Don’t Do the Apnea Test

The doctors do an Apnea test to confirm brain death. The apnea test is not done to benefit your loved one.

It is done to confirm brain death.

An Apnea test is done to see if the patient without the help of a ventilator can breath or gasp or have abdominal movements as the carbon dioxide builds up in the body.

If there is any respiratory efforts by the patient as carbon dioxide builds up, the person is negative for brain death. The symbol for partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the arterial blood is PC02.

If you don’t breathe or gasp or have abdominal movements you are declared “brain dead.”

Apnea Test is NOT the gold standard

We were told the Apnea test, was the ‘gold standard‘ for determining “brain death.” The only thing we understood from that statement was that the test would show if Jamie could expel the carbon dioxide (CO2) that would build up in his body by gasping for air.

We had no clue the test was not being done to help Jamie.

The best way to understand this is to imagine holding your breath under water. After a few minutes you can not hold your breath anymore, and you will gasp for air. That is what is occurring in the Apnea test. The carbon dioxide is building up in your body.

Dr. Paul Byrne on the Apnea test, “carbon dioxide normally remains below 45 in us and when a patient is on a ventilator, the goal is to keep the carbon dioxide below 45. When doing an apnea test (the test for sleep apnea is not an apnea test), the respiration supporting ventilator is taken from the patient causing the carbon dioxide to increase to at least 60, and sometimes higher. When the carbon dioxide goes to these levels, swelling in the brain occurs or gets worse if it is already present. This is tantamount to suffocation.”

Vanderbilt started Jamie’s Apnea test at >64 and finished it at >115.

I’ll leave you to determine what occurred.

Dr. Cicero Coimbra, is head of the Neurology and Neurosurgery Department at the Federal University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

He also has denounced the Apnea test as a diagnostic tool.

The test, he said, which cuts off oxygen to the brain, will bring about severe, irreversible brain damage in patients who, with proper care, would otherwise have had a good chance of survival.

“Diagnostic protocols for brain death actually induce death in patients who could recover to normal life by receiving timely and scientifically based therapies,” he wrote.

Dr. Coimbra also has stated, in his research paper Apnea Test A Bedside Lethal ‘Disaster in the Operating Room, “while most physician advocates may publicly comment on “the possibility of damage by the apneic insult to transplantable organs,” they are unwilling to publish information on “the ethical implications of worsening the clinical and neurological conditions of the potential donor or even causing his (or her) death.”

He argued: A large number of brain-injured patients, even in deep coma, can recover to lead a normal daily life; their nervous tissue may be only silent, not irreversibly damaged, as a consequence of a partial reduction of the blood supply to the brain. (This phenomenon, called “ischemic penumbra,” was not known when the first neurological criteria for brain death were established 37 years ago.)

However, the apnea test (considered the most important step for the diagnosis of “brain death” or brain-stem death) may induce irreversible intra-cranial circulatory collapse or even cardiac arrest, thereby preventing neurological recovery. Dr. Cicero Galli Coimbra, “The Apnea Test — A Bedside Lethal ‘Disaster’ to Avoid a Legal ‘Disaster’ in the Operating Room,” Finis Vitae, pages. 135,335,313-319 and 355.

In plain, simple, language Dr. Coimbra used this word picture.

If you show up in the emergency room with a possible heart attack, the doctors don’t subject you to a stress test. You are cared for in every way to prevent any further stress to your heart.

When your brain is injured and you agree or are subjected to an Apnea test you are putting further stress on a severely injured organ…your brain.

Dr. Yoshio Watanabe,a cardiologist from Nagoya, Japan concurred saying “that if patients were not subjected to the Apnea test, they could have a 60% chance of recovery to a normal life if treated by hypothermia. (deliberately induced cooling)

 Just say NO to the Apnea Test

• The Apnea Test is not for the patients benefit. 
• Don’t let the doctors tell you it needs to done, if you want to give your loved one a fighting chance. 
• It cuts off oxygen to the brain, at a time when the brain needs it most. 
• The swelling in the brain gets worse.
• The only purpose for the Apnea test is to call “brain death” and harvest your organs.

***I’ll post more later on the protocols established for doing the Apnea test but for now you just need to say no if you have a loved one in a coma.***