A Toddler is Miraculously Fine after 101 Minutes of CPR

creek

It doesn’t take a lake, ocean or pool for a child to drown. It takes but a few drops of water to cause a child to drown; and the consequences of that are going to affect you for the rest of your life. Children are not always capable of recognizing what it means to be near water. They don’t know that they are so susceptible to water and that something they probably enjoy is something that could have such a serious impact on their health and life. For many, the fear is all consuming. For others, it’s a very “it’ll never happen to me,” moment. For a 22-month-old Pennsylvania boy and his family, the unthinkable really happened – followed by a miracle no one can explain. On March 11, a little boy by the name of Gardell was playing outside on his family’s 5-acre property with his two brothers when he somehow ended up in the nearby creek. It took his family and a search party a half hour to find the little boy’s lifeless body nearly a half mile away caught in the branches and stuck in the water. The water was a bone-chilling 34 degrees.

When paramedics arrived on the scene, the little boy was dead. They rushed him to the hospital, performing CPR on his lifeless body without interruption for 101 minutes. He had no brain function, no pulse and he was not breathing.  He was dead. It was only after 101 minutes of CPR that the little boy’s pulse returned. He has since made a full recovery. Many believe it was the prayers of his family that bought the boy back to life almost two hours after he died, but doctors say it was a little bit of a medical miracle and a miracle miracle. According to doctors, the boy’s very low body temperature (75 degrees) put him into a hypothermic state that allowed the CPR to work after the boy died. It wasn’t until his body temp reached 82 degrees that doctors found a pulse and brought him back to life.

A miracle? It depends on who you ask, but we think that it was certainly a form of divine intervention that brought this very young boy back to life after drowning in his family’s creek. It’s the happy ending that defines all happy endings.

Photo by Lindsey Wasson/The Seattle Times-Pool/Getty Images

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