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A Swedish skier was basically frozen, but lived (2016)

223 points by Anon84 5y ago

phendrenad2 5y ago
This is so weird. Is it possible that we can bring Walt Disney back to life after all?
plebianRube 5y ago
> “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.” More cases of kids than adults surviving very low body temperatures, but the saying is true, as long as you're not warm and dead there is some hope.
- User23 5y ago
  It’s absolutely true based on every EMT I’ve spoken to. Which, by the way, I highly recommend if you have the opportunity and the stomach for it. They have some wild stories to tell.
- hammock 5y ago
  Not for nothing, with children there is often a greater “spirit not to give up.”
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    That's true, but there's also a hypothesis that kids freeze quicker because of their lower body mass, which may make them shut down more uniformly with less damage. Which means thawing them out has a better chance of success.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Indeed. I'm an EMT and because of cases like this we're taught not to assume a cold or drowned patient is dead until they're warm and dead.
nojs 5y ago
> By the time the rescue team showed up with a rope and a pointed shovel, hacked a hole in the ice, and pulled her out, she had been submerged for about 80 minutes. She had no heartbeat. Interestingly people like Wim Hof have apparently trained themselves to withstand the same exposure for 2+ hours with no issues. The article alludes to this too: > Slightly less creatively, studies have shown that when experienced arctic explorers are asked to stick their fingers in icy water, they feel less cold than average Joes do—their bodies have slowed down their responses, trained by repeated exposure into playing the long game. I wonder what changes in the body with repeated exposure, and why we haven’t evolved to do it naturally?
- maxerickson 5y ago
  It seems he has survived ice for couple hours, that's different than very cold water, as the water will transfer heat away a lot faster.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Especially in a stream where the water is moving. It's like being outside in 0 degree weather (celsius), being outside on the same day with 100 kph winds
- User23 5y ago
  > I wonder what changes in the body with repeated exposure, and why we haven’t evolved to do it naturally? I can’t speak to the specifics, but generally speaking the body will try to maintain homeostasis. A stressor that disrupts homeostasis leads to adaptation or illness and death. Presumably those adaptations are not metabolically free, so the body prefers not to make them in the absence of stress.
js2 5y ago
There's more detail on her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm These are the tidbits I found most interesting: > A team of more than a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours to save her life. Bågenholm woke up ten days after the accident, paralyzed from the neck down and subsequently spent two months recovering in an intensive care unit. Although she has made an almost full recovery from the incident, late in 2009 she was still suffering from minor symptoms in hands and feet related to nerve injury. > "Her body had time to cool down completely before the heart stopped. 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." > "victims of very deep accidental hypothermia with circulatory arrest should be seen as potentially resuscitable with a prospect of full recovery. The key success factors of such marginal resuscitation efforts are early bystander actions with vigorous CPR and early warning of the emergency system, early dispatch of adequate rescue units (ground and air-ambulances) and good co-ordination between the resources outside and inside the hospital, aggressive rewarming and a spirit not to give up." > Bågenholm [upon waking paralyzed] feared she would spend the rest of her life on her back, and was angry with her colleagues for saving her. Bågenholm soon recovered from the paralysis, however, and later apologized to her friends; "I was very irritated when I realized they had saved me. I feared a meaningless life, without any dignity. Now I am very happy to be alive and want to apologize."
- ever1 5y ago
  Thanks, the temperatures in the article means nothing for those who don't speak Fahrenheit...
  - DougMellon 5y ago
    56.7F = 13.7C
  - kurthr 5y ago
    Because 12C ~ 21F there are some convenient temperatures to interpolate between. of course 0C = 32F and -40C = -40F but also (within a degree F): 04C = 40F 16C = 61F 28C = 82F 40C = 104F note that the last two digits are always reversed. below 0C they get less useful -08C = 18F -19C =-1.9F -31C = -23F
xaedes 5y ago
Sounds like the ancients had similar thoughts as “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.”: https://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/sbe04/sbe0411.htm https://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/sbe04/sbe0411.htm From The Zend Avesta, Part I - FARGARD V. 10 (34). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! If the summer is past and the winter has come, what shall the worshippers of Mazda do? Ahura Mazda answered: 'In every house? in every borough, they shall raise three small houses for the dead.' 11 (37). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! How large shall be those houses for the dead? Ahura Mazda answered: ‘Large enough not to strike the skull, or the feet, or the hands of the man, if he should stand erect, and hold out his feet, and stretch out his hands: such shall be, according to the law, the houses for the dead. 12 (41). ‘And they shall let the lifeless body lie there, for two nights, or for three nights, or a month long, until the birds-begin to fly, the plants to grow, the floods to flow, and the wind to dry up the waters from off the earth.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  > the ancients had similar thoughts as “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.” I mean, they lived in the aftermath of an ice age...
