X-Message-Number: 631
Date: 03 Feb 92 18:41:49 EST
From: "Steven B. Harris" <>
Subject: Swank Treatment From ACS

   I swore I'd stay out of this, but it's no use.  <sigh>   The
problem with the account of the last ACS suspension was not the
"warts" which were left in, but the fact that not enough detail
was including to conclude whether there were any warts at all. 
There is, for instance, no shame in letting a member be ischemic
for an hour if there was no warning beforehand, it is a hospital
death, and the armed minions of the state are preventing any
faster access.  There *IS* a problem, however, if the death
occurred in such a place that all this could have been avoided by
prior preparation.  Which have we in the last ACS suspension?? 
Ed Swank writes:

   >>After reading your statement, Mr.  Whitaker, I did ask Jim
Yount and Art Quaife about our emergency response capability.  We
do have one and we always have.  I wear a Medic-Alert bracelet
just like you do. Our emergency response capabilites are na-
turally better in the Bay Area then elsewhere.<<

   My natural comment is: why then did we not see it used?  
There are just too many possibilities left open.  WHY *exactly*
did this ACS member in a nursing home lie there clinically dead
for an hour before anyone got to her?   By way of comparison,
Alcor's last two suspensions in the Bay Area (not exactly our own
back yard, as it is for ACS), BOTH had ischemic times (arrest to
beginning of CPR) of 2 minutes.  Alcor has not had significantly
longer times than this for years, except when directly prevented
from acting by officers of the law, and all of these latter
situations occurred in hospitals with "not previously known to be
terminal" patients, certainly NOT in U.S. nursing homes where
there is (as a rule) plenty of opportunity beforehand to make
hospice preparations to avoid such confrontation with the
government.

   So I have to ask:  what does Dr. Swank *mean* when he talks
about the ACS "emergency response"?  Does ACS have an emergency
response, but regards it as too vulgar to demonstrate?  Does ACS
have an emergency response, but reserves it for important humans? 
Does ACS has an emergency response, and this is it?  (In this
case, perhaps we want to even ask about the "routine" response.-
...)    Does ACS has an emergency response, but only to criti-
cism?

   Or perhaps ACS really was prohibited from doing any better
in this case because of external circumstances.  If so, we'd like
to know.   We'd like to know because cryonics people who show up
an hour after death, like sleepy minimum wage attendants from
some Funeral Home, hurt us all in this endeavour (not least the
poor guy who isn't breathing).  

   So, Ed--- tell us it's all been a mistake, and that ACS
personnel actually kept an all night vigil at the nursing home,
oxygenators and scalpels at the ready, only to be turned away by
armed men when they tried to do CPR!  No?  Promise us at least
then, that whatever happened, things will be better next time,
and that the brain of the *next* ACS patient will shrink under
glycerol perfusion like a live mimosa, as an indication that
somebody did their job and that some organization was on the
ball, in return for all that $.  That's all we at Alcor really
want, you see.  When I see that kind of perfusion reported here
on the Net as regards next ACS suspendee, I'll be the first to
publically applaud.   And in that case, more power to you all. 
I'd a hundred times rather see Alcor in competition with a state
of the art organization; that kind of thing keeps us all on our
toes.

                                Steve Harris

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