Real Survival Stories - Walk in the Woods: Submerged in Icy Water

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Winter 2011 in New Hampshire. David Dwyer is at home in his study when he notices that his wife Kelly hasn’t come back from her walk in the woods. Strapping on his snowshoes, he heads out to look for her. The situation will prove far worse than David’s fears. Kelly isn’t merely lost or injured; she’s unconscious, clinging to life, submerged up to her neck in freezing water. Can she, quite literally, come back from the dead? A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. Written by Joe Viner | Produced by Ed Baranski | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound Supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Jacob Booth | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay, Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Ralph Tittley. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's February the 13th, 2011. In the woods of New Hampshire, just outside the town of Hookset, the beam of a flashlight weaves through the trees, making fleeting incisions in the darkness. Ranks of densely packed evergreens appear in its glare. Their trunks slender and pale, the slumped, bows stiffened with frost. 43-year-old David Dwyer, flashlight in hand,

staggers through the snow. His eyes, scouring the slivers of shadow. between the pines. His voice resonates through the dark forest, echoing the same two syllables. Kelly. Eventually David emerges into open space, a circular clearing covered in a blanket of pillowy white. Though it's not immediately obvious, this clearing is in fact a pond, frozen over and buried by snow. David stands at the pond's edge, his breath fogging the frigid night air. He points his torch beam towards the opposite bank, where the black mass of the forest stands out against the darkening sky. David calls out again. Once the echo of his own voice has faded, he listens, his ears pricked,

his senses sharpened to a fine point, and then he hears something. It sounds like a wounded animal ensnared, imbarbed wire, a throaty, feral groan. His pulse quickening, David directs another yell into the dark void that surrounds him. Again, he waits and again. Whatever that noise was, it didn't sound human, but it's not like I'm making a noise and then howl is, you know, calling back or a coyote's howling at the moon. There was a rhythm.

Something is answering. Me yelling Kelly is something is answering back, something, someone. The sound is primal, an expression of pure, animal distress. But it also seems to be answering him. Whenever David shouts Kelly's name, the sound comes back. David starts inching his way along the edge of the pond, following the direction of the sound. I just kept walking and trying to follow this animalistic noise, and enough time went by that all of a sudden my flashlight picks up this black hole in this frozen white landscape. David stares.

It looks like a blot of ink on a pristine page, a little circle of black against the surrounding white expanse. A hole in the ice. He trains the flashlight on it. And there, staring out from the hole, surrounded by freezing black wall. her face like a ghost is David's wife, Kelly. Her eyes look like you would think if you can envision an animal carp in a trap, this frantic wild animal-looking eyes.

And she opened her mouth and that noise that I've been hearing came out of her. Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes. If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Could you make the right choice? Welcome to real survival stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode we meet husband and wife David and Kelly Dwyer.

On a winter's evening in New Hampshire in 2011, David is at home in his study, when he notices that Kelly hasn't come back from her walk in the woods. Stripping on his snowshoes, he heads out to look for her. My mind is thinking, it's odd that she's not here. It's odd she's not on the path walking back, meeting me. So something is now wrong. But the situation is even worse than David fears. Because unbeknownst to him, Kelly isn't merely lost or injured.

She is unconscious, barely clinging onto life, submerged up to her neck in freezing. water. And I remember screaming, screaming, screaming for help. And that's really all I remember. That's my last memory of that day. As Kelly slipped into a hypothermic stupor, David will have to perform heroics to reach her in time. How will he get her out without risking his own life, too? What would be the consequences of Kelly's hours spent trapped beneath the ice? Can she, quite literally, come back from the dead? I'm John Hopkins, from the Noiser Podcast Network. This is Real Survival Stories.

It's the afternoon of Sunday, February 13th, 2011. In a sprawling area of woodland, about a mile outside the small town of Hookett, New Hampshire, Kelly Dwyer happily picks her way along a path through the evergreens. Bright winter sun slants through gaps in the trees, dappling the forest floor with shifting patterns of light and shade. Kelly, a dark-haired woman of 46, breathes in the cold, pine-resin-filled air and listens to the sound of the wind stirring the branches.

Trees are very symbolic to me, because in the winter here, the shadows in February are beautiful, incredible lighting. It does something different to the bones of the trees, the deciduous trees, when they've lost their leaves. You can see their skeletal structure, and I would always look out at that and just marvel. Kelly walks slowly, methodically lifting each snowshoe before placing it back down with careful precision. She takes periodic breaks, holding onto tree branches for support while she stops to recover strength.

