Natural Curiosities Sleeping Cold

In 1999, in Norway’s Kjølen Mountains, Anna Bågenholm’s heart stopped for three hours and fifteen minutes. The twenty-nine-year-old medical student had been skiing off piste with two friends when she lost control of a ski, slid down a steep slope, crashed headfirst into an ice-covered stream, and broke through into the water. She found an air pocket to breathe, but after forty minutes she lost consciousness, and then her heart stopped beating. By the time rescuers pulled her out, performed CPR, and transported her to an operating room, her core had plunged to a beyond-dead 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit. An attending physician who had experience with severe hypothermia, however, began carefully to raise her temperature, believing that until she was both warm and dead, she was not truly dead. Four hours after she’d fallen through the ice, and more than three hours after it stopped beating, Bågenholm’s heart fluttered to life again. She awoke ten days later paralyzed from the neck down, but within a couple months she’d recovered almost completely.