Frozen solid. No pulse. Still alive. Anna Bågenholm #history #survival

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]In 1999, a woman had no heartbeat [music] for over an hour and still lived to tell the story.

[00:00:06]Anna Bågenholm was a 29-year-old Swedish medical student skiing in Norway [music] when she fell headfirst into a frozen stream. She found a small air pocket under the ice and held on.

[00:00:18]Her friends desperately tried to [music] free her but couldn't.

[00:00:21]For 80 minutes, Anna was submerged in near-freezing water. By the time rescuers [music] pulled her out, she was in cardiac arrest. No pulse. No breathing.

[00:00:32]Her core body [music] temperature had dropped to just 13.7° C, the lowest ever recorded [music] in a human who survived.

[00:00:40]Doctors at Tromsø University Hospital refused to give up. They connected her to a heart-lung bypass [music] machine and after 9 hours of resuscitation, her heart started beating again.

[00:00:52]She spent [music] 2 months in intensive care and had to relearn how to walk.

[00:00:56]During that time, she resented her friends for calling for help and saving her, but she made a near full recovery.

[00:01:02]She would later apologize [music] to her friends.

[00:01:05]The cold had essentially put her body on pause, not killed her.

[00:01:09]Her case transformed [music] how we treat hypothermia.

[00:01:13]The guiding principle it inspired, you're not dead until you're warm and dead.

[00:01:18]Anna Bågenholm went on to become a radiologist at the very hospital that saved her life.

[00:01:24]Follow for more stories about the impossible being proved wrong.