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The resulting sensation of breathlessness or air hunger, Liberles said, can be distressing, yet little is known about how it arises.

Results of more than 200 autopsies of prisoners put to death by lethal injection showed “an extremely high probability that a person killed by this method will experience pulmonary edema - fluid in the lungs - and air hunger, while feeling an excruciating chemical burn from the potassium,” he said.

“There’s a physiological response called air hunger,” Hiserodt told me.

Air hunger can feel like suffocation.

She’s holding two syringes: one in her right hand, to sedate; one in her left, for air hunger.