How someone can pull through alive after their heart stopped for 6 hours is now a major talking point following the somewhat miraculous survival of a British woman at a Spanish hospital.
Audrey Mash was brought back to life after her heart stopped working and stayed so for 6 hours. The expectation was that her brain would have been irreparably damaged due to a lack of oxygen supply only that that did not happen.
So what saved her life?
Doctors who worked on her case say that the extremely low temperatures, 35 degrees below normal, body temperature helped save her. She is said to have suffered a cardiac arrest minus the low temperatures, she would have died.
“If she had been in cardiac arrest for that long with a normal body temperature, she would have died,” said Dr. Eduard Argudo, who helped treat her, as quoted by the New York Times.
She had been on a picnic on the Spanish Pyrenees with her husband when it started to rain, the USA today publication reported.
The extremely low temperatures plunged her body into a hypothermic condition, triggering cardiac arrest. Audrey Mash was quickly rushed to the Vall d'Hebron Hospital.
Rohan Schoeman, her husband, told members of the Spanish press that he thought that her wife would never make to live again.