Charlie Smith
A BRITISH expat has said it was a ‘miracle’ that she survived after her heart stopped for six hours.
Doctors revived Audrey Schoeman, 34 after she developed hypothermia and went into cardiac arrest.
The Barcelona-based teacher was with her hubby, Rohan in the Pyrenees mountains, before the pair became trapped in a snowstorm.
According to Rohan, his wife started ‘talking nonsense’ until her eyes rolled back in her head and she stopped breathing.
Audrey’s body was airlifted to Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Hospital where doctors were shocked that her body temperature had plummeted to 18 °C — below half the normal level.
After the Brit was technically medically dead for six hours, medical experts called her case a ‘exceptional’.
Audrey has now spoken out about her miraculous survival after the incident at Vall de Nuria on November 3.
“It’s like a miracle except that it’s all because of the doctors.
“Probably this winter, I won’t go to the mountains, but I hope that in spring we’ll be able to start hiking again. I don’t want this to take away that hobby.”
In hospital doctors connected her to a machine that removes blood, reoxygenates it and pumps it back into the body.
“She looked as though she was dead, but we knew that, in the context of hypothermia, Audrey had a chance of surviving,” said Dr Eduard Argudo, who assisted Audrey.
“If she had been in cardiac arrest for this long at a normal body temperature, she would be dead.”
Audrey was discharged from hospital following a 12-day stint.