Her body racked with deep heaving breaths. There was a time when Kelly wouldn't have struggled with exercise like this. But for the last few years, she has been battling a health condition whose symptoms, fatigue, muscle pain, nausea, have made it difficult for her to lead a normal, active life. For about three years prior to 2011, I had started to develop really mysterious physical symptoms. Slowly over maybe a year, I became really ill. And this was from someone who was extremely energetic,

very strong, determined, very healthy. And then things just started to slowly deteriorate. As the months passed, Kelly's health continued to decline. She and her husband David spent countless hours meeting with various specialists, but nobody seemed able to identify the cause. She was tested for MS, she was tested for cancer, she was tested for other neurological diseases, diabetes. She had monitors and halter monitors and every diagnosis seemed like, well, maybe that sounds

logical, only to have it rolled out and only her to keep getting sicker and sicker. About a year ago, after endless consultations and misdiagnoses, a doctor finally identified the mystery ailment. It was Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted via the bite of a tick, and which, if left untreated, can develop into a long-term chronic illness. Now, with a correct diagnosis and an intensive course of antibiotics, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel for Kelly.

But there are still good days and bad days. Today started off as a bad one. Earlier this morning, she barely had the energy to get dressed, let alone go outside. So it seemed like a positive sign when, in the early afternoon, she came to David and told him she felt strong enough to take a stroll through the woods. So for her to, in the early afternoon, to say, I'm going outside, I'm strapping on my snow shoes, and I'm going to the beaver pond, and I'm going for a hike was excellent news.

That was exciting. That's great. She's feeling good enough to just get out there and enjoy the sun and enjoy the day. David and Kelly have been married for almost 20 years. When they first met at a work conference back in the early 90s, David was a fresh-faced recent college graduate from small-town New Hampshire. Kelly was three years older, an ambitious young professional from Boston embarking on a career in social services.

Their spark was instantaneous. For me, I walked in, and it absolutely was love at first sight. She was actually working the registration table, and when I approached her, I actually stumbled on what my name was. To give her my name to get my name tag, I was just struck by her. And throughout the conference, as she spoke, and she did various things, and I realized,

wow, she's not only beautiful, but she's intelligent. I was struck by how his eyes first looked almost like deep, soulful eyes, but he also was so kind. And there was just something about him that seemed to be in alignment with how I want to show up, is being kind, to be empathetic and to be sort of insightful regarding people. Despite the mutual attraction, the timing proved problematic. Both were seeing other people, and they left the conference with nothing but a sense of what might have been. Six months later, Fate handed them another chance. I went back again for another conference in September, and as Fate would have it, we were both single at that point.

So we ended up hanging out outside of the conference, going out to dinner. It was at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire, so the second night we were walking on the beach, and I told her I was already falling in love with her. Fortunately, David's forwardness didn't scare Kelly off, and it didn't take long before the feeling was reciprocated. The pair got married, had two daughters, Laura and Catherine, and moved to the town of Hooks at New Hampshire,

just north of where David grew up in Manchester. They built their home from the ground up after purchasing a plot of land that abuts a large, wooded conservation area. It's a beautiful nook, this little parcel, this little two acres of the world. We refer to it as our sanctuary. We just love being outside, putting in the gardens, getting our hands dirty. As nature lovers, David and Kelly have deliberately built their home to coexist with the natural environment. Their backyard slopes seamlessly into the woods, connected by a single footpath. In the winter, when the ground is covered by snow, any distinction between the Dwyer's property

and the conservation area beyond it is erased, obliterated by single unifying carpet of white, such that it becomes impossible to tell where their sanctuary ends and where unforgiving wilderness begins. It's about three in the afternoon. Kelly follows a path through the woods to the edge of a frozen pond. This is one of her favorite places on earth. On days when her health permits it, she likes to come out here to watch the birds through her binoculars,

the finches, robins and woodpeckers that roost in the trees around the water. The pond itself is home to a family of beavers. Their lodges, dome-shaped dens, constructed from sticks and mud, rise above the frozen surface like primitive bunkers. And I remember that day being just brilliant, brilliant sunshine on the snow over the pond, and I did not have sunglasses. And trying to look at the glare of the snow, it almost seemed like there was millions of, like, little bright lights that were dancing. Kelly steps on to the thick ice and heads to the right.

