Hypothermia

In 1999 Anna Bågenholm was out skiiing with friends outside the town of Narvik in Norway, when she fell headfirst into a frozen-over stream running down the mountain. Thick ice covered the water, and Bågenholm fell through a hole in it. She ended up with most of her body, except for her feet and skis, trapped in the freezing water under the ice.

Her friends tried to get her free but couldn't. Luckily, she managed to find an air pocket under the ice and stayed conscious for 40 minutes before becoming still.

By the time emergency services retrieved her, 80 minutes after the accident, her body temperature had dropped to 13.7°C – lower than any body temperature someone had survived before in medical history – and she had no pulse.

She was taken by helicopter to Tromso University Hospital. Doctors attached her to a heart-lung bypass machine, taking the cold blood out of her body, heating it up, and putting it back in, to bring her body temperature back up to normal. Eventually, three hours after it had stopped, her heart began beating again.

It was 12 days until she regained consciousness, and four months in rehabilitation before she was able to leave hospital. Six years after her accident, she was well enough to ski again.

A paper in medical journal The Lancet details Bågenholm's rescue and recovery, saying "this potential outcome should be borne in mind for all such victims". A paper in the journal Resuscitation says that, since 1999, nine out of 24 patients who also suffered hypothermic cardiac arrest have survived, and concluded that "nobody is dead until they're warm and dead."

 

 

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