Dr. Anna Bagenholm made medical history in May, but not in the operating room. She did it trapped under ice, without a pulse, as her body temperature dropped to the lowest ever recorded in a human being. 
 
 A survivor of the worst case of hypothermia ever seen, Bagenholm spoke with CBS Early Show Anchor Bryant Gumbel on Thursday. 
 
 Bagenholm, a 29-year-old doctor studying to become an orthopedic surgeon, was skiing a favorite trail of hers outside Narvik, Norway, with two friends, also young doctors. She usually skied after work. But her May 20 outing was anything but routine. 
 
 "I remember what happened two days before and after waking up, like two weeks after," Bagenholm says. 
 
 "I don't remember anything about the accident. I think that's really good," she adds. 
 
 That's because the accident was one that most would find terrifying: While navigating her skis around a waterfall, Bagenholm fell head first into the water and was trapped between ice and rocks. 
 
 As her companions held on to her skis and called for help on a mobile phone, frigid water doused the young woman. For 40 minutes she struggled, finding an air pocket and somehow remaining conscious. But then she was overcome, and her friends clung to her lifeless body. 
 
 When rescuers arrived, the young woman had been submerged for 80 minutes. She had no pulse, her blood wasn't circulating, and her pupils were very dilated. An emergency team started CPR until a helicopter arrived, and Bagenholm began the hour-long flight back to Tromso University Hospital. 
 
 That's where Dr. Mads Gilbert, an anesthesiologist and chief of Tromso's emergency room, took over. Thanks to Norway's harsh climate, Gilbert had seen severe cases of hypothermia before, and he says that he knew what to do. 
 
 "We took her to the operating room. We continued the resuscitation. We connected her to a bypass machine and gradually and carefully, the team would warm her up by warming up her blood," Gilbert says. "After some time, her heart started beating again and gradually her body temperature came up to normal." 
 
 Very gradually. Over 100 doctors and nurses worked for nine hours to bring Bagenholm back to life. 
 
 But even when her vital signs improved, the fight had just begun. Bagenholm woke up paralyzed, and her kidneys and digestive systems failed. She spent two full months in the intensive care unit. 
 
 Bagenholm suffered no brain damage. Gilbert thinks the subzero temperatures actually helped. "Her body had time to cool down completely before the heart stopped. Her brain was so cold when the heart stopped that the brain cells needed very little oxygen, so the brain could survive for quite a prolonged time." 
 
 But the accident has taken a permanent toll: Nerve damage prevents Bagenholm from having normal use of her hands and that will probably prevent her from finishing her surgical training. She has trouble writing and cooking, and can't rde her mountain bike. But she has returned to skiing and now works part time, doing paperwork and marveling at the medical miracle. 
 
 "When you are a patient, you're not thinking you are going to die. You think, I'm going to make it. But as a medical person, I think it's amazing that I'm alive,"she says. 
 
 ||||| NASAGoddardPhotoandVideo/flickr In May 1999, three junior doctors, Anna Bågenholm, Torvind Næsheim and Marie Falkenberg, were out skiing off-piste in the Kjolen Mountains of Northern Norway, near the town of Narvik. It was a beautiful evening, one of the first days of eternal sunshine at the start of the Arctic summer and the skiing had been good. They found themselves descending into a shaded gully called the Morkhala, a place they knew well and had a good covering of snow even late in the season. All three were expert skiers and Anna began her run confidently. But during the descent Anna unexpectedly lost control. Torvind and Marie watched from afar as she tumbled headlong onto a thick layer of ice covering a mountain stream. Anna slid across it on her back and then fell through a hole into the water. Her head and chest became trapped beneath the frozen surface. Her clothes began to soak, their extra weight carrying her deeper, dragging her downstream with the current and further beneath the ice. Anna's core temperature was measured at 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit—lower at that point than any surviving patient in recorded medical history. Torvind and Marie arrived at the spot just in time to grab her ski boots, stopping her from vanishing under the lip of the ice. Anna was lying face up with her mouth and nose out of the water, in an air pocket. She continued to struggle, freezing, in the Arctic stream. None of the three could have been in any doubt about the seriousness of the situation. Anna was trapped; her clothes soaked with ice-cold water; the stream carrying heat away from her body. Even in those first minutes her core temperature was beginning to plunge. Torvind called for help on his mobile phone, explaining the life-and-death predicament to the dispatcher. 
 
 As doctors, Torvind, Anna, and Marie had many friends and colleagues in the rescue services—the dispatcher among them. Firm in the faith that they would make every effort to expedite an emergency rescue helicopter or a mountain rescue team, Torvind returned to help keep Anna from slipping under the ice. Forty minutes after first becoming trapped, Anna’s desperate thrashing stopped and her body went limp. The hypothermia, now profound enough to anaesthetise her brain, would soon stop her heart. Another forty minutes passed before rescuers from the bottom of the mountain arrived, carrying with them a more substantial shovel, with a pointed tip that was finally able to break through the covering of ice. Eighty minutes had passed since Anna had first fallen into the water and her body was pulled clear of the stream limp and blue. She had stopped breathing and was without a pulse. We call what follows 'downtime'—the period from the moment of cardiac arrest until the point at which spontaneous circulation and breathing can be restored. In that interval, the process of dying begins. Before that comes the 'crash'. If your physiology has crashed, the processes that keep you alive have stopped working. As the resuscitation effort began on Anna’s body in the shadow of those Norwegian mountains, the challenge she faced looked insurmountable. She had been without a pulse for a long time and her core temperature was perhaps more than 20 degrees lower than it should have been. Torvind insisted that they continue their resuscitation attempts. Just before 8:00 p.m., more than an hour and a half after first falling into the stream, Anna was winched onto a helicopter. The struggle to save her life became a desperate scramble. Raising the whole body through those 42 missing degrees would take an enormous amount of energy—equivalent to the boiling of dozens of kettles of water. When the crew touched down at Tromso University Hospital, Anna’s heart had not beaten for at least two hours. Her core temperature was measured at 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit—42 degrees below her normal core, and lower at that point than any surviving patient in recorded medical history. This was genuine terra incognita. Any attempt to resuscitate Anna further could only proceed in the knowledge that in similar situations past medical teams had always failed.
– When a skiing accident left her trapped in an icy mountain stream, Anna Bågenholm's core body temperature dropped to an astonishing 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit—and that may just have saved her life. The Atlantic this week printed an excerpt from Kevin Fong's book Extreme Medicine that recounts Bågenholm's incredible 1999 rescue in Norway. By the time a helicopter got Bågenholm to Tromso University Hospital, her heart hadn't beaten in two hours. But the team decided to try to resuscitate her anyway, on the theory that the extreme cold might have preserved her brain. To raise her body the required 42 degrees quickly and safely, doctors extracted her blood with a heart-lung bypass machine and heated it before recirculating it. Miraculously, her heart resumed beating, and 12 days later Bågenholm awoke. At first she was paralyzed, and she cursed doctors for not letting her die. But she'd suffered no spinal damage, only nerve damage, and slowly that recovered. Six years later she was able to ski again, and she's now a doctor at Tromso. "Doctors exploited Anna Bågenholm's profound hypothermia to successfully resuscitate her." Fong concludes. She is "living proof that extremes can cure as well as kill." Bågenholm's case was extensively covered at the time as well; in 2000 she told CBS that "as a medical person, I think it's amazing that I'm alive."