A 40-year-old man in UP’s Moradabad comes back to life after spending 7 hours in a mortuary freezer. He was reportedly declared dead by the doctors and was kept for over seven hours confusing the medical staffs and filling the hearts of the family members with joy.
Sreekesh Kumar, an electrician with the civic body in Moradabad, had met an accident a speeding motorbike and was taken to the district hospital on Thursday night where doctors on duty declared that he had died. They then rushed him into the freezer in the mortuary before doing the post-mortem the next day.
About seven hours later when a ‘panchnama’, a document signed by family members after identifying the body and agreeing to an autopsy was to be filed by the police, Kumar’s sister-in-law Madhu Bala noticed that he was showing signs of movement.
In a video that has been widely shared on social media, an astounded Madhu Bala is heard exclaiming, “He’s not at all dead, in fact far from it. How did this happen? Look, he wants to say something, he is breathing.”
The people who witnessed the incident were equally confused, while the family members then crowded around the body and ask for doctors and police.
Dr Shiv Singh Moradabad’s chief medical superintendent, said, “The emergency medical officer had seen the patient at around 3am and there was no heartbeat. He told me he had examined the man multiple times. Therefore, he was declared dead. In the morning, a police team and his family found him alive. A probe has been ordered and our priority, at the moment, is to save his life.”
Singh said it was one of those “rarest of rare cases”. Elucidation what may have happened, he said, “Sometimes there are difficulties faced while declaring someone dead. For example, there is ‘suspended animation’ where there is temporary cessation of many vital organs without death. It can lead to extraordinary situations. We can’t call it negligence (on the part of doctors) until we have all the reports in our hand.”
According to reports published in TOI, the patient’s medical condition puzzled the doctors that how this miracle can happen. He said, “As per the guidelines, a body is supposed to be kept in the freezer in order to save it from decaying. The ideal temperature should be below 10 degrees. However, there was an issue of power and the freezer switched on and off. It probably saved the man’s life.”
