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Man chills out, comes back from the dead
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Statistics say John Mazur shouldn’t be alive today.
    On Oct. 14 he collapsed while pumping gas on Altamont Avenue. For minutes he lay there, heart motionless, without an ounce of oxygenated blood pumping into his brain.
    When a gas attendant found him she panicked, calling 911 but not pounding his chest to save his oxygen-starved brain.
    It took paramedics four more minutes to get to him. By then, his brain had been down for 10 to 12 minutes — long enough for irreversible damage to occur.
    But Mazur is perfectly fine.
    He’s planning to celebrate his 50th birthday on Sunday at the Buffalo Bills-Patriots football game, just two months after he was found on the ground without a pulse.
    He’s alive and well today because his heart gave out just after Ellis Hospital finished training for a new technique to save heart attack victims.
    The technique, which Albany Medical Center Hospital began using at the beginning of the year, essentially places victims in a hypothermic coma after they are resuscitated. The cold helps preserve the victim’s brain from being damaged by a series of chemical reactions that occur when blood fl ow is restored.
    Mazur can’t remember any of it — he remembers pumping gas and then waking up at Ellis a week later.
    He was the first at Ellis to benefit from the new technique, which has since saved three other lives. A fifth victim could not be saved, and the sixth is still undergoing treatment.
    Mazur was the ideal candidate — he had been without blood fl ow for a very long time, but his heart began to work after seven shocks with a defibrillator.
    Patients who remain unresponsive but alive are packed on ice for 24 hours to try to save their brains, Dr. Brian McDonald said. It’s not a sure thing. Only 30 percent to 50 percent of the patients will recover enough to live a life similar to what they once had. “Complete recovery is uncommon,” McDonald said.
    And those who waited as long as Mazur did before getting CPR have even less of a chance of waking up without brain damage.
    In fact, Ellis doctors told Mazur’s wife Tatiana that they didn’t expect him to make it through the night. ..............................>>>>........................>>>>.....................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01502&AppName=1