In recent news, an almost-two-year-old little boy was revived nearly two hours after falling into icy thirty four degree waters and being swept a quarter mile downstream. Once he was found after maybe half an hour in the water, he wasn’t breathing and also didn’t have a pulse. As soon as emergency responders arrived they started CPR, a pretty standard procedure especially for people without breathing/pulse in drowning situations. CPR continued on the way to the hospital, but the boy still didn’t have a pulse when they got there and his body temperature was a startling 77 degrees (normal is 98.6, and humans aren’t very tolerant of big body temperature changes). Resuscitation attempts continued as doctors also gave him fluids in an attempt to raise his body temperature. Doctors decided to put him on a heart bypass machine as well. Twenty minutes later, they could finally detect a pulse. After an hour and forty one minutes and many many helpers, the child’s heart was finally beating on its own. Eventually his body temperature also normalized so doctors were able to give him blood pressure medication and also put him on a ventilator to maintain breathing. The boy actually woke up early the next morning and miraculously made it out with no neurological damage. Five days later he was able to leave the hospital and is now completely back to normal, as the healthy and happy little two year old he should be.

So how did such a small child survive such an ordeal? How did his little body (and brain especially) escape unscathed? Well scientists are saying it’s actually because of his young age as well as the extreme temperature of the water. Drowning/staying submerged in water can be extremely damaging to your brain and heart due to the lack of oxygen. But, really cold water triggers the “diving effect” that helps the body conserve oxygen by slowing down your heart and shifts blood flow to other important parts of the body. Funnily enough, this effect is actually a lot stronger in kids than it is in adults. Being in and also swallowing cold water are known to trigger things like hypothermia. But at body temperatures below 86 degrees, the brain’s tissues become less susceptible to hypoxia because oxygen and energy consumption becomes reduced by almost half. The body’s regulatory mechanisms aren’t fully developed in young children such as this boy. This is one way his age could have also been detrimental. And not only do children have less developed body systems, but also a much higher surface area to body mass ratio as well as less fat than adults. These factors put together mean that they will cool much faster than an adult in addition to their less efficient thermoregulation. The human body is full of amazing regulatory mechanisms that keep us functioning second to second and day to day. We really take most of them for granted because they seem so simple and trivial, yet there are still so many that most people don’t even know about and all of which we would be totally doomed without.