South Africa, Carltonville: A South African woman was found alive inside a mortuary fridge after she had been pronounced dead, ABC 7 reported. The unnamed woman had been involved in a car accident near the city of Johannesburg on June 24, Emergency Services said. CBS News reported that "Ambulance service Distress Alert confirmed that the unnamed woman had been certified dead by paramedics at the scene."
The 'dead' woman was taken to the morgue along with other deceased passengers from the car accident and was placed inside a fridge. But later, when attendants went to the fridge, they found she was actually alive and breathing.
Morgue technicians discovered the 'dead' woman was alive
It was a shock for the morgue technicians to discover that she was not dead a few hours later. The Sowetan Newspaper, a large and popular local news outlet quoted a spokesperson at the mortuary as saying, "You never expect to open a fridge and find someone in there alive. Can you imagine if we had begun the autopsy and killed her?"
The incident was very disturbing and the Health Department is conducting an investigation into the whole affair. The family of the woman had to be notified about her changed circumstances. Usually, the South African emergency services are thorough when they perform checks for signs of life.
Ambulance attendants were convinced the accident victim was dead
Gerrit Bradnick is the operations director of Distress Alert and AFP reported that they are perplexed and simply don't understand "how it happened." He noted that the ambulance crew who attended the scene are very stressed and worried about the incident, as they had followed procedures and there were no signs of life.
"We're not in the business of declaring living people dead, we're in the business of keeping people alive," he emphasized. Nevertheless, the incident will have to be fully checked out. It is not clear at this time, whether there was a certified medical doctor in the ambulance.
It's not uncommon to end up at the wrong end of the hospital chain in South Africa
Times Live cited CapeTalk radio, a local news outlet, as speaking to Dr. Charl van Loggerenberg. He said that it is not unheard of for a dead person to be "revived" in the mortuary. "We have moved patients from the 'wrong end' of the hospital to the 'right end' of the hospital."
He noted that while it's not something that happens every day, most medical rescue workers will experience one or two of these types of incidents in their career.
eNCA News announced the that the woman found alive in the mortuary has been moved to a Krugersdorp hospital. She is, however, still in a "critical condition."
