An idea about the signs of asphyxia

[Errata]

Errata.
Bearing in mind the effects we have been talking about, do you have any opinion on some of the comments made by Dr Phillips, on Strides heart.

"There was no fluid in the pericardium,......the left ventricle firmly contracted, and the right slightly so. There was no clot in the pulmonary artery, but the right ventricle was full of dark clot".

Anything here out of the ordinary, if so, do you have any opinions?

Regards, Jon S.

Well the heart is not my strong suit (not having a disease of the heart) but there are two things that strike me as odd about that. And there may be completely reasonable explanations for both. The lack of fluid in the pericardium seems strange, but for all I know that naturally happens when a person dies. I know it does naturally drain and is replaced, so it may have just drained out. I just hadn't run across that before. The second is that there was nothing in the left ventricle, when I'm pretty sure that she was found on her left side. But I could be wrong about that, and also there simply may not have been time for the contents of the right ventricle to leak into the left before she was found and rolled on her back, when the right would not bleed into the left.

The black clot in the right ventricle is actually normal in a dead person, especially if the autopsy doesn't happen within a couple of hours. The right ventricle is the deoxygenated blood that is supposed to get pumped into the lungs. When the heart stops, there is still blood in it. The left ventricle was completely contracted, so nothing would be over there, but the right didn't fully contract, so the non oxygenated blood pooled there. Time passes, the blood thickens. So that's normal. And I think the only reason he mentions that there was no clot in the pulmonary artery was to rule out pulmonary embolism as a cause of death.

I don't think that the black clot in the heart is a sign of ischemia. I think that's just part of the death process. If clots had been thrown out by the heart, I might see it differently, but that didn't happen.