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  The traditional wake is probably rooted in watching the "dead" body for a few days to see if it wakes up before burying them. There can be myriad things that make someone seem dead temporarily, such as consuming improperly prepared fish (I think puffer fish?).
  - edanm 5y ago
    Interesting, I'd never heard this and can't seem to find a reference to it. Btw, in Jewish tradition, burial should happen as soon as possible, usually the same day or the day after.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea. It's perhaps somewhat speculative on my part based in part on the word used for such things. Why would people call the viewing of the body a wake if they weren't hoping the person would awaken? I know I've discussed it with people and I know I've read of incidents where someone was thought to be dead and wasn't. One story was about a child that was thought to be dead during an epidemic and the family was unable to find a box big enough to bury him. They bent his legs up sideways to fit him in the too short box they had. On the one hand, he lived because they only bent his legs up (instead of cutting them off to make him fit). On the other hand, he never walked right because of it. He was permanently maimed. The Bible also has a passage where Jesus says "Why do you weep? She isn't dead. She only sleeps." And he tells the girl to arise and she opens her eyes. So we have records of such incidents going back at least 2000 years. And we have a tradition of viewing the body before burying it. It seems likely to me these things are not unrelated though I'm not sure we really have anything that explicitly says "The historical origin of the practice is rooted in this." So to be clear this is possibly opinion not something I learned in some history class or other.
paulcole 5y ago
> It took much longer—years—for her to be able to move, walk, and finally even ski again. I’ll take cold and dead over this, thanks. I’ve got a chronic illness and have a good sense of my limits for what’s bearable.
- ec109685 5y ago
  The wiki article has her working 140 days after the accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm “ Bågenholm returned to work in October 1999.[12] On 7 October 1999–140 days after the accident—she returned to the hospital in Tromsø and met the doctors and nurses that helped save her life.[18]”
- sterlind 5y ago
  I've got a chronic illness too. I use a wheelchair. it's very bearable for me. you might be less willing to live with limitations than me, though - I was never terribly athletic even when I was able-bodied.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Yeah, everybody’s different. I thought my life was pretty pointless pre-illness. Much worse and I’ll have had enough.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"She's ice cold when I touch her skin, and she looks absolutely dead," Gilbert later told CNN. "On the electrocardiogram… there is a completely flat line," Gilbert remembered. "Like you could have drawn it with a ruler. No signs of life whatsoever." It sounds like they were measuring the wrong thing.
- darkerside 5y ago
  What would you suggest measuring?
- grayclhn 5y ago
  This is a little flip. They obviously weren’t measuring the wrong thing because they kept going and resuscitated her. The EKG was mentioned as one datapoint on the state of her physical body. Edit: I’m writing this comment because in almost any real situation, some of the standard measurements won’t be useful. Pulling out one and concluding “EKGs are wrong” (or whatever equivalent) is a pretty easy and common way to feel smart in the moment and make worse choices overall.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "They obviously weren’t measuring the wrong thing because they kept going and resuscitated her." No. They disregarded the measurements. The measurements mentioned in the story obviously failed them, so they went with their own judgement instead (or maybe some other measurements not mentioned in the story.. but I'm just going by what's given in the story, not some imagined account of what might have happened instead).
    - krisoft 5y ago
      > No. No back to you. :) > The measurements mentioned in the story obviously failed them The measurement didn't "fail" them. It told them the truth, that is that she didn't have electrical activity in her hearth. If they would have seen a different rhythm they would have given her a different treatment. For example if they would have seen one of the shockable rhythms they would have given her the appropriate shock. > so they went with their own judgement instead Instead? From what you say it sounds like there is some rule preventing people from continuing efforts if they see a flat ECG. That is not true. The medical providers didn't use their judgement "instead" of the measurement. They used their judgement factoring in all the things they measured, known, heard, and sensed. (including but not limited to the flat ECG measurement)
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
What's cool, is that it does not seem to have resulted in permanent injury. She is currently an MD at a Norwegian University hospital, and looks to be doing great.
- Rastonbury 5y ago
  I wonder what caused the neck down paralysis initially and how it recovered, usually there isn't much scope for recovery from that.
  - aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
    >I wonder what caused the neck down paralysis initially Nerve damage. >and how it recovered The nerves healed.
    - sterlind 5y ago
      nerve damage to the spinal cord? or peripheral nerves? why did the nerve damage there take longer to reverse than nerve damage in the brain? also, what do you mean by damage exactly? the axons presumably weren't damaged. the neurons were apparently not "online" but presumably didn't go through apoptosis. do you mean metabolic dysfunction?
    - Rastonbury 5y ago
      Nerves in the CNS hardly ever heal or regenerate, tetraplegia is usually damage to the cervical nerves which are CNS
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  This article makes me wonder if rapid cooling could help save you from brain damage in case of a stroke or similar.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    Yes. https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/cooling-to-prevent-stroke-brain-damage/ https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/cooling-to-prevent-str...
