Anna Bågenholm – 80 minutes in a frozen stream

Anna Bågenholm is a Swedish national who was born in the town of Vänersborg in 1970. She had always been a keen skier and would often go out after finishing her shift at the Narvik hospital in Norway were she was doing her internship. She had been skiing for so long she could be considered an expert and had never had any serious injuries or been stranded before on the mountains she knew so well.

One day on 20 May, 1999 when Anna was 29 years old, she was skiing on the mountains outside of Narvik with two of her colleagues, Marie Falkenberg and Torvind Næsheim, both of which were very experienced skiers. On this day Anna was skiing down a steep slope she had done many times before, but at one point lost control and started falling down the slope, landing hard on her back right on top of a frozen stream.

The surface ice cracked under her back and icy water began to fill her clothes. Her head and back were pulled under but her feet were still stuck above the ice which was about 8 inches thick. She tried to break free but her rigid ski boots were still stuck on top of the hole that opened up and she wasn’t able to pull herself out by her feet alone. Fortunately there was an air pocket that had formed under the ice from the impact and if she kept her face close enough to it could just manage to get enough air to breath.

It wasn’t long before her colleagues realised she had gone out of sight and went looking for her, finding nothing more than a pair of skis poking out a hole in the ice. They tried to free her but had nothing on them capable of breaking 8 inches of ice, and they couldn’t get close enough to safely pull her out.

Seven minutes after she first went under Marie Falkenberg and Torvind Næsheim called for help and police lieutenant Bård Mikalsen took the call. He immediately organised two search teams, one to start from the top of the mountain and the other from the bottom. He also called the Bodø rescue team as he knew they had a rescue helicopter, but was told it was being used to transport a sick child.

After being very persistent he managed to get the helicopter to turn around and get involved in the rescue. Meanwhile Anna’s colleagues were holding on to her skis in the hope they may stop her going that little bit deeper, but they both suspected that she was probably already dead at this point. The rescue team starting from the top of the mountain arrived first but had nothing capable of breaking the ice, and their attempt to pull her out with a rope was unsuccessful.

When the team dispatched from the bottom of the mountain arrived they had with them a strong pointed shovel. After a short while of hacking away at the ice they managed to make a hole just big enough to pull her through, at which point she had been under the water for 80 minutes. After she had been under the ice for 40 minutes she started to pass out from circulatory arrest, giving the rescuers little hope she would make it when they pulled her onto the surface.

There were two doctors in the rescue teams and both gave her CPR while they waited for the helicopter to arrive. At this point she wasn’t breathing and her blood wasn’t circulating in her veins, but she also wasn’t dead so they did what they could until the helicopter arrived and took her to the Tromsø University Hospital which she arrived at within an hour.

(A seaking helicopter, used as a rescue vehicle by many European countries)

On the flight the rescue team gave her CPR and put on an oxygen ventilator, they also tried using a defibrillator to restart her heart after they believed it had stopped but were unable to revive her. When she arrived at the hospital her body temperature was only 13.7 °C, making her one of the lowest survived body temperatures in a human.

Dr. Mads Gilbert was the chief of the emergency room who worked on her and reported the following of her condition: “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 she was connected to showed no signs of life and everyone thought she was dead, but Dr Gilbert knew to always warm them back up again before making it official. Over the next 9 hours she was worked on by a team of more than 100 doctors and nurses who connected her to a machine that warms the blood up outside the body before putting it back into the veins.

She arrived at the hospital at 21:10, and it wasn’t until 22:15 that they recorded her first heartbeat. At 22:15 her body temperature was 36.4 °C and her body began to show signs of returning to normal. In the early hours of the morning her lungs shut down and she had to spend the next 35 days connected to a ventilator.

10 Days after the accident she woke up paralysed from the neck down, with no one being able to tell her if she’d ever recover or not. She initially thought she’d be that way for the rest of her life and was angry at her colleagues for saving her, however over the next few months she began to regain control of her limbs and later made an apology to them both.

She spent the 2 months after the accident in an intensive care unit as her kidneys and digestive system weren’t functioning properly. Apart from having minor damage to some of her organs and nerve damage which effects movement in her fingers, she has made a complete recovery and returned to work 140 days after the accident.