Anna Bågenholm

Anna Bågenholm is a Swedish radiologist, born in 1970 in Vänersborg, whose name is known in medicine because of what happened to her on 20 May 1999. While skiing near Narvik in Norway, where she was working as an assistant surgeon at the local hospital, she fell headfirst through a frozen stream and was held under the ice for about eighty minutes. She found an air pocket and stayed conscious for roughly forty minutes before her circulation stopped. Colleagues who were doctors began resuscitation as soon as she was pulled out, and she was flown to Tromsø University Hospital, where she arrived with a body temperature of 13.7 degrees Celsius, then the lowest ever survived by a person with accidental hypothermia. A team of more than a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours to warm her. She woke ten days later paralysed from the neck down, spent two months in intensive care and recovered almost fully, with only minor nerve symptoms in her hands and feet remaining by 2009. Her case was discussed in The Lancet and in medical textbooks as evidence that survival is possible after prolonged hypothermic cardiac arrest.