Almost 14 months after a man in his 80s was frozen, a woman from near Melbourne has now been frozen and stored in Australia’s only cryonics facility.
She died last Friday afternoon (July 4), and the team from ‘Southern Cryonics’ at Holbrook in NSW was ready and waiting.
The woman was packed in water/slushie ice and transported to a local funeral home, where the cryonics team followed a very specific protocol. It would have been wild for those funeral peeps to witness the woman’s preparation!
Lots of attention is placed on the controlled cooling of the head to minimise ischaemic damage to the brain, that is, insufficient blood flow to the brain.
According to a statement by Southern Cryonics, “At the funeral home, the team from Australian Blood Management – comprising a doctor and two clinical perfusionists – commenced the perfusion (making sure the blood keeps flowing to the organs) and further cooling process. This three-member team had flown in from Sydney earlier that Friday afternoon and worked on the patient for approximately six hours”.
Then at 9 pm, the patient was transferred up the Hume Highway to the Holbrook facility in a hearse. (Usually, interstate body transfers are done in a van, so I find the use of a hearse interesting.)
Seven hours later, the woman arrived at the Holbrook facility, where the “controlled cooldown process” continued all day. At 9 pm, she was placed in an insulated container called a Dewar. Think of it as a tall stainless-steel vat containing liquid nitrogen.
The statement made sure to give the people involved a pat on the back for working through the night, labelling their “dedicated” efforts as “nothing short of heroic”.
It took five days for last year’s ‘patient’ to be suspended. This time around, it took less than 1 ½ days.
The plan is to thaw them out when the technology to revive and restore them in good health is developed. But what if science doesn’t advance enough to ever permit their reanimation? (At this point, there is no evidence that reanimation will be possible. Nil.)
There’s more about the process, the cost, the ‘science’, and the huge ethical concerns involved in this blog that I wrote when the first man was suspended last year.
And while we ponder this dead woman’s future, amid the hype, a family has lost a loved one. I hope the people who love and miss her find solace in the fact that she was prepared in death and made her wishes well known. That’s why I wrote The Bottom Drawer Book: the after death action plan. It’s a funeral planning guide and workbook that allows you to write your plans, wishes, and life’s reflections so that, at a time of confusion and grief, your family will have one less thing to worry about. They’ll be able to farewell you just how you wanted to be farewelled.
Oh, and in another new development at ‘Southern Cryonics’, you can now cryonically suspend your pet. I won’t be signing Wally up anytime soon.