montroser 5y ago
See also Timothy Lancaster, a British Airways pilot who survived after an explosive decompression propelled his body out through the windscreen into -17°C conditions at 700km/h at FL170. He was pinned against the fuselage for 20 minutes with his feet hooked on the control column, while the first officer made an emergency descent and landed the plane. Lancaster made a full recovery, and continued his career as a commercial pilot for nearly 30 years following the incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pilot-sucked-airplane/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pilot-sucked-airplane/
- fifilura 5y ago
  There is also an extreme accident in Sweden where a couple of kids in a canoe survived (incidentially with Norwegian emergency care). One of them found with his face under the water at 14C body temperature surviving cardiac arrest for 6 hours. The extreme low body temperatures seems to be able to allow for surviving under extreme conditions, even without breathing for several hours. (a bit too fancy) article in swedish. https://mirakletiannsjon.story.aftonbladet.se/ https://mirakletiannsjon.story.aftonbladet.se/ (google translate to english "Canadian" is a special type of canoe) https://mirakletiannsjon-story-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=sv&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=sv&_x_tr_pto=wapp#5 https://mirakletiannsjon-story-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog...
  - pge 5y ago
    Bit of relevant trivia - in a number of languages other than English, "canoe" means both the style of boat we call a canoe in English and the thing we call a kayak. To distinguish the two, the one we call simply a "canoe" is called in those languages a "Canadian canoe" or "Canadian" for short.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      My father is Swedish and used to have a Canadian canoe. He would refer to the canoe by its name most of the time but sometimes he and my grandfather would refer to it as “kanadensaren” (“the Canadian” in Swedish), and I never knew why until now. Thank you!
dskloet 5y ago
> Even after a couple of hours out of the water, Bågenholm’s core temperature was 56.7 degrees Farenheit 13.7 Celsius
adictator 5y ago
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
She was 0K.
webchat 5y ago
[dead]
thih9 5y ago
Since then there was an accident involving an even lower body temperature: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/04/doctors-toddler-freezing-pyjamas-miracle-poland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/04/doctors-toddle... > Two-year-old Adas was found by police unconscious near a creek in the village of Raclawice, just north of Krakow, late on Sunday in weather of -7C. > His core body temperature had plummeted to just 12.7C (54F), and doctors kept him in an artificial coma until Wednesday, fearing brain damage. > But after being awakened, the boy on Thursday was speaking, playing and eating normally in hospital. Medical staff believe he might have come through his ordeal almost unscathed, probably with pneumonia but with no sign of frostbite.
widforss 5y ago
I live in Narvik, and I can't understand why they name the place of the accident Kjolen. What I can gather from archived news articles she was skiing in a very well known place called Mørkhola, or "the backside". I have not heard of any Kjolen Mountains, and as part of a local SAR team, I think I should've known about it if it existed.
- gliptic 5y ago
  They probably mean Kjølen? Kjolen could be an appropriate name for a mountain though, shape-wise :).
  - widforss 5y ago
    That's probably it :) But if they refer to the Kjølen which is the entire Scandinavian mountain range, that's terribly imprecise. Kjolen would mean "the skirt", for the anglophones reading.
    - areyousure 5y ago
      Please forgive me, for I am actually curious about this: Were you previously aware of the term "Kjølen" to refer to the (Northern) Scandinavian mountain range? And if so, when you wrote > I have not heard of any Kjolen Mountains, were you really distinguishing between Kjolen and Kjølen? Are you a native Norwegian speaker? I understand that ø is a "distinct" letter in Norwegian, but to my uneducated eyes/ears it sounds similarly baffling to a French speaker not recognizing the "Pyrenees" because they're used to "Pyrénées".
      - widforss 5y ago
        I didn't make that connection since the term Kjølen to refer to the whole mountain range is rather archaic. If it was more common with this specific meaning, I may have understood it. I'm a Swedish native (mutually intelligible with Norwegian), and yes, when I read, "o" and ø/ö are very different and distinct letters.
      - 5y ago
sethammons 5y ago
Another one: https://allthatsinteresting.com/jean-hilliard https://allthatsinteresting.com/jean-hilliard > Her skin was so frozen that they couldn’t pierce it with hypodermic needles — the needles just broke on contact. Her body temperature was so low that it didn’t register on a thermometer. Her face was an ashen-gray color and her eyes didn’t respond to changes in light.
moneywoes 5y ago
Does this give credence to the freezing of brains that people under go post death?
- blkhawk 5y ago
  no, the person in question wasn't frozen even if the headline says so. Her body temperature was lowered quite drastically and that slows down any damage dramatically. Actually freezing people without any type of antifreeze agent usually causes ice crystals to form and that damages cells in the whole body enough to make revival unlikely. Modern cryo uses antifreeze agents but since the people undergoing these procedure are already quite dead & those agents aren't really conducive to life either most of the time its still unclear if anybody frozen that way can be revived in the future at all.
jansan 5y ago
Fahrenheit is such a dumb temperature scale. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit simply took the lowest outside winter temperature of his hometown as zero and the highest summer termperature as 100 degrees. If he had lived somewhere else or at a different time, the temperature scale would be different. Although Fahrenheit was German, Germany does not use this scale. It would be nice if the remaining parts of the world that still use the Fahrenheit scale could eventually switch to Celsius which at least makes a little bit of sense.
