Elaf Ernst
Anatomy

Hypoxic Anoxic injury
The brain requires a continuous supply of oxygen and nutrients to function normally. Anoxic brain damage, or cerebral hypoxia, occurs when there is not enough oxygen being constantly supplied to the brain. Hypoxic anoxic injury also known as HAI, happens when oxygen flow is completely stopped, therefore, the brain is disrupted from performing vital biochemical processes. Anoxic brain damage occurs to the outer part the brain called the cerebral hemisphere, then work it’s way inward, killing brain tissue and neurons, causing most people to fall into a deep coma and possibly never recovering.
Oxygen is very important for our bodies to metabolize glucose, giving the body energy. Our brain consumes about a fifth of body’s total oxygen supply (NINDS), so our brain, needs energy to transmit electrochemical impulses between cells, in order to maintain the important ability of neurons to receive and respond quickly to these signals.
Hypoxic anoxic brain injury could be caused by many numbers of diseases and injures for example, the most common disease that cause HAI is called hypoxicischemic, which results from injuries such as cardiac arrest, vascular catastrophe or drug overdose each of these cause the brain to go into coma.
Another factor that cause hypoxic anoxic brain injury is anemic anoxia, which happens when a person does not have enough hemoglobin, an important chemical in the red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body. This usually occurs at very high altitude. Likewise, there are other many diseases that could cause the HAI including lung, heart, circulation including heart attack, severs asthma, pneumonia, and sinus infection. Brain injury could also caused result of smoking or carbon monoxide inhalation, drowning, or poisoning.
The reason why I chose to do a research paper on HAI “brain damage” is because of my husband’s medical condition that he suffered from in 2008. Therefore, I was interested on how it was that amazing he recovered from the edge of death.
My husband, Paul was in the military, was doing advanced army combat training. He went through phases of sickness: First he started having sinus infection during his first phase of exercises: starting with water to land operations where he was sent a mile out into the water with gear and told to make it to the beach.
This simple sinus infection moved down into his lungs and formed into bronchitis and then broke down to methicillin sensitive staph aurous (MSSA) pneumonia. This progressed untreated for the next two weeks except for some over the counter medication, which did not help to fight the advanced stage of infection.
Soon my husband’s body started to get worse because his severe stage of pneumonia and caused his immune system to break down. At that point, his body became susceptible to opportunistic illness such as the flu. Since the immune system was not fighting the new infection it was easy to enter into is blood stream. This is when all chaos unfolded inside his body. (Paul 2008)
The training was coming to an end and it was finally time for him to get some needed rest. However, since his body was trying and failing to fight the infection, he fell asleep and drifted into a coma. After a defilation during his ambulance ride to the hospital he was put on life-support for the next two and a half weeks. After he woke up from the coma, he was conscious yet unable to recognize his surroundings, and unable to remember the past events proceeding to his illness.
No matter the of HAI, the symptoms are similar, anoxia being loss of consciousness or coma, or the person would suffer from stiff neck or have uncontrollable muscle spasms, vomiting, and sleepiness.
Even when a person