RIP Carrie Fisher aka Princess Leia

***Dangerousdave26*** · December 27th, 2016, 09:46

May the Force be With You

**n4gix** · December 27th, 2016, 10:17

Argh! So many of our generation's bright shining stars are leaving us; 2016 has been a very bad year. Rest in peace dearest Princess Leia!

***Roger*** · December 27th, 2016, 12:58

Only 60! RiP Carrie

***wombat666*** · December 27th, 2016, 19:24

I've often thought that at least one or two (two is better) of the cabin crew should have undergone a proper emergency medical course.
In this case it would appear that early intervention might have kept her stable enough to be revived by the end of the flight.
Ms. Fisher was far too young to lose.

**StormILM** · December 27th, 2016, 20:51

Originally Posted by wombat666

I've often thought that at least one or two (two is better) of the cabin crew should have undergone a proper emergency medical course.
In this case it would appear that early intervention might have kept her stable enough to be revived by the end of the flight.
Ms. Fisher was far too young to lose.

The problem with that is that for one, the distance and time involved with a flight like that in being able to get a person to a medical facility for proper cardiac care or emergency surgery usually puts them outside that "Golden Hour" of assessment/intervention. I had a bad feeling when I heard the news that she wouldn't end up making it due to the damage done due to the time the time elapsed. Also, it would most likely be cost prohibitive (and most likely legal/medical protocol prohibitive due to legal medical authority boundaries even with national/international registries) to train a crew and properly equip the aircraft to act as a full blown air ambulance for a medical emergency that may or may not occur. I have several friends who are flight medics & flight nurses and from my own extensive experience in Fire/EMS, I can speak from experience about training and continuing education requirements which would be a major headache and expense to maintain for cabin crews. In this case, it would have taken nothing short of Paramedic Level intervention with the proper intravenous cardiac drugs and array of supplies which would create a lot of logistical requirements that outside of air ambulance operations or prearranged medical patient transfer flight on a commercial flight, it would be impractical. Even on high end medivac flights, patients are lost all the time even with what amounts to a flying ER on board.

It's a very sad loss.....

**gaucho_59** · December 27th, 2016, 20:57

I am a retired anesthetist with more than 20 years in the US Army... in combat and regular duty
In my experience of a few hundred resuscitations... CPR is unfortunately much over rated...
In my experience, I can only count two cases where CPR was successful after complete cardiac standstill...
and both occurred in the OR... with the patient endotracheally intubated and put on O2 immediately...
one was a full recovery.. the other was brain damaged... In the emergency room... I never saw anyone
recover... they went up to ICU with a heartbeat... but, unfortunately... in vegetative states... Only on
TV shows you see people waking up after external cardiac massage... really...
The cases that are successfully recovered... are mostly misdiagnosed... as actual cardiac arrests...
so training non-professionals in CPR is probably not the answer either... it surely helps to support folks who
are caught in the nick of time... but chances are REALLY slim...
G.

**StormILM** · December 27th, 2016, 23:38

I agree Gaucho_59. I have run on many cardiac arrest and heart attack calls and the doctor who oversaw our EMS operations gave an estimate that resuscitation rates were maybe 7% to 10% (some put the figure higher & lower) and I tend to think that estimate was optimistic at best. In my experience, with cardiac arrests and massive heart attacks both survival and significant long term recovery were rare (our EMS system maintained patient follow up statistics). All of the long term recovery instances we saw were a matter of the patient having some other positive health attributes that helped them survive a cardiac event as well as permanent damage being minimized.