This is the route she normally takes across the frozen water. A path of trampled snow tells her where to place her feet, where she knows the ice is strong enough to support her featherweight 115 pounds. She knows to avoid areas of the pond where the beavers are most active, as the ice here is likely to have been weakened over time. They store or cash their food for the winter near the lodge, not right adjacent to the lodge, but usually about 10 or 12 feet away. They anchor those large branches into the mud,

and I know that there's weak ice around that because of the activity of coming in and out of the lodge. So I knew to give that area a wide berth. Kelly takes another few steps forward. At this point, it's hard to say exactly what happens next. Kelly herself can't say for sure. Maybe she pauses, lifting her head to admire the treetops above the opposite bank.

Maybe a bird flies over, distracting her for a single critical second, pulling her attention away from the ice beneath her feet. So something must have compelled me to either step forward or step backward off of that. I think probably about five feet from my usual blaze trail. Whether something flew over and I took a step forward or back to look at it with my binoculars, I don't know why I went off that safe trail. All anyone can say for sure is it when Kelly puts her foot down,

There is a loud crack, a sudden lurch of weightlessness, and a paralyzing shock of cold as she plunges vertically through the ice and disappears beneath the water's inky black surface. As her muscles tighten and contract, Kelly acts quickly. She kicks off her heavy metal snowshoes and flings her forearms onto the solid ice trying to heave herself back up. But the slippery, unstable edges, coupled with the numbing effects of the cold, make this action impossible. Kelly reaches into her coat and pulls out her cell phone, but it must have shorted out after hitting the water. The screen is black and unresponsive.

She grips the edge of the hole and gasps for breath, fighting to maintain a sense of clarity against the dizzying effects of the extreme cold. I remember screaming toward a development past a wooded area near the pond, and I remember screaming, screaming, screaming for help to the point when my voice went hoarse. And that's really all I remember.

That's my last memory of that day. It's about 5 p.m. in the Dwyer household. Shafts of late afternoon sunlight filter softly through the sash windows as David Dwyer potters about his study. Somewhere his daughter Laura is practicing her flute. In another room, 12-year-old Catherine is finishing some homework. Aside from these little pockets of activity, the house is a hush of calm.

Shadows lengthen across well-worn floorboards. Warm air murmurs from heating vents. It's a normal relaxing Sunday. Not a lot of care in the world. There was no errands to run. There was no commitments to honor. It was just a nice, relaxing, beautiful Sunday type you hope you get every now and then so you can just rejuvenate.

David is in his study, getting some things ready for work in the morning when his daughter Catherine pokes her head into the room. She wants to know where her mum is. Shouldn't she be home by now? David glances at the time. Kelly had a routine where she'd walk out to the beaver pond and go for a hike around the woods and would try to always end around dusk

to see all the various birds that would roost for the night. She came to know which birds were going into which tree at night. So she would stay with her binoculars until, you know, everybody went into their hole and roosted for the night and then she'd come back home. David reassures Catherine that he wouldn't expect Kelly home before dusk, but he turns back to his computer. But a short while later, Catherine comes back into the room. Her forehead creased with concern.

Catherine came in and said, well, shouldn't Mom be home by now? And when I looked, it was dark. And yes, she should have been home by now. Now this is odd. The sky beyond the window is a deep indigo, slowly transitioning into black. David tells his daughter not to fret. He's sure everything's fine. But you'd still better go out to look for Kelly.

She may have lost track of time. David puts on his coat, hat and gloves. He straps on his snow shoes and grabs a flashlight. Then he opens the door and steps out into the gathering gloom. David walks purposefully, but not with any great urgency. There is no immediate reason to be concerned for Kelly's well-being. But as he steps into the shadows of the trees, night seems to steal over him all at once.

By the time I got out of our yard into the woods, it was dark now. There's no fooling myself that the sun is going down and there's a little light. It was downright dark. The beam of David's flashlight probes the darkness as he trudges deeper into the snow-laden woods. Slender trunks and spindly branches loom on either side of the footpath.

Any second now, Kelly will surely appear around a corner, apologizing for causing any unnecessary concern. But the further David walks, the less sure this becomes. Halfway from our house to the beaver pond, I started yelling her name just in case she had fallen somewhere. And again, my mind is thinking it's odd that she's not here. She's not on the path.