- hexane360 5y ago
  Fahrenheit was actually defined so 0 °F was the freezing point of brine, and 100 °F was roughly human body temperature.
  - jansan 5y ago
    I had a different source, but Wikipedia says that you are correct.
    - fennecfoxen 5y ago
      In either case, a temperature scale that goes from 0 = “ice on the roads won’t melt it anymore” to 100 = “watch out, heatstroke time” is eminently reasonable for measuring temperatures that humans experience personally. I understand Celcius is better for times when you want to do math, such as when you are figuring out how many joules it is going to take to boil water for your morning coffee, in the manner that any perfectly normal human being does on a regular basis. Why, it’s just as natural as consulting the periodic table so you can the use nutrition fact Dara on about sodium to estimate the impact of swapping out unsalted butter for salted in your recipe. Which I have done. Once. (It was a very small impact.)
petilon 5y ago
In Siberia they do this routinely. In this video [1] doctors lower the body temperature to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which basically brings the body including brain to a halt, then perform the surgery. Note: the audio is in Russian but there is text description below the video: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMX6YKYMrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMX6YKYMrU
Noe2097 5y ago
I discovered a few years ago that thanks to this kind of "experience", forced hypothermia is now used to prevent brain damage to new borns who suffered from loss of oxygen during delivery. Our second son was (initially, thankfully) stillborn after a complicated delivery, yet the medical team managed to revive him and immediately put him in hypothermia (to 34° C), surrounding his head with some apparel containing essentially ice. Fast forward the 5 most painful days of my life, doctors warmed him back very slowly. He is now 4, and showing completely "normal" (in the statistical sense of the term) development. Indeed, brain damage is not immediate in case of oxygen loss. It happens in phases. I am no expert, but I understood that most damage happen not immediately, and happen even if oxygen has been restored. Slowing down the body through hypothermia, seems to avoid the brain to "collapse". Discussing with the head of the department (for a mandatory "retrospective"), he explained me that this technique had been devised after seeing that people who drowned in very cold water could be revived with less "impact" on their capacities than others. He also explained me that the technique was not always successful, but was the only "treatment" that had shown actual improvement of recovery chances in this kind of cases.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia_therapy_for_neonatal_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia_therapy_for_neonat...
- MobileVet 5y ago
  What a traumatic experience. I cannot even imagine. Gives me chills Our third had a pretty solid cord wrap going around her neck and being the third I knew it was not normal. Thankfully the nurse was skilled and it had not been depriving her of too much for very long. That was scary enough. I am so happy for you that your son survived being born still. Wow.
- markdown 5y ago
  > hypothermia (to 34° C) Is there a typo here?
  - 5y ago
mysql 5y ago
Sounds like a similar medical miracle to I guy I knew at University. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/02/19/this-queens-student-froze-to-death-on-a-kingston-pier-heres-how-he-came-back-to-life.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/02/19/this-queens-...
hedgehog 5y ago
Clip of a short BBC interview with her: https://youtu.be/clvnGfE6ul0?t=63 https://youtu.be/clvnGfE6ul0?t=63
rkagerer 5y ago
A few years back while recertifying, I got interested in what the world record was for longest successful CPR recovery. Longest I could find was this 4-hours incident, involving someone who'd gone into hypothermia some hours before: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christine-tink-newman-s-medical-miracle-revived-from-near-death-1.2591379 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christine-tin... I think I read somewhere else the lowered body temperature contributed to her surviving long enough for rescue.
JasonBorne 5y ago
The lowest body temperature ever... maybe recorded recently. The nazis conducted experiments to try to freeze people and bring them back to life which they conducted on jews and slaviks after they kept losing pilots after they would die of hypathermia in the english channel.
emmelaich 5y ago
Cooling a patient was feature in a M.A.S.H. episode in 1979/80. I presume it was moderately well known thing then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Time_(M*A*S*H) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Time_(M*A*S*H)
Twisell 5y ago
Remind me of a scene from The Abyss (movie 1989). The main heroine deliberately enter hypothermia underwater hoping to be revived few moments later and after a apparently hopeless CPR she finally come back from the death. Turn out this part was actually quite realistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss
biggu 5y ago
Traditional Indian medicine systems could explain this phenomenon. The "life" of a human being is categorized as 5 different energies, each having a specific function. (Pancha Pranas). Death is seen as a process where these energies exit the body in a certain sequence over a period of time. It is said that it is possible to reverse this process till a certain point with intervention. A small extract on what these 5 energies are: https://imgur.com/2GvgEqB https://imgur.com/2GvgEqB This is from the book "Death: An inside story"
yencabulator 5y ago
The actual title is much better: The Woman Who Survived the Lowest Body Temperature Ever Very few mammals can recover from freezing, and the bad sensationalism takes away from how amazing the facts are. The article fails to mention her lowest measured core temperature, but Wikipedia says 13.7 °C (56.7 °F), which is definitely not yet freezing.

