ABC news:
March 1, 2007 Doctors say they've never seen anything like it: A
little boy who was pronounced dead came back to life 30 minutes
later.
It all happened so fast. One minute 2-week-old Woody Lander was a
healthy little boy, the next he was turning white and struggling to
breathe.
His parents rushed him to the hospital in Leeds, England, in
December 2005.
"I just walked in to see poor Woody laid, spread-eagled on the
table with about 20 nurses and doctors all round him applying heart
massage and it was like that for 30 minutes," said Jon Lander,
Woody's father, on "Good Morning America."
The baby had a heart attack, and the doctor pronounced the baby
dead.
"He had to say they could not do anymore for poor Woody," Jon
said.
Woody's mother, Karen Lander, was overcome with emotion.
"They gave him to me to say goodbye. But
it was too much for me,"
she said. "I couldn't handle it so I gave him to Jon and just as
one of the doctors or the nurses was removing the tube from his
mouth he coughed. Woody coughed."
The doctors immediately went into action.
"One of the doctors, they didn't say anything. They whipped him out
of my arms and asked us to leave," Karen said.
The doctors got a pulse.
"His heart was beating," Jon said. "And the little fella came back
to life."
According to one doctor, children's natural resilience may have
accounted for what many are calling a miracle.
"It is true that children have a special resilience. They are
really not small adults," said Gregory Fontana of the Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles. "They have characteristics that
allow them to survive incredible circumstances."
"This case clearly represents nothing short of a miracle," Fontana
said.
Doctors say Woody, now 14 months old, seems absolutely fine after
his ordeal; it caused no brain damage and no lasting health
problems.
