The Surgeon Who Carried Her Through

In 2011, a three-year-old girl named Elise fell into a frozen pond in rural Minnesota. By the time paramedics pulled her from the water, she had no pulse. Her core temperature had dropped to 60 degrees. By every clinical measure, she was gone. Dr. Frank Gruber at Hennepin County Medical Center refused to give up. For nearly six hours, his team worked to warm her blood one degree at a time, circulating it outside her body and back in again.…