14 DAY TRIAL // Voodoo stories are just stories; Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is just for entertainment; but this is a real case. You could imagine the shock lived by the relatives of an 87-year-old man from Chiayi County, Taiwan, when "the deceased" woke up at his own funeral.
The Taiwanese's relatives and friends were in a Buddhist mourning hall, reciting Buddhist prayers for hours over the "dead" body, when the dead started to gasp and then woke up, as the Shanghai Daily reports.
Medical doctors from the hospital where the patient received treatment had told to the family that the man was kept alive only by oxygen hoses, and that he would die as soon as these were removed. The man had spent months bedridden. The family chose to take him out of the hospital so that he could end his life quickly and painlessly at home, according to the local tradition.
They removed the oxygen hoses, dressed him in funeral clothes, and transported him in the mourning hall, and started his funeral service, until he started breathing heavily.
After realizing that he was still alive, the family sent the man - whose name was not made public in order to protect his identity - back to the hospital. The doctors treating him are still stunned by his impressive recovery and are keeping him under medical observation but they can't explain what happened.
Funeral parlor employees said it was a miracle, and that it's great that the "event" didn't provoke subsequent heart attacks in the funeral parlor.
A simpler explanation would be clinical death, occurring when the heart stops beating in a regular rhythm (cardiac arrest). Stopped blood circulation is difficult to reverse and the absence of blood circulation and vital functions has been regarded as the definition of death. Today, the cardiac arrest can be reversed through cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), defibrillation, epinephrine injection, and other treatments.