A young women was brought back to life after being dead for three hours. The 29 year old Swedish doctor and keen skier, Anna Bagenholm was trapped under thick ice and freezing water for an hour and a half before she was rescued. Her body temperature had fallen to 13.7 C. The normal body temperature is 37 C. When she arrived at the hospital she had no heart beat, no blood circulation, she was not breathing and her pupils were unresponsive to light.

Dr. Bagenholm, who was sking with two colleagues from the hospital in Narvik in Norway where they worked, plunged head first into a frozen river while sking. She was wedged between rocks making it impossible for them to pull her out. It was only because of her skis that she did not disappear all together into the water. After struggling to free her for seven minutes, her colleagues called emergency service which took an hour and half to arrive.

Dr. Mads Gilbert, of University of Regional Hospital of Tromso, lead the team that saved her life.
The extreme low temperature suffered by Dr. Bagenholm is a record. No one has yet survived such extreme accidental hypothermia.
It is likely that she was taking oxygen from an air pocket in the river as her body temperature dropped. Her helpless colleagues could see her struggling below the ice for almost 40 minutes before she became still. On the way to the hospital she was given cardiopulnmonary resuscitation. Once in the hospital she was put on heart bypass machine. This allows the blood to be circulated and and re-warmed outside the body by a machine that mimics the actions of heart and lungs.

It was only after an hour after reaching the hospital that her heart started beating again. Her resuscitation took a total of nine hours and she was in intensive care for 35 days and needed many months of rehabilitation. Some 100 specialists and nurses were involved in caring for her round the clock. She had lots of narrow escapes with her kidneys failing, her intestines failing, her lungs failing - but the doctors did not give up.

The key factor in Anna Bagenholm's survival had been the cooling of her brain as she lay submerged in the freezing water. The main danger after the resuscitation is that the brain cells swell up leading to death. This is less likely if the brain get cooled at the time of accident.
When she first came out of sedation she was paralysed. She could only move her head.

Eight months later, Dr. Bagenholm does not have normal use of her hands, cannot as yet resume her training as a surgeon. But this has not stopped her from taking a two week sking holiday in Canada.