01/06/2026
This is why in cases of hypothermia, CPR continues until body temp comes back up. Amazing story of survival
Her heart stopped under the ice. Eighty minutes later, doctors said: You're not dead until you're warm and dead.
May 20, 1999. The mountains outside Narvik, in northern Norway.
Anna Bågenholm, a 29-year-old Swedish medical student training to become a surgeon, was skiing after work with two colleagues. She had taken this route many times before.
Then she lost control.
She fell headfirst onto a frozen stream, crashed through the ice, and plunged into the water below. Her head and torso went under. Her skis caught on the surface. She was trapped upside down, in gear soaked through, the current pulling at her, the ice refusing to break.
Her friends grabbed her legs immediately. They couldn't pull her out. The ice was too thick, and she was wedged between rocks.
Anna was conscious. For several minutes, she fought—clawing at the underside of the ice, searching for a way out.
Then she found an air pocket.
A small gap between the ice and the rushing water. She pressed her face into it and breathed.
For forty minutes, Anna Bågenholm clung to rocks in near-freezing water, breathing from that tiny pocket of air, her body temperature plummeting, her friends desperately trying to reach her.
At some point around the forty-minute mark, she stopped moving. Her heart went into cardiac arrest. She was still trapped under the ice.
Another forty minutes passed before rescuers finally cut through and pulled her body from the water.
No pulse. No breathing. Pupils dilated and fixed. Skin gray-blue.
By any conventional measure, Anna Bågenholm was dead.
Her colleagues—both doctors—began CPR on the spot. A rescue helicopter arrived and transported her to Tromsø University Hospital, about 100 kilometers away, where the team continued resuscitation during the hour-long flight.
When Anna arrived at the hospital, her core body temperature was 13.7°C.
For context: normal human body temperature is 37°C. Severe hypothermia is anything below 28°C. Anna was at 13.7°C—the coldest body temperature ever recorded in a surviving adult.
Dr. Mads Gilbert, an anesthesiologist and chief of the emergency room, took one look at her and later described what he saw:
"She has completely dilated pupils. She is ashen, flaxen white. She's wet. She's ice cold when I touch her skin, and she looks absolutely dead."
The electrocardiogram showed a flat line. No signs of life whatsoever.
But Gilbert had treated severe hypothermia before. He knew something that saved Anna's life.
"We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead."
When the human body gets cold enough, metabolism slows dramatically. The brain needs far less oxygen. Cellular processes nearly stop. In warm water, eighty minutes without oxygen means irreversible brain death. In freezing water, the cold itself can protect the brain—putting it into a kind of suspended animation.
Gilbert's hope was that Anna had cooled so rapidly that her brain had slowed down before it could be damaged.
The team connected her to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine—the same technology used in open-heart surgery. They removed blood from her body, warmed and oxygenated it, then pumped it back in. They raised her temperature slowly, degree by degree, to avoid rewarming shock.
Over a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours.
13.7°C... 18°C... 25°C... 28°C...
Still no heartbeat.
30°C...
Then something appeared on the monitor.
A single beat.
Then another.
Anna Bågenholm's heart started again.
She woke up ten days later, paralyzed from the neck down. For a moment, she was furious at her colleagues for saving her. She feared a life without dignity.
But the paralysis was temporary. Her nerves had been damaged by the cold, not destroyed. Over months of rehabilitation, she regained mobility. The nerve damage in her hands prevented her from completing her surgical training—she couldn't operate—so she changed specialties.
She became a radiologist.
Today, Anna Bågenholm is in her mid-fifties. She works as a senior radiologist at Tromsø University Hospital—the same hospital where she was brought back to life. She walks past the ICU where she lay, technically dead, being slowly rewarmed by the people who refused to give up on her.
Her case changed emergency medicine worldwide. "You're not dead until you're warm and dead" became official protocol. Resuscitation efforts in hypothermia cases now continue for hours when necessary. Her survival is cited in every major emergency medicine textbook.
In 2010, her record was broken by a seven-year-old Swedish girl who survived a body temperature of 13.0°C. Anna still holds the record for the coldest temperature survived by an adult.
In 2020, she defended her doctoral dissertation on trauma radiology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
She survived. She recovered. She became a doctor. She earned a PhD. She works at the place that saved her.
When reporters ask how she kept going, her answer is simple:
"When you are a patient, you're not thinking you are going to die. You think, I'm going to make it."
Anna Bågenholm was dead for eighty minutes.
And she came back.
~Old Photo Club