223 points by Anon84 5y ago

This is so weird. Is it possible that we can bring Walt Disney back to life after all?

> “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.” More cases of kids than adults surviving very low body temperatures, but the saying is true, as long as you're not warm and dead there is some hope.

User23 5y ago
It’s absolutely true based on every EMT I’ve spoken to. Which, by the way, I highly recommend if you have the opportunity and the stomach for it. They have some wild stories to tell.
hammock 5y ago
Not for nothing, with children there is often a greater “spirit not to give up.”
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  That's true, but there's also a hypothesis that kids freeze quicker because of their lower body mass, which may make them shut down more uniformly with less damage. Which means thawing them out has a better chance of success.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
Indeed. I'm an EMT and because of cases like this we're taught not to assume a cold or drowned patient is dead until they're warm and dead.

nojs 5y ago

> By the time the rescue team showed up with a rope and a pointed shovel, hacked a hole in the ice, and pulled her out, she had been submerged for about 80 minutes. She had no heartbeat. Interestingly people like Wim Hof have apparently trained themselves to withstand the same exposure for 2+ hours with no issues. The article alludes to this too: > Slightly less creatively, studies have shown that when experienced arctic explorers are asked to stick their fingers in icy water, they feel less cold than average Joes do—their bodies have slowed down their responses, trained by repeated exposure into playing the long game. I wonder what changes in the body with repeated exposure, and why we haven’t evolved to do it naturally?

maxerickson 5y ago
It seems he has survived ice for couple hours, that's different than very cold water, as the water will transfer heat away a lot faster.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Especially in a stream where the water is moving. It's like being outside in 0 degree weather (celsius), being outside on the same day with 100 kph winds
User23 5y ago
> I wonder what changes in the body with repeated exposure, and why we haven’t evolved to do it naturally? I can’t speak to the specifics, but generally speaking the body will try to maintain homeostasis. A stressor that disrupts homeostasis leads to adaptation or illness and death. Presumably those adaptations are not metabolically free, so the body prefers not to make them in the absence of stress.

js2 5y ago

There's more detail on her wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Bågenholm These are the tidbits I found most interesting: > A team of more than a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours to save her life. Bågenholm woke up ten days after the accident, paralyzed from the neck down and subsequently spent two months recovering in an intensive care unit. Although she has made an almost full recovery from the incident, late in 2009 she was still suffering from minor symptoms in hands and feet related to nerve injury. > "Her body had time to cool down completely before the heart stopped. 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." > "victims of very deep accidental hypothermia with circulatory arrest should be seen as potentially resuscitable with a prospect of full recovery. The key success factors of such marginal resuscitation efforts are early bystander actions with vigorous CPR and early warning of the emergency system, early dispatch of adequate rescue units (ground and air-ambulances) and good co-ordination between the resources outside and inside the hospital, aggressive rewarming and a spirit not to give up." > Bågenholm [upon waking paralyzed] feared she would spend the rest of her life on her back, and was angry with her colleagues for saving her. Bågenholm soon recovered from the paralysis, however, and later apologized to her friends; "I was very irritated when I realized they had saved me. I feared a meaningless life, without any dignity. Now I am very happy to be alive and want to apologize."

ever1 5y ago
Thanks, the temperatures in the article means nothing for those who don't speak Fahrenheit...
- DougMellon 5y ago
  56.7F = 13.7C
- kurthr 5y ago
  Because 12C ~ 21F there are some convenient temperatures to interpolate between. of course 0C = 32F and -40C = -40F but also (within a degree F): 04C = 40F 16C = 61F 28C = 82F 40C = 104F note that the last two digits are always reversed. below 0C they get less useful -08C = 18F -19C =-1.9F -31C = -23F

xaedes 5y ago

Sounds like the ancients had similar thoughts as “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.”: https://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/sbe04/sbe0411.htm https://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/sbe04/sbe0411.htm From The Zend Avesta, Part I - FARGARD V. 10 (34). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! If the summer is past and the winter has come, what shall the worshippers of Mazda do? Ahura Mazda answered: 'In every house? in every borough, they shall raise three small houses for the dead.' 11 (37). O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! How large shall be those houses for the dead? Ahura Mazda answered: ‘Large enough not to strike the skull, or the feet, or the hands of the man, if he should stand erect, and hold out his feet, and stretch out his hands: such shall be, according to the law, the houses for the dead. 12 (41). ‘And they shall let the lifeless body lie there, for two nights, or for three nights, or a month long, until the birds-begin to fly, the plants to grow, the floods to flow, and the wind to dry up the waters from off the earth.

