 NASAGoddardPhotoandVideo/flickr In May 1999, three junior doctors, Anna Bågenholm, Torvind Næsheim and Marie Falkenberg, were out skiing off-piste in the Kjolen Mountains of Northern Norway, near the town of Narvik. That's because the accident was one that most would find terrifying: While navigating her skis around a waterfall, Bagenholm fell head first into the water and was trapped between ice and rocks. Anna's core temperature was measured at 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit—lower at that point than any surviving patient in recorded medical history. For 40 minutes she struggled, finding an air pocket and somehow remaining conscious. She continued to struggle, freezing, in the Arctic stream. As her companions held on to her skis and called for help on a mobile phone, frigid water doused the young woman. Her brain was so cold when the heart stopped that the brain cells needed very little oxygen, so the brain could survive for quite a prolonged time." Another forty minutes passed before rescuers from the bottom of the mountain arrived, carrying with them a more substantial shovel, with a pointed tip that was finally able to break through the covering of ice. She had been without a pulse for a long time and her core temperature was perhaps more than 20 degrees lower than it should have been. An emergency team started CPR until a helicopter arrived, and Bagenholm began the hour-long flight back to Tromso University Hospital.
– When a skiing accident left her trapped in an icy mountain stream, Anna Bågenholm's core body temperature dropped to an astonishing 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit—and that may just have saved her life. The Atlantic this week printed an excerpt from Kevin Fong's book Extreme Medicine that recounts Bågenholm's incredible 1999 rescue in Norway. By the time a helicopter got Bågenholm to Tromso University Hospital, her heart hadn't beaten in two hours. But the team decided to try to resuscitate her anyway, on the theory that the extreme cold might have preserved her brain. To raise her body the required 42 degrees quickly and safely, doctors extracted her blood with a heart-lung bypass machine and heated it before recirculating it. Miraculously, her heart resumed beating, and 12 days later Bågenholm awoke. At first she was paralyzed, and she cursed doctors for not letting her die. But she'd suffered no spinal damage, only nerve damage, and slowly that recovered. Six years later she was able to ski again, and she's now a doctor at Tromso. "Doctors exploited Anna Bågenholm's profound hypothermia to successfully resuscitate her." Fong concludes. She is "living proof that extremes can cure as well as kill." Bågenholm's case was extensively covered at the time as well; in 2000 she told CBS that "as a medical person, I think it's amazing that I'm alive."