Read our strategy. See the latest vacancies. Search vacancies near you. Get in touch with any enquiries. Contact us. You will be closely monitored in the first few days after your heart attack. Depending on the severity of your heart attack, the treatment you have received and your home situation, you will usually be in hospital for 3 to 5 days. For most people, after a couple of days, your heart will settle down, the risk of another heart attack lessens and intensive monitoring can be stopped.
From the CCU you will be transferred to a ward. Here you will gradually increase what you do for yourself and have any other tests the doctors might feel necessary. If you can, try to have someone with you at home for the first few days or weeks, depending on how you feel. Or, arrange to stay with friends or family for a few days.
Before you leave the hospital, you should receive information about cardiac rehabilitation rehab , and an idea of when you should expect to be contacted by your cardiac rehab team. You will also receive a supply of medicines.
He was heavily sedated, had a breathing tube and was on a ventilator. He soon began to show signs of delirium , a state of serious confusion and reduced awareness that can be brought on by illness. Although Chris was sedated, he began trying to climb out of bed, and kicking when hospital staff held him back. He began having terrifying hallucinations, and even tried to pull his breathing tube out. He had to be restrained for his own safety.
This continued throughout the next week. Staff covered his bed needed to be covered in foam padding to stop him from bruising himself. He needed full time supervision even while restrained.
Even with this new technique, however, cardiac-arrest patients usually are not expected to recover if they have been comatose for longer than a week. Only in rare cases have doctors kept such patients on life support for more than two weeks. The earliest of the three cases described in the paper was that of a year old man who was unresponsive after a heart attack. His heart was restarted by paramedics, and a CT scan at the hospital showed no sign of major structural damage to the brain.
But he lacked normal brainstem reflexes such as a blink reflex, and his EEGs showed an epilepsy-like pattern that later became a pattern called burst-suppression in which relatively long periods of brain electrical inactivity are punctuated by brief bursts of activity.
A persistent burst-suppression EEG pattern traditionally has been considered a sign of general and likely irreversible brain damage when it continues after sedation is removed in cardiac-arrest coma patients. That and the lack of brainstem reflexes and other signs led the attending neurologists, in accordance with standard guidelines, to recommend the withdrawal of life support. Schiff consulted on the case.
Peter Forgacs , now a clinical assistant professor of neurology courtesy , observed a similar case in which a patient in a coma following cardiac arrest did not have care withdrawn as counseled, in part because his family lived in a foreign country—yet this patient also emerged from coma at 30 days and later made a significant recovery.
The patient had had an EEG burst-suppression pattern like that of the earlier recovered patient, and when Dr. Schiff learned of a third post-cardiac-arrest coma patient with a similar EEG pattern, he counseled that life support should be maintained.
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