Sometimes you just have to keep the party going, and for a Polish man identified only as “Kamil,” he wasn’t going to let a mundane thing like being dead stop him from getting his drink on.

As SPEISA reports, 25-year-old Kamil was partying it up in the town of Kamienna Gora, drinking obscene amounts of vodka, when his drinking apparently caught up to him. Eyewitnesses say he staggered out of the pub and fell to the ground unconscious. A passerby attempted to aid the man, and then an ambulance was called.

Kamil was taken to the hospital, where attempts to revive him failed. He was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest and taken to a morgue, and placed on a tray in a refrigerator, just like any other stiff.

At this point in the story, we’re going to take a break from Kamil’s narrative and talk about alcohol poisoning. According to The Mayo Clinic, alcohol poisoning can induce cardiac arrest, as well as mimic symptoms of cardiac arrest. Those symptoms include irregular (or non-existent) heartbeat, stopping breathing, and a host of other signs that may look like death, to an untrained observer.

“A major cause of alcohol poisoning is binge drinking — a pattern of heavy drinking when a male rapidly consumes five or more alcoholic drinks within two hours, or a female downs at least four drinks within two hours. An alcohol binge can occur over hours or last up to several days. You can consume a fatal dose before you pass out. Even when you’re unconscious or you’ve stopped drinking, alcohol continues to be released from your stomach and intestines into your bloodstream, and the level of alcohol in your body continues to rise.”

However, death from alcohol poisoning, if that’s what it actually was, wasn’t going to stop Kamil’s party.

At the morgue, a security guard heard the sounds that undoubtedly every security guard in every morgue in the world does not want to hear: rattling and other noises coming from inside the morgue. The guard, who asked not to be identified, described what he heard that night.

“I was sure it was a burglary, young people sometimes break into the morgue, but the sounds came from the refrigerators. With shaking hands, I opened one of the doors, and there I found a naked corpse, who asked me for a blanket.”

Kamil wanted to go home, but the security guard wasn’t about to risk his job by letting a “dead” patient walk out of the hospital before being checked out. So doctors examined him, deemed him OK, and sent him on his way.

And if you’re thinking Kamil, following his “death,” would have gone straight home and taken stock of his life choices, you’d be wrong. Instead of going home, we went back to the pub for more drinks.

Kamil is not the first person to have been declared dead only to wake up later and wonder what all the fuss was about.

For example, according to the New York Post, a Russian man, also drunk, was declared dead, then woke up terrified in a refrigerated room surrounded by dead bodies.

As physicians will tell you, the line between life and death can be a thin one indeed. Medicine relies on instruments and observation to determine if someone is dead, and sometimes those instruments and observations can lead you them to declare a person dead even when they are still alive.

[Featured Image by malialeon/Shutterstock]