In 1999, a young medical student named Anna Bågenholm went skiing in Norway when a split-second accident changed everything.
She fell headfirst through a frozen stream and became trapped beneath the ice. For 80 minutes, she was pinned under freezing water, unconscious. Her heart stopped. Her body temperature dropped to 13.7°C (56.7°F), the lowest ever recorded in a human who survived.
By every medical standard, she should have been gone.
But the doctors refused to give up. Following an old Nordic saying, “No one is dead until they are warm and dead”, they connected her to a heart-lung machine and slowly rewarmed her blood.
Hours later, her heart started beating again.
She woke up days later, temporarily paralyzed. After months of rehabilitation, she learned to walk again. And in an incredible twist, she eventually returned to the same hospital not as a patient, but as a radiologist.
What saved her life was the very thing that should have killed her.
The extreme cold slowed her metabolism so much that her brain barely needed oxygen, protecting it from permanent damage. Her case went on to change medicine and helped prove the effectiveness of therapeutic hypothermia, now used worldwide in cardiac arrest and brain injury cases.
Sometimes survival comes from the most unexpected places, even ice.
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My wife had a partial placenta abruption and my daughter was born with HIE. She had some brain damage and the doctors used therapeutic hypothermia to protect her brain from any further damage and give it time to heal. Today she is a healthy 1 year old and I credit this treatment for saving her life.
Cold saved her brain, love brought her home.
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Cold hypothermic cardiac arrest first used in heart surgery in 1950s and modern hypothermic surgical techniques developed in 1970s and 1980s.....no not new in surgical practice in 1999.
Interesting in that the case didnt happen in hospital.
Hypothermia wasn’t new in 1999, but surviving 80 minutes pulseless under Arctic ice without a hospital in sight? That rewrote the rules.
I had heart surgery in 1960 and I was "frozen", and I believe it slowed heart down to allow for surgery. It was very successful and I only needed an update surgery 5 years ago.
I heard this worked on the only human survivor of rabies.
The protocol for rabies is distinctly different than the protocol for warming a hypothermic body, or for cooling it for medical therapy/life saving measures.
The Milwaukee protocol for rabies uses drug induced comas and heavy sedation to stop brain activity while the virus runs its course, not temperature.
They do have the same kind of idea, to slow brain activity to allow healing or recovery, but they use totally different methods.
A lot of researchers and Drs are now saying the Milwaukee protocol isnt effective due to its low success rate. They say you should get antibodies and follow up shot series to prevent symptoms....and while thats absolutely correct, what's not the point of the Milwaukee protocol. Its used when treatment isnt administered in time, and symptoms are already present. Its a Hail Mary therapeutic pass, and Im not surprised one bit of its low success rate. But if my loved one was scratched or bitten and didn't get treatment in time, I'd absolutely ask for the Milwaukee protocol.
Yes, you're referring to Jeanna Giese, the first known human to survive untreated rabies in 2004. She was treated with the Milwaukee Protocol