The Story about Kim Suozzi
Today I want to get into a little bit controversial theme. Cryopreservation.
At first, you should go over to Wait but Why?, they have a pretty good article about the theme. After you have read it, come back and listen to the story about Kim Suozzi.
I published this article a while back on my medium, but this is a recreated and altered version of it.
“The way I see it, it’s better bet than decomposing or getting cremated.” - Kim Suozzi on her Blog on the 16th August 2012.
Who was/is Kim Suozzi?
Currently, from a legal perspective, and only from my understanding of the laws (I have said before, I am not a lawyer), Kim was just an average girl, living her life along with many others. But something happened in her twenties.
She got brain cancer at the age of 21. I probably don’t need to lay out that she passed away later.
After her diagnosis, she pretty much resigned with it and agreed with herself on the fact that she would die young. If I remember correctly she was symptom-free for a bunch of months, but a scan showed more and more tumour cells in her brain.
Since they were centred midbrain and on the brainstem a surgical removal wasn’t possible and clinical trials were also limited.
A lot of people will tell me not to lose hope, but I think it’s now time for me to truly accept that it’s just about the end for me. […] This is not to say that I’m going to stop pushing for the best treatment for my disease, but I need to set my expectations much lower. Kim Suozzi
She was pretty much at a dead end. Only a few options were left:
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best-case a clinical trial that gives her more time
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a standard drug “Avastin” (according to her limits the blood vessel growth in the tumour), but the results vary from 2 months more to live, to no months more
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worst-case neither one of the above works, and she doesn’t have more than a few months.
Remember, a girl in her twenties on a dead end. At that time she started thinking about cryonics. In one of the last Articles on her blog, she lines that out.
Her time was running out and she was thinking about an opportunity to live. Not today, not tomorrow, but maybe later.
She was cryopreserved at Alcor on January the 17th 2013.
I am not deadly ill or something other right now, at least as far as I know. But I’d like to bring cryonics up as a theme. Don’t worry, not every following post will be about that. Maybe just one or two from time to time, to bring up ideas and thoughts about the length of human life and how quickly it can end.
I’m a paramedic, I’m regularly dealing with death.
Here are some links, I used to research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdTdWs4NleA
https://suozlogs.wordpress.com/
https://alcor.org/Library/html/casesummary2643.html
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryonik#Umsetzung
I know the last one is in German, but interestingly only the German Wikipedia lists the Story of Kim.