'Miracle' man back from death
Tuesday December 13 2005
Edel Kennedy
HUBERT Maciak has become known as the "miracle man" after being clinically dead for almost three hours before Irish doctors dramatically brought him back to life.
His body temperature dropped to 22 degrees - almost 15 degrees below normal - and he had no pulse or heartbeat after his canoe capsized at sea.
But the medical staff at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda fought to save the Polish-born youth and he has now made a full recovery.
Dr Vinod Chinnappa, a registrar at the hospital, said Hubert was "technically absolutely dead" and staff at the hospital have nicknamed him their "miracle man".
It is believed Hubert had the lowest body temperature ever recorded in this country for a patient who went on to make a full recovery.
The agricultural student was on a three-month work placement at the farm of Andrew and Leonie Workman in Togher, Co Louth, when he went canoeing.
"We got up one Sunday morning in September and he had left a note to say he'd gone out canoeing," said Leonie.
"We thought we should go and check up on him because we didn't know whether he could swim or not."
Alarm raised
Andrew rushed down to the seashore with his binoculars but it was only after climbing to higher ground that he spotted the upturned canoe more than a mile from the beach. About 100m from it was Hubert, afloat thanks to his lifejacket.
A helicopter rushed to the scene from Dublin and rescued him.
Andrew remained on the shore and kept his binoculars trained on Hubert's lifeless body, and his directions helped the rescue team locate his body quicker than normal.
"I rang to see how he was doing and they told me it wasn't good," recalled Leoni. "They told me that he had been face down in the water and had gone into cardiac arrest."
The helicopter rushed the 20-year-old to the hospital in Drogheda, giving him CPR en route.
Once in the hospital, the medical staff continued to perform CPR and his body temperature began to rise from a low of 22.4 degrees to finally reach the normal temperature of 36.8 degrees. Led by Dr Chinnappa, they carried out CPR for just over 2½ hours.
"He had gone into cardiac arrest and he had deep hypothermia," Dr Chinnappa said.
"He seemed to be clinically dead, his pupils were blown and dilated and he was very, very cold. After 1½ hours there was still no response.
"Technically he was absolutely dead. As for complications, he had them all and we were worried that if he was resuscitated, he would be brain-dead."
Organs shut down
His heart, lungs, kidneys and other major organs had all shut down because of the cold he had endured.
Dr Chinnappa said some of the medical team thought they should stop trying to revive him, but a decision was taken to continue.
Almost five hours after he first fell into the water, they finally got a faint pulse.
"He was intact and had no neurological problems - that was the big thing. Forty-eight hours later he was able to talk to us and tell us what happened."
The only serious complication as a result of his ordeal was renal failure, and he underwent dialysis in the Mater Hospital for three weeks before being discharged.
Dr Chinnappa has since written a number of papers on the miracle patient and said this case showed that doctors should not give up on patients, even when it seems like all hope is lost. "The guidelines for anything like this is to increase the body temperature and you're not supposed to declare them dead until they are warm.
"The moral of the story is he might have gone into cardiac arrest but you must go on for two, three or four hours to try and get a pulse," he added. Dr Chinnappa donated the money he won for a paper on the subject to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which is using it as part of its funds to buy a dialysis machine. Hubert is now back in college in Poland.