Mikeb85 5y ago
> the ancients had similar thoughts as “We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.” I mean, they lived in the aftermath of an ice age...
DoreenMichele 5y ago
The traditional wake is probably rooted in watching the "dead" body for a few days to see if it wakes up before burying them. There can be myriad things that make someone seem dead temporarily, such as consuming improperly prepared fish (I think puffer fish?).
- edanm 5y ago
  Interesting, I'd never heard this and can't seem to find a reference to it. Btw, in Jewish tradition, burial should happen as soon as possible, usually the same day or the day after.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea. It's perhaps somewhat speculative on my part based in part on the word used for such things. Why would people call the viewing of the body a wake if they weren't hoping the person would awaken? I know I've discussed it with people and I know I've read of incidents where someone was thought to be dead and wasn't. One story was about a child that was thought to be dead during an epidemic and the family was unable to find a box big enough to bury him. They bent his legs up sideways to fit him in the too short box they had. On the one hand, he lived because they only bent his legs up (instead of cutting them off to make him fit). On the other hand, he never walked right because of it. He was permanently maimed. The Bible also has a passage where Jesus says "Why do you weep? She isn't dead. She only sleeps." And he tells the girl to arise and she opens her eyes. So we have records of such incidents going back at least 2000 years. And we have a tradition of viewing the body before burying it. It seems likely to me these things are not unrelated though I'm not sure we really have anything that explicitly says "The historical origin of the practice is rooted in this." So to be clear this is possibly opinion not something I learned in some history class or other.

paulcole 5y ago

> It took much longer—years—for her to be able to move, walk, and finally even ski again. I’ll take cold and dead over this, thanks. I’ve got a chronic illness and have a good sense of my limits for what’s bearable.

ec109685 5y ago
The wiki article has her working 140 days after the accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm “ Bågenholm returned to work in October 1999.[12] On 7 October 1999–140 days after the accident—she returned to the hospital in Tromsø and met the doctors and nurses that helped save her life.[18]”
sterlind 5y ago
I've got a chronic illness too. I use a wheelchair. it's very bearable for me. you might be less willing to live with limitations than me, though - I was never terribly athletic even when I was able-bodied.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Yeah, everybody’s different. I thought my life was pretty pointless pre-illness. Much worse and I’ll have had enough.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"She's ice cold when I touch her skin, and she looks absolutely dead," Gilbert later told CNN. "On the electrocardiogram… there is a completely flat line," Gilbert remembered. "Like you could have drawn it with a ruler. No signs of life whatsoever." It sounds like they were measuring the wrong thing.

darkerside 5y ago
What would you suggest measuring?
grayclhn 5y ago
This is a little flip. They obviously weren’t measuring the wrong thing because they kept going and resuscitated her. The EKG was mentioned as one datapoint on the state of her physical body. Edit: I’m writing this comment because in almost any real situation, some of the standard measurements won’t be useful. Pulling out one and concluding “EKGs are wrong” (or whatever equivalent) is a pretty easy and common way to feel smart in the moment and make worse choices overall.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "They obviously weren’t measuring the wrong thing because they kept going and resuscitated her." No. They disregarded the measurements. The measurements mentioned in the story obviously failed them, so they went with their own judgement instead (or maybe some other measurements not mentioned in the story.. but I'm just going by what's given in the story, not some imagined account of what might have happened instead).
  - krisoft 5y ago
    > No. No back to you. :) > The measurements mentioned in the story obviously failed them The measurement didn't "fail" them. It told them the truth, that is that she didn't have electrical activity in her hearth. If they would have seen a different rhythm they would have given her a different treatment. For example if they would have seen one of the shockable rhythms they would have given her the appropriate shock. > so they went with their own judgement instead Instead? From what you say it sounds like there is some rule preventing people from continuing efforts if they see a flat ECG. That is not true. The medical providers didn't use their judgement "instead" of the measurement. They used their judgement factoring in all the things they measured, known, heard, and sensed. (including but not limited to the flat ECG measurement)

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

What's cool, is that it does not seem to have resulted in permanent injury. She is currently an MD at a Norwegian University hospital, and looks to be doing great.

Rastonbury 5y ago
I wonder what caused the neck down paralysis initially and how it recovered, usually there isn't much scope for recovery from that.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  >I wonder what caused the neck down paralysis initially Nerve damage. >and how it recovered The nerves healed.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    nerve damage to the spinal cord? or peripheral nerves? why did the nerve damage there take longer to reverse than nerve damage in the brain? also, what do you mean by damage exactly? the axons presumably weren't damaged. the neurons were apparently not "online" but presumably didn't go through apoptosis. do you mean metabolic dysfunction?
  - Rastonbury 5y ago
    Nerves in the CNS hardly ever heal or regenerate, tetraplegia is usually damage to the cervical nerves which are CNS
worldsayshi 5y ago
This article makes me wonder if rapid cooling could help save you from brain damage in case of a stroke or similar.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Yes. https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/cooling-to-prevent-stroke-brain-damage/ https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/cooling-to-prevent-str...

