Posted by Hunter [24.8.14.102 - c-24-8-14-102.client.comcast.net] on 29 May 2004 at 01.14.23 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: I think pretty much anyone could call it... posted by Damien on 28 May 2004 at 21.00.57 ZuluTime:

Let me first state that I have not seen the video. I got a little sick of hearing about it before I got the chance.

That said....

The carotid is one of the big 'don't cut that' arteries, right up there with the femoral and the [fuck, what is it?] aorta. That third one's a little hard to just accidentally 'cut', but the other two are pretty easy to get to. If I remember my training right, it takes about five minutes to lose a fatal ammount of blood from the femoral artery. I'm thinking quite a bit less for the aorta, and for the carotid, it apparently depends on the size of the cut -- minutes to actual hours.

Factoring heart rate [probably high; I doubt he was calm, cool, and at resting BPM], and the corresponding blood pressure, there probably would've been a good healthy arterial spurt. There would be in someone at rest, too, and there would [probably] be a noticable 'pulsing' to it, as well, in time with the beating of the heart. That said, there probably isn't enough blood in a single person to make the mental images of 'covered, drenched, soaked, painted in blood' happen. The average person has something like five to six litres of blood. That's about, what, 1.4 gallons, or somewhere around 5 quarts. Six would up that to 1.5 and 6 quarts. And yes, I'm rounding. That sounds like almost enough to paint a person, but not an entire room, or even an entire wall. Especially considering that you're losing not only a hell of a lot of blood, but once you've cut the carotid, you're not getting much [if any?] oxygen to the brain. Things stop working. I'm not sure how much blood you have to lose before the heart fails, but I know that a third of the body's blood-volume is a real concern, and anything beyond that is just bad. So you wouldn't be getting all of the body's blood out, you'd just get what the heart managed to pump out, as far as a good 'spray' goes. And that would weaken pretty quickly.

As for the spine, they could cut between, not through the bones; the spinal column isn't exactly 'fused'. If it were, we wouldn't have anywhere near the range of motion we have. You can probably move your neck in interesting and potentially painful ways and hear the grinding sounds for yourself. And a dedicated person with a decently sharp knife and a little bit of luck or knowhow could fairly easily get a knife in there. You can get needles in between the vertibrae to perform spinal taps.

I don't know about twitching, though. I do know that cutting through the meninges is probably pretty painful. They say that's one of the more painful parts of a spinal tap, and it's definitely what causes the pain in meningitis. The brain itself, and I'd almost have to assume the spinal cord itself probably don't have any nerves *in* them that are of the 'make pain happen' variety. That's a special function, sorta like light-sensing, I think.