A five-year-old girl awoke apparently fine from a five-day coma in an Afula hospital Thursday following her near drowning in Lake Kinneret. Doctors said she began breathing without the help of a life-support system, recognized her parents and showed no signs of brain damage.
The family, from Rehovot, had been vacationing near the lake last Sunday. Upon realizing the girl was missing, bathers searched the area. One searcher spotted her body and pulled it from the water. She had no pulse and had turned blue.
No trained medical personnel were available, but a boy on the shore recollected a demonstration he had seen on television and applied pressure to her chest until a Magen David Adom intensive care ambulance arrived. Six minutes elapsed before she received oxygen.
For five days the girl remained in a coma at the Emek Hospital, attached to life support machines. Doctors said her recovery without brain damage from a five-day coma, after six minutes without oxygen, is “extremely rare.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
