Dead woman comes to life after 3 hrs

Doctors who worked to revive Dr Bagenholm said that the message this gave to doctors was “don’t give up”. ProfMads Gilbert, of the University and Regional Hospital of Tromso, who led the team that saved her life and wrote to the medial journal Lancet about it, said: “Her low temperature is a record. We have broken through a barrier, we have searched the records and we can find no one who has survived such extreme accidental hypothermia.”

Dr Gilbert said that it is likely that Anna Bagenholm was taking in 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 cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Once in hospital, Dr Bagenholm was ventilated and put on a heart bypass machine.

This allows the blood to be circulated and re-warmed outside the body by a machine that mimics the action of the heart and lungs.

It was only an hour after reaching hospital that Dr Bagenholm’s heart started beating again. Her resuscitation took a total of nine hours and she wasin intensive care for 35 days and many months of rehabilitation. Some 100 specialists and nurses were involved in caring for her round-the-clock.

Prof Gilbert said: “But we had lots of very narrow escapes with her: her lungs failed, her kidneys failed, her intestines failed. We just did not give up.”

He said that a key factor in Anna Bagenholm’s survival had been the cooling of her brain as she lay submerged in the freezing water. He said that the main danger after resuscitation is that the brain can swell, leading to death. He said that this is less likely if the brain is cooled when the accident happens. He said: “If you have a warm brain when you die, you get brain oedema after resuscitation. If you have a cold brain, you don’t.”

With the macabre humour of the medical profession, he added: “The message is that if you fall into water, before you drown get the cap off your head.”When she first came out of sedation, Anna Bagenholm was paralysed. She said: “When I woke up, I could only move myhead. All I thought was I would spend the rest of my life on my back. I was very angry with my colleagues who had saved me. But I have apologised to them now.” Prof Gilbert said that the team that had worked to revive her also had momentary doubts. He said: “We wondered what we had done. This young doctor was unable to move.” Eight months later, Dr Bagenholm does not have normal use of her hands and cannot as yet resume her training as a surgeon. But this has not stopped her from taking a two-week skiing holiday in Canada.

She said: “We really do not know why the motor nerves (which control movement) have been affected. Everyone has a different explanation. My hands tingle all the time, my fingers do not have proper feeling. So for now, I cannot examine patients. But I am happy that they saved me.”

She added: “If I cannot be a surgeon, there are other things I can do as a doctor. But now, I am going skiing.”