montroser 5y ago

See also Timothy Lancaster, a British Airways pilot who survived after an explosive decompression propelled his body out through the windscreen into -17°C conditions at 700km/h at FL170. He was pinned against the fuselage for 20 minutes with his feet hooked on the control column, while the first officer made an emergency descent and landed the plane. Lancaster made a full recovery, and continued his career as a commercial pilot for nearly 30 years following the incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_5390 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pilot-sucked-airplane/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pilot-sucked-airplane/

fifilura 5y ago
There is also an extreme accident in Sweden where a couple of kids in a canoe survived (incidentially with Norwegian emergency care). One of them found with his face under the water at 14C body temperature surviving cardiac arrest for 6 hours. The extreme low body temperatures seems to be able to allow for surviving under extreme conditions, even without breathing for several hours. (a bit too fancy) article in swedish. https://mirakletiannsjon.story.aftonbladet.se/ https://mirakletiannsjon.story.aftonbladet.se/ (google translate to english "Canadian" is a special type of canoe) https://mirakletiannsjon-story-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=sv&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=sv&_x_tr_pto=wapp#5 https://mirakletiannsjon-story-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog...
- pge 5y ago
  Bit of relevant trivia - in a number of languages other than English, "canoe" means both the style of boat we call a canoe in English and the thing we call a kayak. To distinguish the two, the one we call simply a "canoe" is called in those languages a "Canadian canoe" or "Canadian" for short.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    My father is Swedish and used to have a Canadian canoe. He would refer to the canoe by its name most of the time but sometimes he and my grandfather would refer to it as “kanadensaren” (“the Canadian” in Swedish), and I never knew why until now. Thank you!

dskloet 5y ago

> Even after a couple of hours out of the water, Bågenholm’s core temperature was 56.7 degrees Farenheit 13.7 Celsius

adictator 5y ago

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

She was 0K.

webchat 5y ago

[dead]

thih9 5y ago

Since then there was an accident involving an even lower body temperature: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/04/doctors-toddler-freezing-pyjamas-miracle-poland https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/04/doctors-toddle... > Two-year-old Adas was found by police unconscious near a creek in the village of Raclawice, just north of Krakow, late on Sunday in weather of -7C. > His core body temperature had plummeted to just 12.7C (54F), and doctors kept him in an artificial coma until Wednesday, fearing brain damage. > But after being awakened, the boy on Thursday was speaking, playing and eating normally in hospital. Medical staff believe he might have come through his ordeal almost unscathed, probably with pneumonia but with no sign of frostbite.

widforss 5y ago

I live in Narvik, and I can't understand why they name the place of the accident Kjolen. What I can gather from archived news articles she was skiing in a very well known place called Mørkhola, or "the backside". I have not heard of any Kjolen Mountains, and as part of a local SAR team, I think I should've known about it if it existed.

gliptic 5y ago
They probably mean Kjølen? Kjolen could be an appropriate name for a mountain though, shape-wise :).
- widforss 5y ago
  That's probably it :) But if they refer to the Kjølen which is the entire Scandinavian mountain range, that's terribly imprecise. Kjolen would mean "the skirt", for the anglophones reading.
  - areyousure 5y ago
    Please forgive me, for I am actually curious about this: Were you previously aware of the term "Kjølen" to refer to the (Northern) Scandinavian mountain range? And if so, when you wrote > I have not heard of any Kjolen Mountains, were you really distinguishing between Kjolen and Kjølen? Are you a native Norwegian speaker? I understand that ø is a "distinct" letter in Norwegian, but to my uneducated eyes/ears it sounds similarly baffling to a French speaker not recognizing the "Pyrenees" because they're used to "Pyrénées".
    - widforss 5y ago
      I didn't make that connection since the term Kjølen to refer to the whole mountain range is rather archaic. If it was more common with this specific meaning, I may have understood it. I'm a Swedish native (mutually intelligible with Norwegian), and yes, when I read, "o" and ø/ö are very different and distinct letters.
    - 5y ago

sethammons 5y ago

Another one: https://allthatsinteresting.com/jean-hilliard https://allthatsinteresting.com/jean-hilliard > Her skin was so frozen that they couldn’t pierce it with hypodermic needles — the needles just broke on contact. Her body temperature was so low that it didn’t register on a thermometer. Her face was an ashen-gray color and her eyes didn’t respond to changes in light.

moneywoes 5y ago

Does this give credence to the freezing of brains that people under go post death?

blkhawk 5y ago
no, the person in question wasn't frozen even if the headline says so. Her body temperature was lowered quite drastically and that slows down any damage dramatically. Actually freezing people without any type of antifreeze agent usually causes ice crystals to form and that damages cells in the whole body enough to make revival unlikely. Modern cryo uses antifreeze agents but since the people undergoing these procedure are already quite dead & those agents aren't really conducive to life either most of the time its still unclear if anybody frozen that way can be revived in the future at all.

jansan 5y ago

Fahrenheit is such a dumb temperature scale. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit simply took the lowest outside winter temperature of his hometown as zero and the highest summer termperature as 100 degrees. If he had lived somewhere else or at a different time, the temperature scale would be different. Although Fahrenheit was German, Germany does not use this scale. It would be nice if the remaining parts of the world that still use the Fahrenheit scale could eventually switch to Celsius which at least makes a little bit of sense.

