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Toddler whose heart stopped for an hour makes 'miracle' recovery
A toddler whose heart stopped for nearly an hour after he fell into a ditch of freezing water has made a remarkable recovery.
Published: 6:07PM BST 10 Sep 2010
Gore Otteson was without a heartbeat for between 50 to 55 minutes after he wandered away from the family holiday cabin and ended up face down in an irrigation ditch Photo: CATERS
Gore Otteson was without a heartbeat for between 50 to 55 minutes after he wandered away from the family holiday cabin and ended up face down in an irrigation ditch. His parents were told there was a less than one per cent chance he would have any brain function. It is thought he had been under the ice-cold water for about 25 minutes before he was found and his rescuers began resuscitation.
His heart did not start for nearly half an hour after he was found and some at the Children's Hospital in Denver, Colorado, USA, where he was treated even questioned why life-saving efforts that took place continued as long as they did. However, now, weeks after the incident the 21-month-old has made a full recovery. His parents, Dave and Amy Otteson, from Lakewood, Denver, say doctors are without any explanation for their son's amazing progress and have hailed his complete recovery as "a miracle".
Mr Otteson said: "Based on the first day of physical therapy, if you would have said he would be walking out of the hospital three weeks later, we wouldn't have believed it," "Now he's the same kid that he was before the accident." Dr. Roger Sherman, ER doctor at Gunnison Valley Hospital, said that as well as the resuscitation efforts, a phenomenon called "mammalian dive reflex" was to thank for Gore's incredible survival.
In humans, especially youngsters, cold water causes the body's heart rate to slow, creating a kind of hibernation. Dr Sherman said: "There is an adage in emergency medicine that you're never dead until you're warm and dead and the kid was extremely cooled down." "In his case, because we were able to restart his heart with a drug called atropine, we decided not to warm him up. "It just took a couple days for his neurological system to come back."
