- A young doctor told yesterday how she was brought back
from the dead after she had been trapped under ice for nearly an hour and
a half. She had the lowest body temperature recorded in a human survivor.
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- Dr Anna B'genholm, 29, an off-piste skier, had plunged
into a frozen river, near Narvik in north Norway and was technically dead
for three hours. On reaching hospital her body temperature was recorded
at 13.7C - more than 23 degrees below normal.
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- Now the trainee surgeon from near Gothenburg, Sweden,
has made a good recovery and has just returned from a heli-skiing holiday
in Canada. But when she arrived at hospital she had no heartbeat, no blood
circulation, was not breathing and her pupils were widely dilated and unresponsive
to light.
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- Prof Mads Gilbert, of the University and Regional Hospital
of Tromso, who led the team that saved her life, said yesterday: "The
message to doctors from this remarkable survival is - don't give up. 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."
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- However, when she came out of sedation Dr B'genholm was
paralysed. She said: "When I woke up I could only move my head. I
could not move my body at all. Being able to ski again was not the first
thing I thought about. But it was in my mind. 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."
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- Her family and doctors knew that Dr B'genholm's mental
faculties where unimpaired when her father asked her for her PIN number.
When they tried her bank card the number worked. Prof Gilbert said: "We
wondered what we had done. This young doctor was unable to move. We did
have some second thoughts."
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- He describes in The Lancet today how Dr B'genholm, fell
head first into a river when skiing down a waterfall gully last May. Her
head and upper body became wedged below the ice and her companions, both
doctors trained in emergency procedures, could not get her out. They called
the Narvik hospital, where they all worked, for help on a mobile phone.
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- She was seen to be struggling below the ice for 40 minutes
before she became still and it was another 39 minutes before two rescuers
from the hospital arrived. She was extracted when her colleagues cut a
hole in the ice down-stream and pulled her clear. She was clinically dead.
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- She was given oxygen at the scene and taken to Narvik
and transferred to Tromso. Once in hospital she was ventilated and given
a cardio pulmonary by-pass, her blood being warmed before it was returned
to her body. She then needed her blood to be oxygenated outside her body
when her lungs would not work.
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- An hour after arriving at hospital her heart started
beating again. Her resuscitation took a total of nine hours and she needed
intensive care for another month, followed by months of rehabilitation.
Prof Gilbert said that about 100 specialists and nurses had been involved
in her round-the-clock care.
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- He said: "We think she was breathing for the first
40 minutes in an air pocket in the flowing water. So she was taking in
oxygen as her body slowly cooled down. She was also extremely fit. 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."
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- Through intensive rehabilitation, Dr B'genholm has regained
the use of her limbs and was back skiing at Christmas with her ski sticks
taped to her hands as she improved her ability to grip. Eights months after
her ordeal Dr B'genholm does not have normal use of her hands and for the
time being cannot continue her training as a surgeon.
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- 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. I am happy that they saved me. I am
going back to work for the first time tomorrow to do paperwork. If I cannot
be a surgeon there are other things I can do as a doctor. But now I am
going skiing."
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