The case of the man who was wrongly declared dead in the Mater hospital in Dublin earlier this month is rare but not unique, a city undertaker has said.
Yesterday's Irish Timesreported that the Mater was carrying out an investigation into how a man in his 30s, who was declared dead by staff, was subsequently found to be alive when mortuary personnel came to collect his body on Easter Sunday.
Keith Massey, of Rom Massey & Sons Ltd, said his father, Rom, experienced a similar case in the 1960s. When he went to collect the body of a man from a Dublin hospital, he could not find it, he said.
It emerged that when the man was being moved to another hospital for post-mortem, he revived. Death notices had appeared in the newspapers for him, but he went on to live for another 10 years.
Mr Massey said if a person was buried alive, the chances are they would die of asphyxia before they realised what had happened. "Human nature being what it is, it is bound to happen now and again," he said. "Looking at the trade journals, there are occasional reports of people waking up."
He said he heard of a case in Yorkshire in the 1990s when a woman, who suffered from a rare form of epilepsy, ended up in a mortuary on two occasions. The condition resulted in her body appearing to shut down. She went stone cold and had only a very faint pulse, which went undetected.
"She was lucky she wasn't put in a fridge in either of the mortuaries or she would have died of hypothermia," he said.
Undertakers are obliged to carry out a series of basic tests once they receive a body, including putting a hand over the person's mouth to check for breathing, putting a mirror to a person's mouth, searching for a pulse and checking for chest sounds.
"Sometimes we get asked to put a mobile phone in a coffin so that the person can call if they wake up," Mr Massey said. "We recommend embalming. This plasticises the body and once you're embalmed you're gone. To embalm, we cut open an artery - there should be a trickle of blood, but if it pumped out we would stop everything. We embalm in four out of five cases."
He added that the mistake made in the Mater hospital might reflect the amount of pressure doctors are under," he said. "It is not like forgetting to deliver a piano. In this business, one error has a huge impact."
