Clinically dead boy 'saw grandma in heaven'
A three-year-old boy brought back from the dead after his heart stopped beating for three hours has told how he allegedly saw his great-grandmother in heaven.
The youngster - who is named only as Paul - claimed he met his relative and she sent him back to Earth.
Paul was playing on his own when he fell into a lake near his grandparents' house in the town of Lychen, north of Berlin, Germany.
The child's grandfather later found him lifeless in the water.
Paul was quickly dragged to the shore but the youngster remained unconscious.
His father, who had had first aid training in the past, tried to resuscitate his son by giving him mouth to mouth and heart massage.
A helicopter took him to Helios hospital in Buch and doctors also tried to resuscitate him but he was unresponsive.
They were about to stop because the boy had been clinically dead for three hours and 18 minutes - but then a miracle happened.
The team managed to get his heart beating again, defying the laws of medicine.
The water in the lake was cold and the boy's core temperature was just 28C - it should normally be 37C.
If the temperature had been higher, the team would have stopped trying to resuscitate after 40 minutes because the boy would definitely have been brain dead.
Cold temperatures means the metabolism slows so body can survive with little oxygen.
Professor of Paediatrics, Lothar Schweigerer, is from the Helios hospital in Buch.
"My doctors were close to saying 'we can do no more' after two hours of thorax compression," he told Sky News UK.
"The chances of survival had gone and the little lad must have been brain dead.
"Then suddenly his heart started to beat again, it was a fantastic miracle."
