SHOCK SURVIVAL
How 7 kids who died for SIX HOURS after icy boat crash came back to life
SEVEN schoolkids who died for SIX hours after their boat capsized in icy water on a school trip came back to life when doctors warmed up their blood, in the first case of its kind.
The teenagers had been dead - they weren't breathing and their hearts stopped beating - for two hours when they were pulled out of a freezing fjord in Denmark by rescuers, with "ice cold" skin.
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Blood heated up 1C every 10 minutes
Although their chances of survival seemed non-existent, they were raced to hospital - where medics slowly heated up their blood, one degree every 10 minutes.
This is usually done using a hemodialysis machine which filters the blood and warms it in stages.
And incredibly, after four hours of treatment, their hearts all began to beat again.
The teens' extraordinary story of survival is told in a BBC documentary, Back From The Dead, which features new interviews with young survivors and emergency workers.
Survivor Katrine, who was just 16 at the time, recalls: "When I came up from the water, the nightmare began. Everybody was screaming and everything was unreal.
"You could just see the panic."
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How horror struck on school trip
The tragedy unfolded during a school trip in 2011, when Katrine, her 12 schoolmates and two teachers took to Præstø Fjord, on the island of Zealand.
The group set sail at 11am - but just 20 minutes later, horror struck when the human-powered vessel capsized in high winds, plunging them into the 2C water.
"It was so freezing - it was so cold. And there was ice on the water," says Katrine, breaking down in tears as she returns to the fjord where she nearly died, eight years on.
"The teacher said that we had to swim in, because else we would die," she adds. "You could just see the panic."
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Kids told to 'swim or die'
With no phone or radio to raise the alarm, the kids knew their only choice was to swim to shore. But they were hundreds of metres from land - and not all of them could.
"I couldn't swim," recalls schoolboy Casper.
"One of my friends came over to me and tried to help me."
But by that point, his heart had stopped beating, and along with six others his body floated in the icy lake until they were rescued, while one of the teachers tragically drowned trying to rescue pupils.
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But Katrine and two others managed to make it to shore.
Despite suffering from severe hypothermia and cramping legs, the teenager swam until she eventually stumbled on to land - but found herself lost in a forest.
'I thought, "OK, now I'm going to die"'
"It was really hard because you didn't have any strength in your legs," Katrine, now in her mid-20s, recalls in the short documentary. "And I kept falling down."
She adds: "In that moment, that was where I thought 'OK, now I'm going to die'. "
Yet unbeknown to Katrine, her schoolmate Line had already reached the shore and run more than a mile to Præstø, where she had alerted the emergency services.
When she spotted a rescuer approaching, Katrine was overwhelmed by relief.
"When I saw him, I was screaming so loud," she says.
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How teens' low body temperatures saved them
But for her classmates still stranded in the fjord, the situation looked bleak.
Dr Steen Barnung, who was called to the tragedy, recalls one rescuer repeating the same terrifying words over and over: "They're all dead, they're all dead."
However, Dr Michael Jaeger Wansche, of Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, says that the teenagers' incredibly low body temperatures actually gave doctors hope.
This is because, in their state of extreme hypothermia, the kids' metabolic processes slowed down and the cells in their body didn't require as much oxygen as normal.
Therefore, their brains didn't suffer the usual irreparable damage caused by the heart stopping beating.
While a normal core body temperature is 37C, Casper's dropped to 17.5C.
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'You have to be warm to be dead'
This extremely rare occurrence has been seen before.
In 1999, a 29-year-old Swedish woman was taken to hospital with a body temperature of just 13.7C after she went into cardiac arrest while trapped under ice for 80 minutes.
She looked "absolutely dead" - but after her blood was warmed up, she survived.
The phenomenon has led some experts to declare you "have to be warm to be dead".
Of the fjord incident, Dr Jaeger Wansche recalls: "They're clinically dead young teenagers... [but] when you are as cold as they were, we know that we can resuscitate.
"They are dead but not really dead. We still have a chance."
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Children's remarkable recovery
He adds that medics "aimed at warming the blood one degree per 10 minutes".
And six hours after the accident, all seven children's hearts were beating again. Their families, who had been anxiously waiting for news at the hospital, screamed with joy.
Although there were fears that the youngsters' brains would be damaged, Dr Jaeger Wansche says in the documentary that "no abnormalities" were seen on scans.
However, from the time suggest that some of the seven - including Casper - did suffer life-changing brain damage including memory loss and epilepsy.
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Today, many survivors still suffer from the physical and psychological effects of the tragedy - which saw four of them receive medals for their bravery.
"When you have nearly died it's just - it is a little different," says Katrine.
"Mentally sometimes I get some breakdowns."
But she adds: "I'm really happy that I'm alive."
- The BBC documentary Back From The Dead is available online
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