- A two-year-old boy was brought back to life by doctors
more than seven hours after he was discovered face down in a garden pond.
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- Joe Towey's heart stopped beating when he fell into the
freezing water and the temperature was so cold his body "froze"
- protecting his brain and giving doctors crucial time to get his heart
pumping.
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- Giving him constant heart massage, they warmed him up
slowly and after five hours detected a heartbeat. Two hours later he reached
normal body temperature and has now made a full recovery.
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- Dr Nick Makwana, who led the resuscitation team, said:
"It was remarkable, the sort of thing that reminds me why I do this
job. I understand it is the longest time ever spent successfully resuscitating
someone in this country."
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- Joe's apparently lifeless body was found in his garden
pond in Birmingham by his mother, Jennifer Nock. She and Joe's father,
Michael Towey, began heart massage and mouth-to-mouth before the paramedics
arrived.
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- Joe was taken to the city's Heartlands Hospital, where
the long process of resuscitation began. When he reached accident and emergency,
his body temperature had fallen from the normal 37.5 degrees centigrade
to 26 degrees.
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- Doctors are obliged to continue working on a patient
until the core temperature reaches 32 degrees. They then begin to assess
brain damage.
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- For hours they slowly warmed Joe up by flushing warm
water through organs such as his bladder and stomach and wrapping him in
blankets, all the while taking turns to massage his heart.
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- Dr Makwana, a specialist registrar in paediatrics, said:
"Joe wasn't breathing, he had no heartbeat and his pupils were not
responding to light.
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- "We didn't give him a great chance of living. At
the very least we thought he would have some degree of brain damage. For
the whole seven hours we had to take it in turn to massage his heart.
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- "After around six hours his eyes started reacting
to light, which came as a great surprise as it meant he might not have
suffered severe brain damage. To hear he is completely recovered is fantastic."
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- Details of Joe's case emerged only yesterday when his
parents agreed to talk about it now that he had made a full recovery.
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- Mr Towey, 42, from Yardley Wood, said Joe was "effectively
dead" when they pulled him out of the water on Boxing Day.
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- He was placed on a life-support machine for two weeks
while further tests were carried out to assess any damage, and was kept
in hospital for three more weeks.
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- Miss Nock, 28, said: "One morning he opened his
eyes and looked up at Michael. You could tell he recognised him and from
that moment we knew he would be fine."
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