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Psy-Kosh comments on Dying Outside - Less Wrong
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I am indeed signed up, having been an Alcor client for 20 years.
Ironically I chose full-body suspension as opposed to so-called neurosuspension (head only) on the theory that the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system might include information useful for reconstruction and recovery. Now it turns out that half of this data will be largely destroyed by the disease. Makes me wonder if I should convert to neuro.
Indeed even the popular (mis)conception of head-only revival wouldn't be that bad for me, not unlike the state I will have lived in for a while. In fact it would really be better in many ways if I could somehow lose my body once I become paralyzed, since it will be a potential source of pain signals and also a lot of work for caregivers to deal with. But I doubt that the technology is there yet.
Oh, not sure if you heard about this, but apparently there was some Alcor and CI sponsored research and the result was basically that it's a really good idea to make arrangements for, well, if anything happens to you to begin being cooled immediately, and actually even better, to have your blood washed out. India ink and rat ( :( ) experiments suggest that being a warm body for even a couple hours is enough to more or less cause effects like thickening blood and so on to more or less prevent any significant amount of cryoprotectant from actually ending up in the brain. (AFAIK, they're working on updating their suspension protocols based on this info)
An immediate water+ice bath makes a big difference, and immediately washing out the blood makes a HUGE difference.
(At least, such info was presented by the experimenters when I went to the CI general meeting a couple weeks ago. I'm having some trouble finding info this specific research at the moment, though.)
Just figured you probably ought to know this for when you start to be at increased risk, so you may want to look into those experiments and make arrangements with regards to that.
Here's hoping though that this is all academic and that you won't actually need this, as it were.
EDIT: IIRC, it was these two that did that research and presented those results.
Refer to case summary A-2435, a recent patient who was able to become the "most expedient cases expedient cases from bedside to cryopreservation procedures that Alcor has ever experienced" by ensuring she was as geographically close to Alcor as possible when preservation became necessary:
http://www.alcornews.org/weblog/2009/09/case_summary_a2435_member_a243.html
Linkrot marches on; the summary is here and the full case report is here. (The former says that A-2435 is Alcor's 88th patient, the latter the 89th, which is a bit odd.)