CNN's Sanjay Gupta explores the practice of saving lives

LOS ANGELES — Surgeons crowded around the 23-year-old driver who had been rushed into the University of Michigan hospital with head and chest injuries from a vicious automobile accident.

They scrambled to stop the bleeding. They tried to relieve pressure in the young man's brain. There was a flurry of movement, until his heart stopped.

And then it was over.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN, recalls the incident in his new book, "Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles That Are Saving Lives Against All Odds" (Wellness Central).

Gupta was a third-year medical student at the hospital when the victim was brought in, treated and then suddenly pronounced dead.

"It was a little bit unsettling, a reminder of my own mortality," said Gupta, now a practicing neurosurgeon, of the death he witnessed at the University of Michigan. "It was that sort of arbitrary nature — everybody was trying to save this kid, then at some point they decide he's dead. I thought, 'Hey, what happened? That was it?'"

Since then, he's been fascinated with the thin line that separates life and death — the central topic of his book, which arrived in stores this week. A companion documentary will premiere Saturday. Oct. 19, on CNN.

In the book and film, Gupta shares dramatic, improbable stories of survival and the cutting-edge, sometimes controversial, medical practices that proved lifesaving.

There's the 29-year-old Norwegian skier who crashed and landed headfirst into a frozen stream. Stuck for more than 40 minutes, her temperature down to 56 degrees, she was clinically dead — until she was revived.

And there's the Glendale, Ariz., schoolbus driver who went into cardiac arrest and ran his car into a palm tree. It took the actions of paramedics trained in a rarely used variation of CPR to save his life.

As he began writing the book, Gupta said, he struggled with the definition of death.

Was it when the heart stopped beating? When the brain stopped functioning?

So he questioned fellow doctors.

"I started getting different answers," he said last week via cell phone, while driving along Sunset Boulevard near CNN's Los Angeles office. "So, understandably there's confusion. Everything we do in medicine is predicated on this."

"Cheating Death" explores medical practices that have kept people alive beyond the point where they would have been pronounced dead not that long ago.