What causes you to stop breathing for 20 minutes straight and you have turned all red?

Answer 1

There may be a number of reasons for breathing to stop for 20 minutes. Electric shock would be just one. But anyone who does not breathe for 20 minutes is brain dead, or is just deceased. Oxygen cannot be "stored" in the blood. It is used up out of the circulatory system, and carbon dioxide is deposited on a continuous basis. Gas exchange in cells, that is, O2 in and CO2 out (which is cellular respiration), continues even if breathing stops. The CO2 buildup will drive the "need to breathe" and the body will want to exhale and inhale. The brain uses oxygen at a fairly constant rate, regardless of activity (sleeping or solving differential equations). This makes brain tissue different than, say, skeletal muscle tissue. This muscle tissue can do without oxygen for a while, but it cannot "stop using it" out of the blood as circulation continues. Brain tissues cannot operate long without oxygen. The tissue begins to die in 3 - 5 minutes. A 20 minute lapse in breathing is fatal. There are some instances of "cold water drowning" where a person (particularly a child) has stopped breathing in cold water and is revived several minutes later and suffers no obvious ill affects (no brain tissue death). But lack of oxygen kills people. As for the turning red, if a person was breathing carbon monoxide, which has CO as its chemical formula, that person's blood would become "redder" and this would give the person a "red" appearance. A lack of oxygen because of displacement by the carbon monoxide, or by virtue of the fact that the carbon monoxide "binds" to hemoglobin in blood more strongly than oxygen, and because the CO is "there" already, O2 can't be picked up and transported, would be fatal. Breathing will eventually stop spontaneously and leave a body red for a short while. All this is just some "if's" and "maybe's" according to the question. There is no way to provide a definitive answer because of the number of possibilities. But people don't stop breathing for 20 minutes and survive.