It's odd she's not home yet, but it's odd she's not on the path walking back meeting me. So something is now wrong. Could she have tripped and sprained an ankle? Kelly's battle with Lyme disease can leave her feeling weak and unsteady on her feet. David quickens his pace until eventually he reaches the pond. It wasn't until I got all the way to the pond's edge that no Kelly. And this is not good. It would make sense she's on the path.

My brain is thinking logically she's on the path, she's walking back. Even if she broke her leg, she's on the path. So now that I'm at this pond surrounded by woods, where is she? Where could she be? David stands at the edge of the pond, shining his light's beam out across the frozen surface. He shouts Kelly's name. His voice gruff with anxiety. And it's pitch blackout.

So as I'm yelling, I yell her name again, this noise to the right way off in the distance. comes back. It's hard for me to describe. I can't describe it. I can't mimic the noise. The best I could describe it was an animalistic noise coming from the dark over to the right on the pond. He strains his ears.

It sounds like a wounded animal, except it seems to be answering him, calling back whenever he shouts Kelly's name. Whatever that noise was, it didn't sound human, but it's not like I'm making a noise and then howl is calling back or a coyote's howling at the moon. There was a rhythm, something is answering me yelling Kelly is something is answering back, something, someone. With shaky hands, David takes out his phone. I called the house Laura picked up and I told Laura call 911. And Lara, the poor 14-year-old is what's wrong?

I said, I don't know, I haven't found mom yet, but something's wrong. Call 911 when they get to the house, tell them how to take the path down to the pond, and I'm going to the right. Tell them when they get to the pond to go to the right. And she said, okay, and we hung up. David slides the phone back into his pocket. Then flashlight poised and ears pricked. He starts edging carefully around the snowy bank.

I just kept walking and trying to follow this animalistic noise, and enough time went by that all of a sudden my flashlight picks up this black hole in this frozen white landscape. It looks like a blot of ink on a white page, a six-foot wide hole in the ice. And staring out from it, a stricken face ghostly pale, is Kelly. Her eyes look like you would think you can envision an animal caught in a trap. This frantic, wild, animal-looking eyes. And she opened her mouth and that noise that I had been hearing came out of her. So with her, it was just awful.

To see her and hear that noise come from her. She was conscious. Obviously, she's making the... this noise, but she wasn't there. She wasn't looking at me. She was an animal cart in a trap. David stands at the edge of the frozen pond, his torch beam aimed at a six-foot wide hole in the ice. Kelly stares into the glare like a deer caught in the headlights, her shockingly pale face framed by the dark water that surrounds it. The cold has drained the blood from her skin, leaving it mottled and translucent as tracing paper, revealing the blue veins and arteries beneath.

Her sodden hair is plastered against her skull in lank, oil-black strands. Her eyes are wide, but they're vacant, unseeing. David fumbles for his cell phone. I called the house real quick, and Laura said, I call 911. They're on the way. I said, call them back. She said, but I already called them. I said, just call them back. and tell them, mom's in the water.

They've got to be prepared to water rescue. They've got to get her out of the water. They've got to come prepared. He hangs up. While on the phone, David has managed to unbuckle his snowshoes. Now he steps gingerly onto the pond's frozen surface and inches towards Kelly. The ice creaks menacingly beneath his weight. I'm now standing on ice.

I could fall through ice too, and how am I going to get to her? So I just laid down, put my body flat, and then slowly inched over towards the hole. David spreads his weight as evenly as he can. He calls out reassurances to Kelly, letting her know that he's coming. The deep snow piles into David's face as he bellies his way across the ice, squirming and wriggling, dragging himself by the elbows. Eventually, he reaches her. I reached down into the hole and just grabbed her by the back of the collar by her coat.

She still had her red winter coat on. I could see it sticking out of the water, so I just grabbed her collar of her coat and had her, grabbed her. David pulls Kelly to the edge of the hole, his gloved hands gripping the saturated fabric of her coat. The freezing water soaks through the down. of his winter jacket. Within seconds, his blood has turned to ice. It raises a terrifying question. How long has Kelly been submerged? How could she have survived more than a few minutes in water this cold? David wraps his arms around Kelly's chest and tries to hoist her out. But it's no use. You can't reach in a hole lying down on snow and magically pick somebody up and pluck them down,

So I couldn't get her out that way. I didn't know what to do. He lies there, prostrate on the ice. His wife, a dead weight in his arms. Since David reached her, Kelly seems to have lost whatever remnant of consciousness she had left and is now threatening to slip out of his grasp. She's totally unconscious now,

and she would have just slipped under, under this black, this black ink and just disappeared. So I had to pull her up because her head is now passed out, tilting forward. I had to hold her out of water higher to keep her face from pitching forward into water. David holds on tight, constantly shifting and readjusting his grip as his wife's head flops around limp. Having established that pulling Kelly out from this position is physically impossible, David must come up with another solution. He soon arrives at a radical one.

