cerebral artery infarctions
     or strokes.
    When there is a blockage in the middle cerebral artery, the middle of three major blood vessels bringing blood to the brain,
     it causes catastrophic brain damage. Here’s the problem: as the brain cells, or neurons, start to die from lack of blood flow,
     the brain starts to swell in response. Swelling in the abdomen and other parts of the body can be serious, but when it pushes
     the brain against the hard casing of the skull, it’s deadly. In any brain injury, swelling and pressure is the biggest threat.
     Many people got a glimpse of this threat when the actress Natasha Richardson died after falling on a ski slope near Montreal.
     While the accident seemed minor at first, bleeding inside her head ratcheted up the pressure on Richardson’s brain so quickly
     that within hours of her fall the case was deemed hopeless. 11
    As Mayer embarked on his very first hypothermia study, he wanted to see if therapeutic cooling might reduce the swelling from
     brain injury, reduce the damage, or both. “Decades ago, the only use of hypothermia was in selected, super-high-risk brain
     and heart