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A toddler who "died" for 40 minutes and then came back to life has amazed doctors.
Two year-old Caleb Teodorescu's heart shut down after he was found floating face-down in the family's outdoor swimming pool in Phoenix, Arizona.
His frantic mother, Mihaela, found him and cried for help and a neighbour performed CPR on the lifeless child.
"He quite literally died outside the hospital," Dr Corey Philpot, a paediatric critical care physician at the Banner Thunderbird Medical Center in Glendale, told ABC News.
Caleb's mum described her devastation at the time: "I was crying out to God. I was saying, 'God you cannot take him from me!'"
At the hospital, Caleb was in a coma and on a breathing machine when Dr Philpot and his team got to work. They put him on blood pressure medication but their biggest worry was whether Caleb would suffer long-term brain injuries so doctors decided to slow down the boy's metablic rate with a process known as therapeutic hypothermia.
"Therapeutic hypothermia slows down the metabolic rate of the body and, in this case, of the brain," Dr Philpot explained.
"We cooled him down and put him in a cold hybernatory state to prevent ongoing brain injury."
After 24 hours doctors began the process of warming him up again. And they slowly re-warmed his body over four days they noticed an improvement in Caleb's heart condition.
About five days after he was admitted to the hospital, Caleb began to make a remarkable recovery.
"He started to move, and then his movements became purposeful, and then he opened his eyes. We could tell that he was on the quick road to recovery," Dr Philpot said.
Caleb's father, Ovy, said: "Our doctor told us in his 23 years of being with the hospital in the paediatric intensive care unit, they did not have a case like this. He said out of the good outcomes, Caleb is the best of the best of the best."
Caleb is now back at home and running around and playing like any other energetic two year-old.
What an incredible story!