I thought, all right, I'll slip into the hole. I'll go in and I'll push her out. That would have been a very bad plan, but that's what I was about to do when I could see in the woods and hear, I could hear voices and flashlights. David looks up. Beams of light weave through the trees

as a team of firefighters barrel through the forest towards the pond. It's hard to say how long it's been since he spoke to Laura, but it can't be more than 15 minutes. The firefighters soon reached the spot on the bank where David dropped his flashlight. He can see that one of them is dressed in what looks like scuba gear, a full-body dry suit. Three firefighters make their way over to David and Kelly. The one in the dry suit slips into the water and wraps Kelly in a bear hug.

there is a rope tied around his waist and the two firefighters on the ice hold the other end of it. The next step is to pull them out. The firefighter in the water is looking at me saying I've got her, you can let her go. He had to say it again. He might even had to say it three times.

And the third time was very kind and gentle looking at me saying, trust me, I have her. You can let her go. So I did. It's a few minutes later. The rescue team carries Kelly through the woods on a stretcher. David walks in front, illuminating the footpath with his flashlight.

The whole walk I have this illusion, she's going to be fine. Because when they pulled her out of the hole and they're strapping her down, I heard one of the firefighters turned to the other two. He wasn't talking to me. He was talking the other two. She has a pulse. So the whole walk back, I'm thinking. well, you have a pulse, right? You have a pulse. A chocolate, warm shower. We'll be laughing

about this in an hour, in our house. All will be well and all will be right in the world. But when they reach the backyard, David's wishful thinking evaporates. Instead of carrying Kelly inside the house, the firefighters rush it at the driveway where they load her into the back of an ambulance. David watches helpless as his wife is whisked out of sight. The scene in front of the house is chaotic. There must be half a dozen vehicles parked here. Police cars, fire engines, ambulances, a tumult of wailing sirens and red and blue flashing lights. Worried neighbours cluster around the foot of the drive, craning their necks.

David stands in the middle of it all in a state of shock. A firefighter comes over to him and starts asking questions about what happened. But David can't focus. He pushes past the firefighter and staggers over to the ambulance. The rear doors are closed, so he peers in through the window. And when I looked into the ambulance, there was three firefighters leaning over this naked body of white translucent human skin giving her CPR. And another firefighter has a mask on her face pumping air into her.

nose and mouth. David watches horrified as the emergency workers try to resuscitate Kelly. None of this makes any sense. He heard the firefighters say that Kelly had a pulse. From somewhere nearby, he hears a voice

telling him they're going to take Kelly to the nearest hospital. David asks if he can ride along in the ambulance, but the voice tells him there is no room. He'll have to drive himself. David pulls himself away from the scene in the ambulance and rushes to the house to speak to the girls. He explains that their mom is being taken to the hospital and asks if they want to come.

The girls both took a step back and no, we'll wait here. I could see it in their eyes, even though I didn't even tell them what I just saw. Basically, Kelly's dead. They're giving CPR. The only reason you get CPR is because your heart's not pumping. If your heart's not pumping, you're not alive. I can't say any of that. As David struggles to find the right words, Laura steps towards him, her voice full of comforting reassurance.

Laura said, Dad, she came, approached me and put her hands on my arms and said, Mom's going to be okay. And I had to decide, do I give her that big of a false sense of security or my brain was just firing fast and making decision fast. So I just looked at Laura and said, I don't know she's going to be all right. This is serious. And that's all I said. And Laura took a step back and said, and get going, as if she now believes I'm going to go save for mom.

