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Sam, the man who ate my steak, has a lot of muscle. The deltoid that my protein is a part of is just one of many muscles in the shoulder and the rest of the body. The proteins that have been here longer than us say that Sam eats a lot of meat. He likes it so much that he eats it in big portions as fast as he can. One of the guys near me said that Sam didn’t even chew the piece of steak he was in; he just swallowed it whole. I told the other guys that it seems kind of dangerous. My mother always told me to chew my food well, so I wouldn’t choke. Unfortunately, Mom’s predictions came true the next day for Sam. He was eating his favorite meal of green eggs and ham when he had to pause from shoveling it in, because no more would go down. He tried to swallow, but a piece of ham was stuck in the back of his throat. It was blocking the air pipe to his lungs. He kept coughing, but it did not work and soon his face started turning blue. The other proteins tell me that as soon as the oxygen could not get to the brain, the cells started to die. Those brain cells sound very sensitive to me. After about six minutes, Sam lost consciousness, and was pronounced dead because his brain cells had died.
Even though he was medically dead, however, some of his cells were still alive. The muscle I was in was even functioning after Sam was dead. It continued to produce lactic acid from the stored energy in glycogen as it did when he was alive. Because no oxygen was coming into the body, the glycogen was depleted and there was a very high level of lactic acid around us. The lactic acid started reacting with some proteins near me named Actin and Myosin and they formed a gel. This gel caused all of Sam’s muscles, including mine, to get very stiff. I heard one of the other proteins call it rigor mortis. Not only was it stiff, but it also became very cold. I guess that was because the brain wasn’t alive to regulate the body’s temperature. We had been sitting for almost two hours in Sam’s stiff, cold body when some blood started to settle around the shoulder near my protein. The blood was so dark from the lack of oxygen that it made everything around us look purple. This change was called livor mortis or hypostasis.
After about three days of sitting in Sam’s body, I noticed that his skin was starting to turn as green as the eggs in his last meal. These annoying bacteria started moving in all around us. They make it smell pretty bad in here. I asked the other guys if they knew what was going on, and they said it was called putrefaction. I sure hope it’s over soon!
When a person eats too quickly, they often do not chew their food adequately. This can result in large pieces of food getting stuck in the pharynx (back of the throat). Because the pharynx has two purposes (carrying food to the digestive tract and air to the respiratory tract), a piece of food lodged in it can block the airway. Any obstruction to the trachea (windpipe) is, of course, life-threatening. Choking is the body’s way of trying to remove a foreign object, such as a piece of steak, from the airway. The universal choking sign is clutching the throat. Rapid first aid is very important in choking cases. Everyone should, therefore, be familiar with the Heimlich Maneuver, a method of dislodging an obstruction from the airway. Not knowing this first aid procedure can be fatal because most adults die within three to seven minutes of being deprived of oxygen.
Death is simply defined as the cessation of all life processes. In a human, however, death is not quite that black and white. There are three types of death: cellular death, necrosis, and somatic death. Cellular death is when individual cells in the body cease to carry out respiration and metabolism. A normal type of cellular death is called necrobiosis, the continual death and replacement of individual cells throughout life. This type of death can be easily observed in the loss of skin cells, hair and fingernails that occurs daily in all people. When a large group of cells (as in a tissue or even an entire organ) dies, this type of death is called necrosis. An example of necrosis is when a person’s kidney ceases to function due to kidney disease. Necrosis affects organ and its function, but does not necessarily cause the death of the whole organism. Somatic death is what most people think of when they think about a dead person. It is defined as the end of all life processes within an organism.
Even with all of these definitions of different types of death, doctors still have trouble diagnosing it in a real human being. The traditional criteria for death are: lack of pulse and heartbeat, absence of breathing, no corneal reflex, and cyanosis. With medical technology capable of keeping man alive longer and under different circumstances, doctors had to establish a new definition of medical death. This definition, from the 1980 Uniform Determination of Death Act, states that a person is considered dead when breathing and the heartbeat irreversibly stop, or when brain function totally and irreversibly stops (brain death). Establishing precise criteria for death is also important because of new advances in organ transplantation techniques since the death of the donor must be established before and organ can be taken. Death does not necessarily occur all at one time. Different cells die at different times. The most sensitive cells in the body, the brain cells, die within three to seven minutes after they are deprived of oxygen. The last cells to die are the bone, hair, and skin cells, which continue to grow for several hours.
Many postmortem changes help doctors establish the medical death of a patient. These irreversible changes include: