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Contributor: Stefani Allegretti. Lesson ID: 13272
Have you ever wondered what happens in the body when someone drowns? Learn about the anatomy of drowning and the true story in Breakthrough of someone who drowned and came back to life!
That is a grim statistic from the CDC. Fortunately, not all incidences of drowning are fatal. There are some incidences of people surviving drowning that completely defy medical explanation!
One such incident is a 14-year-old boy named John Smith, who drowned in freezing waters while playing on a frozen lake in Missouri. John was underwater for more than 15 minutes, yet survived!
In this lesson, you'll learn the hows and whys of what happens to the human body when it experiences drowning through the true story of John Smith, captured in the film Breakthrough.
Let's begin!
What is drowning?
Drowning is when someone suffocates because they are submerged in a liquid, usually water. When suffocation occurs, it means that the body does not get enough oxygen, which it needs to survive.
For a better understanding, watch the following video.
Different processes occur in the human body when it drowns. This lesson will focus on the three listed below.
View this clip from the film Breakthrough to see what happened when John Smith fell through the frozen lake into the icy water.
As you saw, this event was quite tragic and scary. John Smith falls into water below 32° Fahrenheit, which means it's freezing. At first, John can move around in the water, but then he begins to experience hypothermia.
Hypothermia occurs when the body temperature drops below 35° Celsius or 95° Fahrenheit and the body loses heat faster than it can produce it.
When the body is in a state of hypothermia, it intuitively starts to move all of the oxygen-containing blood away from the body's extremities (toes, fingers, feet) to vital organs like the heart and the brain. After all, the human body can't survive without those important organs!
Watch this next video to learn more about hypothermia.
When someone drowns, the body also experiences hypoxia, which is a medical term that means severely deprived of oxygen.
The brain, heart, and cells all need oxygen to work properly and to keep the human body alive. Medical science tells us that brain cells begin to die if the brain is deprived of oxygen for just one minute.
Look at the table below for a quite summary of What You Need to Know About Brain Oxygen Deprivation.
| Time Without Oxygen | Effect on the Body |
| after 1 minutes | brain cells begin to die |
| after 3 minutes | brain cells are damaged further |
| after 10 minutes | coma and permanent brain damage likely |
| after 15 minutes | survival becomes nearly impossible |
When hypoxia and hypothermia occur, the body shuts down. The heart doesn't pump as effectively and eventually stops altogether. This is called cardiac arrest.
This happens when John becomes unconscious in the water. At this point, his heart has stopped pumping blood, his lungs have filled with water, and presumably, his brain cells have started to die due to lack of oxygen.
This is typically what would happen to the body when someone drowns in freezing water, especially if they've been underwater for more than 15 minutes.
John is eventually rescued by first responders, who pull him out of the icy water and perform CPR. Watch a brief Breakthrough clip showing this rescue.
John Smith not only survives the scary experience of drowning and all the processes that occur when that happens, but he miraculously suffered no permanent brain damage.
Now, move to the Got It? section to see how much you remember about what happens in the human body during drowning.
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