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CNN Live Sunday

Three Rescued Remain Hospitalized

Aired July 28, 2002 - 18:13   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: Six of the nine rescued miners have been released from Somerset Hospital. They are recovering at home with their families tonight. Three others, though, remain hospitalized.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. RUSSELL DUMIRE, CONEMAUGH MEM. MEDICAL CENTER: Three of our patients have been discharged and are in the process of leaving the hospital with their families at this point. Three other patients are in good condition, but they've developed a couple of problems, which need further evaluation. One of which is in the decompression chamber right now for a possible type I decompression sickness, or early bends, as you might put it. Mildest form at best.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LIN: CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins us to talk about the miners' health and the situation with the bends. I never knew you could get the bends on dry land.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: People talk about that with scuba diving, typically, but certainly when you go into these mines, specifically what they do is they compress the mines with quite a bit of air. That actually facilitates actually extracting the coal, or extracting the water from the coal. And because of that, these miners are under quite a bit of pressure for some time. No one expected 77 hours, no doubt. And because of that, when they're actually brought from 240 feet down, as was the case here, back up to surface level, sometimes you can get bends.

What happens, Carol, is that actually the nitrogen builds up in your body, and those little bubbles are pretty small when you're under a lot of pressure, but as you come back up to the surface, those bubbles get larger and larger. They can actually push on your spinal cord. They can push on certain organs in the body. They can get in the joints, sometimes causing joint pain, like a shoulder pain or a knee pain or something like that.

The treatment, really, is to put someone back into a compression chamber. They call it a decompression chamber. Actually, recompress them and decompress the nitrogen a little bit more slowly so as to allow those bubbles to extract themselves normally, and that gets sort of the symptoms typically. This particular gentleman was in a decompression chamber for about four and a half, five hours, this sort of complicated (UNINTELLIGIBLE) was to figure out how long you need to be in the decompression chamber, but whatever it was, it worked in his case. Looks like the symptoms are all gone.

LIN: Why is it only one of the miners suffered decompression illness, then?

GUPTA: You'd probably be a little surprised that there weren't more. You'd think that a few of the miners would have had some decompression problems. It really depends -- everyone's physiology in their bodies is a little bit different. How much nitrogen they actually had in their body at the time, how much they were excreting through their skin. You don't excrete nitrogen through breathing; you excrete it off your skin. So everyone is a little bit different. The others may have had minor symptoms, not requiring decompression, but I guess in this case, just the one.

LIN: Any long-term problems as a result?

GUPTA: Once you get them compressed and decompressed again slowly, they usually are going to be just fine. That's a gold standard treatment that's worked for years, decades, really, with scuba drivers. Miners have been doing it for a long time as well. I just figured this out as well, talking to some people from the mining industry, that you actually have to sometimes decompress. It's not an uncommon problem. Certainly, there was a lot of unusual variables here -- 77 hours underneath there. They actually had to put in pressurized air, heated air that may have added to the pressure problems as well down below, certainly coming up at a pretty quick rate. They wanted to get those guys out of there as quickly as possible.

LIN: Yeah, but that hot air kept them alive. I think heated to about 100 degrees. The water was about 50 degrees, because the big fear was that these guys might die from hypothermia.

GUPTA: A real concern. Hypothermia can be a real problem. You just lower your body temperature from 98.6 to 95; doesn't take a lot. And when you get your body temperature that cold, first you start to have problems just with your judgment. You don't really know what the best thing to do is to keep yourself warm.

After that, you might start to have problems with your heart rate, with your body functions overall. Eventually, people lapse into unconsciousness. Some people can certainly die from hypothermia. It's difficult to say how long it takes and how much heat was actually down there because they were snuggling together quite literally to try to keep warm. But whatever it was, a couple of the guys did have hypothermia, but not enough to be dangerously low.

LIN: Can you really generate that much heat by, you know, snuggling up together?

GUPTA: Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the best thing to do, really. You generate a lot of each other's body heat because you're constantly giving off body heat, especially under conditions of great stress, like these gentlemen no doubt were. And you can absorb that heat, make it most efficient and get each other's body heat.

LIN: All right. Aside from a strictly clinical, medical standpoint, what did you think when you heard that these guys were coming up after being there since 9:00 Wednesday night, and they were in pretty good shape?

GUPTA: I'll tell you, I was concerned like you. I know you were here all night reporting on this. And I was concerned that there was going to be a problem with one of these guys having significant hypothermia, significant dehydration or significant problems with the heart. You know, just not having enough fluids for that long can put a lot of strain on the heart. Heartbeats go up. And certainly one of the guys did have a little trouble with the heart coming up.

But it looks like it all has resolved well. But you know, 77 hours without any supplies, from what I understand, and no water, which is a big concern. Three days can be a real problem. So I guess it's just one of those things. Thankfully, it all worked out well, but I think most people were sort of holding their breath; I certainly was as those miners were coming up.

LIN: Yeah. One of the miners has already talked about the emotional fallout that he might experience later. I think the doctors must have talked to him about it at the hospital. I don't expect these big tough miners to be talking about, you know, how I am going to deal with my emotions down the road, but they seemed to be warned.

GUPTA: And it is a concern. No doubt everyone is focused rightfully so on the success of things right now. Certainly everyone is alive and appears to be doing well, but post-traumatic stress is a big concern. There were 60 million gallons of water coming at these men. They're gasping for air. That has to have a psychological impact on these things.

It sounds like they're already starting to address that. It will be important for them to address it. There will be reminders of that sort of event that they will have to think about in the future, and if they are reminded of that, that might bring back some post-traumatic stress-like symptoms. But with all the support they're getting, the 200 people that slaved away for hours trying to get them out of there and the family, it sounds like they have got good support systems in place.

LIN: You bet. All right, thank you so much, Sanjay, good to see you.

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