Man Lives Without Heartbeat
Nikolai Mikhalnichuk, a resident of
the Russian city of Saratov, is a unique man. He is the only person in Russia,
who lives with a still heart.
The story started several years ago, when Nikolai's relationship with his wife,
Lydia, started worsening. Lydia was coming home late, Nikolai was answering dead
phone calls: he realized that she was having a love affair. One day Lydia said
that she wanted to leave him.
Nikolai was crushed with the news – he had a heart attack at night. He felt
sharp pain in the chest, and it took him great efforts to call an ambulance.
When doctors looked at the cardiogram, they were surprised to see that the
graphic waves on the paper did not look like usual ones – Nikolai's diagram was
much smaller.
When doctors examined Nikolai's heart through blood vessels, they were shocked
to find out that the man's heart was not beating, although the vessels continued
pumping his blood. Nikolai's body was functioning on the base of absolutely
unknown rules.
Numerous additional medical examinations could only prove the previous result:
the man's heart was not beating. When doctors were checking Nikolai out of the
hospital, they told him about the remarkable peculiarity of his cardiovascular
system. At present moment Nikolai visits a local cardio-center once in a month
to have his unique heart examined.
”When doctors told me about my heart, I was shocked. I was afraid to walk and
even to breath. I was panicking all the time: I thought that blood would stop
flowing through my body and I would just die. Then I got used to it. Now I can
even forget about it at times,” Nikolai said.
When Nikolai's ex-wife learnt about what happened, she came to see her
ex-husband at the hospital. “I did not let her come in. It all happened to me
because of her. I don't want to see her,” the man said.
Nikolai met a girl six months after that. “I was afraid to touch her – what if I
died because of that. That was the only idea in my head because I thought that
any emotional stress, positive or negative, would be deadly to me. But then I
just thought that such a life would not be good for me and I decided to live my
life to the utmost, like before.”
Vitali Levitski, a professor of the Institute of Cardiology said that Nikolai
Mikhalnichuk became the third person in the world, who could live with a still
heart. “Two other individuals like Nikolai live in Brazil and Japan. Blood
vessels of the human heart are elastic and strong enough to pump blood. That is
why Nikolai is still living, breathing and moving. His heart is alive; one may
say that it is sleeping. Such a unique incident occurred as a result of his
stress. A strong emotional experience results in a powerful hormone action,
which affects the heart and vessels first and foremost,” the professor said.
The phenomenon of a still heart was discovered for the first time in the 1950s
in Vienna, Austria. Scientists found “sleeping” parts of the heart tissue with
seven members of the experiment to test a new cardiograph model. The seven
patients said that they had had a very strong emotional stress before. However,
those seven individuals had stillness of only certain parts of their hearts.
Nikolai is definitely a unique individual, because his entire heart muscle went
to a standstill. If he did not have extra-strong elastic vessels, he would not
be able to live.
”This man can live a normal life for many years. He is not allowed to do any
extreme sports, but simple physical exercises and moderate sex will be only good
for him,” professor Levitski said.