hexane360 5y ago
Fahrenheit was actually defined so 0 °F was the freezing point of brine, and 100 °F was roughly human body temperature.
- jansan 5y ago
  I had a different source, but Wikipedia says that you are correct.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    In either case, a temperature scale that goes from 0 = “ice on the roads won’t melt it anymore” to 100 = “watch out, heatstroke time” is eminently reasonable for measuring temperatures that humans experience personally. I understand Celcius is better for times when you want to do math, such as when you are figuring out how many joules it is going to take to boil water for your morning coffee, in the manner that any perfectly normal human being does on a regular basis. Why, it’s just as natural as consulting the periodic table so you can the use nutrition fact Dara on about sodium to estimate the impact of swapping out unsalted butter for salted in your recipe. Which I have done. Once. (It was a very small impact.)

petilon 5y ago

In Siberia they do this routinely. In this video [1] doctors lower the body temperature to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which basically brings the body including brain to a halt, then perform the surgery. Note: the audio is in Russian but there is text description below the video: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMX6YKYMrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVMX6YKYMrU

Noe2097 5y ago

I discovered a few years ago that thanks to this kind of "experience", forced hypothermia is now used to prevent brain damage to new borns who suffered from loss of oxygen during delivery. Our second son was (initially, thankfully) stillborn after a complicated delivery, yet the medical team managed to revive him and immediately put him in hypothermia (to 34° C), surrounding his head with some apparel containing essentially ice. Fast forward the 5 most painful days of my life, doctors warmed him back very slowly. He is now 4, and showing completely "normal" (in the statistical sense of the term) development. Indeed, brain damage is not immediate in case of oxygen loss. It happens in phases. I am no expert, but I understood that most damage happen not immediately, and happen even if oxygen has been restored. Slowing down the body through hypothermia, seems to avoid the brain to "collapse". Discussing with the head of the department (for a mandatory "retrospective"), he explained me that this technique had been devised after seeing that people who drowned in very cold water could be revived with less "impact" on their capacities than others. He also explained me that the technique was not always successful, but was the only "treatment" that had shown actual improvement of recovery chances in this kind of cases.

sbierwagen 5y ago
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia_therapy_for_neonatal_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia_therapy_for_neonat...
MobileVet 5y ago
What a traumatic experience. I cannot even imagine. Gives me chills Our third had a pretty solid cord wrap going around her neck and being the third I knew it was not normal. Thankfully the nurse was skilled and it had not been depriving her of too much for very long. That was scary enough. I am so happy for you that your son survived being born still. Wow.
markdown 5y ago
> hypothermia (to 34° C) Is there a typo here?
- 5y ago

mysql 5y ago

Sounds like a similar medical miracle to I guy I knew at University. https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/02/19/this-queens-student-froze-to-death-on-a-kingston-pier-heres-how-he-came-back-to-life.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/02/19/this-queens-...

hedgehog 5y ago

Clip of a short BBC interview with her: https://youtu.be/clvnGfE6ul0?t=63 https://youtu.be/clvnGfE6ul0?t=63

rkagerer 5y ago

A few years back while recertifying, I got interested in what the world record was for longest successful CPR recovery. Longest I could find was this 4-hours incident, involving someone who'd gone into hypothermia some hours before: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christine-tink-newman-s-medical-miracle-revived-from-near-death-1.2591379 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/christine-tin... I think I read somewhere else the lowered body temperature contributed to her surviving long enough for rescue.

JasonBorne 5y ago

The lowest body temperature ever... maybe recorded recently. The nazis conducted experiments to try to freeze people and bring them back to life which they conducted on jews and slaviks after they kept losing pilots after they would die of hypathermia in the english channel.

emmelaich 5y ago

Cooling a patient was feature in a M.A.S.H. episode in 1979/80. I presume it was moderately well known thing then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Time_(M*A*S*H) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Time_(M*A*S*H)

Twisell 5y ago

Remind me of a scene from The Abyss (movie 1989). The main heroine deliberately enter hypothermia underwater hoping to be revived few moments later and after a apparently hopeless CPR she finally come back from the death. Turn out this part was actually quite realistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abyss

biggu 5y ago

Traditional Indian medicine systems could explain this phenomenon. The "life" of a human being is categorized as 5 different energies, each having a specific function. (Pancha Pranas). Death is seen as a process where these energies exit the body in a certain sequence over a period of time. It is said that it is possible to reverse this process till a certain point with intervention. A small extract on what these 5 energies are: https://imgur.com/2GvgEqB https://imgur.com/2GvgEqB This is from the book "Death: An inside story"

yencabulator 5y ago

The actual title is much better: The Woman Who Survived the Lowest Body Temperature Ever Very few mammals can recover from freezing, and the bad sensationalism takes away from how amazing the facts are. The article fails to mention her lowest measured core temperature, but Wikipedia says 13.7 °C (56.7 °F), which is definitely not yet freezing.