It's about half an hour later. David runs through the brightly lit corridors of the emergency room at Elliott Hospital in Manchester. Eventually, he finds the room where Kelly is being treated. I just leaned against this wall staring at this room in front of me, and there's Kelly on a hospital emergency room bed with 1215. I don't know, a lot of hospital people running around, a lot of monitors, a lot of tubes in her all of a sudden. As David stands there, his back against the wall,

everything becomes a blur, the blinking monitors, the tubes pumping warm water into Kelly's bloodstream, the swift, precise movements of the medical staff. The sense of powerlessness is overwhelmed. But David's not going anywhere. Kelly and I know each other very well. She's in the love of my life. Ever since the day I met her,

she would not want to be alone. It's that simple. Soon, David is joined in the hospital by Kelly's parents who have driven up from Massachusetts. His own mother is here too. They sit in the waiting room, anxiously awaiting news. David, meanwhile, remains in the ward, unwilling apart from Kelly. Hours pass, and still the CPR continues. The heart monitor beside Kelly's

bed registers an ominous flat line. No trace of electrical activity. No trace of life. She hasn't had a heartbeat for two hours, and I'm watching everybody trying everything. And this person, nurse, doctor, I'm not sure which was approaching me out of the corner of my eye coming up to tell me something and I could feel dread of probably saying we've tried everything. As the medic approaches, David braces for the worst, but she doesn't deliver the bad news he's expecting. She explains that while they've done everything they can here at this hospital, there is another hospital nearby with a larger and better equipped cardiac team. They'd like to move Kelly there to try one last procedure.

to save her life. But before they do, they need David to sign off on it. If you give us permission to send Kelly over there, they're going to try to warm her heart with bypass to try to warm her blood to try to start her heart there. And I remember just so, what an odd question. They need my permission. I immediately said, well, yes, do that.

You have a plan. Let's do that. that. And she said, okay, we're going to do that right now. And as she walks away, I'm just like, why would they have asked that? And I realized, because she's dead, they needed permission to keep trying. It's the early hours of the morning of February the 14th, 2011. A quiet night at the CMC Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire. Then all of a sudden, an ambulance screeches up to the entrance of the ER. A female patient is wheeled through the doors and whisked to the ICU where a team of specialist heart doctors swarm around her. As they begin prepping the patient's

unconscious body, the doctors exchange worried glances. They have already been briefed on the patient's condition. She has suffered a cardiac arrest triggered by hypothermia and continued attempts to restart her heart have failed. Even after efforts to warm her, the patient's internal body temperature sits at an unsurvivable 27 degrees Celsius, or about 10 degrees below normal. Their last recourse is a cardiopulmonary bypass, a surgical procedure in which the blood is removed from the body, warmed up, then pumped back into the patient's veins. The chances that it will work are vanishingly slim. So she arrived at CMC with no brainwave and no heartbeat, and they're looking at the clock going,

this is over three hours, three hours of CPR, and we're hooking her up to a bypass machine, and they were like, why are they sending this? They questioned why they would send this poor woman over here in this condition. Despite the grim prognosis, the cardiac team gets to work. About an hour later, one of the doctors steps into the waiting room where David and his family members sit in agonizing uncertainty. David jumps to his feet, nerves. shredded. But this time the doctor has a positive update. The bypass worked. They have warmed Kelly up and they've got a heartbeat. It's still too soon to celebrate. The doctor warns the family that Kelly remains in a coma and will need to be kept on life support. David and the

others are allowed to go in and see her. She didn't look alive. She didn't look like Kelly, but she was alive. Her heart was pumping. She could not breathe on her own, but her heart was pumping on her own. And this is how she remains, through the next day and the next. For six days, Kelly is kept in this room

in the ICU hooked up to various machines and monitors. As well as raising her body temperature and restarting her heart, doctors have to pump water and pond muck from Kelly's lungs. Even if she does come out of the coma, there's a high likelihood that she will have sustained brain damage during those hours that she was medically dead. Throughout it all, David seldom leaves her side. I lived my life hearing she's not dead or happy how she's responding to this medicine, but her kidneys aren't working. And she still may not make it.

