Extreme Medicine Read Free Page B

sequence of physiological events. She was as lifeless as Scott, hundreds of miles from help, trapped by ice, her heart at a standstill as seconds became minutes and minutes became hours. But she survived.
    In May 1999, three junior doctors, Anna BÃ¥genholm, Torvind Næsheim, and Marie Falkenberg, were out skiing off-trail in the Kjølen 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, which 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 farther beneath the ice.
    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.
    But after what seemed to Torvind like an interminable age of waiting, he rang the dispatcher again, this time demanding to know why nobody had yet arrived. “Yes, Torvind,” came the reply, “we are trying as hard as we can, but you must understand it takes more than three minutes to make these things happen.” To Torvind, fighting for Anna’s life, three minutes had seemed like eternity enough.
    Two rescue teams were sent; one from the top of the mountain, on skis, and another from the town of Narvik at its base. The ski team, led by Ketil Singstad, was the first to arrive, but they were lightly equipped, and their snow shovel wasn’t enough to break through the thick covering of ice. All they could do was lash a rope around Anna’s feet to help Marie and Torvind stop her from slipping farther beneath the ice.
    A Sea King helicopter had also been scrambled, but even traveling at over a hundred miles an hour, it would take more than sixty minutes to reach them and would take at least as long again to fly back to the nearest major hospital in Tromsø.
    Forty minutes after becoming trapped, Anna’s desperate thrashing stopped and her body went limp. The hypothermia, now profound enough to anesthetize 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.
    Singstad, leading the mountain rescue team, was already deeply pessimistic, believing that their efforts now could only succeed in retrieving the body of a dead friend. 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