And me just looking at the doctor saying, you can finish your sentence. that way all you want, she's alive, and that's all I can go with, right? I can't deal with the what-ifs. It is several days later. In a room in the ICU, Kelly is lying in her hospital bed, hooked up to a confusion of tubes and wires, when suddenly her eyelids twitch. I remember opening my eyes and looking around and, wondering, what on earth? Where am I? What happened? And I thought my first thought was,

I must have got electrocuted. I have no idea why I thought that. Slowly, Kelly returns to life. She can't speak or move her arms and legs. But as the doctors fuss around her bedside, Kelly's eyes flit around the room, alert and conscious. Later, when a medic is asking David about her medication, Kelly, who is following the conversation, tries to interject. She mumbles inaudibly through her ventilator. David repeats the names of the medications, and Kelly confirms with the movement of her head. I must have nodded, and at that time, the neurologist stepped up to David and said, I can tell you right now I'm signing off on her. Her brain seems to be functioning fine, the fact that she can even process the question and provide

a somewhat garbled answer through the ventilator, I think that we feel pretty confident that she didn't suffer any lasting neurological issues to her brain or her cognitive abilities. Soon, doctors deem Kelly well enough to breathe on her own. They remove the ventilator, enabling her to speak. At this stage, Kelly still has no recollection of falling through the ice.

Not wanting to alarm her, David initially made up a story about an accident at home. But now that she's fully awake, he asks if she wants to know the truth. And so he started to tell me how he found me in the icy hole. And the nursing team came flooding into the room and they said, what's the matter, what's the matter? And David said, I was telling her what happened. And because my heart rate was high, the blood pressure, everything,

all of my vitals sort of went off the charts with the trauma of hearing what actually happened. Kelly might not have any conscious memory of the time she spent trapped under the ice, but she still carries the trauma. After several more days of monitoring, she is discharged from hospital and allowed to continue her recovery at home. It is a long and grueling journey. She spends many hours with a physical therapist, working to regain mobility in her hands,

which suffered extensive nerve damage. I'll never forget the first time about three months after my accident. A simple thing, like crossing my fingers, and I sobbed, and I thought, oh, my gosh. So I had adaptive utensils and things for quite a while, but I regained about 90% of the mobility and strengthened my hands. There's still some damage, but that's a small price to pay for being alive. Aside from some lasting nerve damage, Kelly continues to make a full recovery. It is a miraculous defiance of the odds. The medical staff estimate that she must have spent two hours in the pond

and that she probably only had minutes left to live when David found her. When reflecting on her survival, Kelly maintains that dying that night was simply not part of the script. My work on this planet was not done. I had two incredible young girls to continue to raise. I had a family, my parents, my siblings. there was still a lot of fun to be had. There was still a lot of incredible experiences,

and it was not my time because I still had things I wanted and had to do. Still, how differently things could have gone had David not acted so swiftly and so decisively. For Kelly, his actions that night simply reinforced something she already knew about her husband. He's somebody that really, he will have your back. He's the most trustworthy,

the insightful person I've ever met. And he seems to know what needs to be done, what someone's feeling before they may even know it. There are many others who played a role in Kelly's survival, the firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and doctors. For his part, when looking back at the whole ordeal, David's main feeling is one of gratitude and appreciation. For a community who rallied around when they most needed it.

There's just so many beautiful people. The woman who cleaned the room every day came in and dusted and mock found out that Kelly and I, whenever we're together, we have tea and toast every morning together. We make tea, we have toast with peanut butter on it, we sit, we talk, and we have tea and toast. And this beautiful, beautiful person who comes into the room every morning quietly and just cleans the room. and disappears, started showing up every morning with two cups of tea and two pieces of toast with peanut butter on it for Kelly and I. She knew Kelly was in a coma. She knew Kelly is not going to drink that tea or eat that toast, but she brought this normalcy to this awful situation. She just showed up every day and the nurses, the wonderful people, family, medical staff,

everybody. I look back at that just saying how wonderful people were. This is not a story about me. This is a story about the never give up spirit of a community and of a family and of people that are there to take care of each other. Nobody ever gave up on me. That's what the story is about. It's not me surviving this. I survived it because of the community and all members of my community. And that's a really a wide net that I cast. Never gave up on me. And we don't give up on each other. We shouldn't. Next time on real survival stories, we meet 24-year-old park ranger Andy Peterson. On April the 30th, 1998, Andy wakes up late. He decides to put off his list of chores and instead heads to Colorado's Roxburgh National Park for an invigorating

hike. It's a decision that will change his life forever. On the forested slopes of Carpenter's Peak, Andy is stalked and then attacked by an apex predator that seems intent on ending his life. Hunted, isolated and terrified, it appears certain that he will become the beast's next meal. That's next time on real survival stories. Listen right now without waiting and without ads by joining Noiser Plus.