we have a really touching story we want to share with you this morning. the girl in the flight suit you'll see is 13-year-old claire winland of california, and claire is terminally ill with cystic fibrosis, but her dream was to visit alaska, which she got a chance to do. >> she got a flight aboard a coast guard helicopter. rescue swimmers fit her with a flight suit that had her own name tag on it. she said the flight was amazing, invigorating. she was so proud she wore her flight suit on on the commercial flight back to california. cool to see people go out of their way, coast guard helping out to make a dream like that come true. coming up at the top of the hour, more live news here. "cnn sunday morning" continues. >> first, sanjay gupta, m.d., begins right now.

welcome to a very special edition of sgmd. i'm dr. sanjay gupta. if you want to save a life, you need to learn cpr. the american heart association has introduced some brand new guidelines the old way. check for a pulse. check for breathing. give artificial respirations, mouth to mouth. you can forget it. now if you see someone on the ground unresponsive, not breathing normally, you need to start pressing on their chest right away. it's not fancy, but it works. and it's part of something else. a big revolution in emergency care that's already having profoundly successful results. you're about to see it right here in my special report, "cheating death." >> christopher! >> 911, where's the emergency? >> middletown township. >> what's the problem? >> my son's not responding here. he's breathing. his eyes are open, but i don't know what's going on.

i don't know if he's snoring. >> is he awake and talking to you or not? >> no, he's not. >> hurry up! >> i'm gonna give you some instructions. just stay on the line. >> christopher was chris brooks, 22 years old, just months from college graduation. he was working construction part time and living at home with his family. when that 911 call came in, chris brooks was dead, clinically dead for more than 15 minutes. his heart stopped beating short of 3:00 in the morning on november 15th, 2008. but here's the thing. it wasn't the end. in his case and in several others that you're about to see, death was reversible. >> the night chris brooks died began innocently enough at this bowling alley in morrisville, pennsylvania, a night out with a girl and his best friend, t.j.

was he acting any differently at all? acting unusual? >> no, acting himself. he's always the life of the party. >> he's 22. just got home from college to work for the weekend. he went bowling. >> woke me up. he said, it's just me, mom. i'm plugging my cell phone. i said, okay. sleep here? >> he said, yeah, i'll sleep down here tonight. >> moments later, there was a noise from the couch. sounded like snoring, but his mother knew something wasn't all right. i bent over and went to smack his face, and i went like this. put my hands on his arms to smack his face again. christopher. what's the matter? i can't wake him up. >> is he breathing? >> i don't know. >> here, you talk. >> he just stopped breathing. >> is his chest rising or falling? >> i don't know. >> we can't tell. all right. >> tell everybody to stop screaming and listen to me so i can give you some help. >> did you know what to do? >> i watched tv. >> you watched tv? i started giving him mouth to mouth. that's all i know. and the 911 operator, he's the one that told me to stop mouth to mouth and straddle his chest

and try to give him 60 compressions in a minute and thep just keep doing that, keep doing that, they're on their way. >> bare his chest and put both heels between his nipples. >> wait a minute. bare his chest? >> i'm screaming, where are they? where are they? >> for every minute our brains go without oxygen, our chances decrease by about 10%. without help, chris brooks, who had no heartbeat for well over ten minutes, had almost a zero chance of survival. but luckily for chris, his father was buying him some precious time. it was a new kind of cpr. and it was pioneered right here in arizona. it's a better way to save people whose hearts have stopped. >> what's the address? >> my husband's not responsive. >> okay. what's your address? >> this is a call to 911 in scottsdale, arizona. >> oh, my god. >> a 53-year-old man is in cardiac arrest, and that's his

wife on the phone. >> is he breathing? >> no, he's not. >> listen to me. someone needs to start cpr. do you have anyone there that can do cpr? >> say what? >> listen carefully to the dispatcher. >> you need to put him on his back chllingt >> he's on his back. >> put the heel of your hand on his breast bone in the center of his chest. >> okay. >> notice what you don't hear. >> you need to put your other hand on top and interlock your fingers. >> there was nothing in there about breaths. there was nothing in there about giving breaths. >> i need you to press straight down into his chest. >> okay. >> go quick, okay? start counting for me. >> one, two. >> three, four. >> it's all about compressing the chest, and until just recently, that would have been unthinkable, but it does work. here's why. for the first several minutes after your heart stops, your blood still has plenty of oxygen. as expert breath holders know, it's sort of this trick that your body plays on the mind. synchronized swimmers know this.

you can go without breathing far longer than you think. far beyond the point when your body is starting to scream for air. with practice, almost anyone can hold their breath for two or three minutes. experts can go beyond seven minutes. seven minutes without a breath. think about that. but only if that oxygen gets to your brain. either pumped by your heart or by chest compressions. now, in most cases of cardiac arrest, that's still not enough time. but what if you could buy just a bit more? what if you could slow the clock? coming up, what you need to know to save a life. ♪ this one thing i'll eat, any time of day ♪ pancakes! ♪ from dawn 'til sunset, i'll never walk away ♪ ♪ blueberry pancakes are so good ♪ [ male announcer ] bisquick. pancake lovers unite. no matter how the market changes,

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chris brooks is clinging to life, his desperate father trying to buy more time using a new kind of cpr. the based on a new understanding of the space between life and death. and before we pick up the story, there's someone else you should meet. so where are we right now?

>> right now we're in the center for resuscitation science laboratories at the university of pennsylvania. >> and this is dr. lance becker. he's the director. >> when i trained, it was like you're alive, you're dead. it was just this sharp line between the two, like going off a cliff. now we know it's nothing like that. it's this gradual process. and that process means there's an opportunity where we could do something. >> some would say, look, don't bother with the mouth to mouth at all. you've got oxygen in your bloodstream. the key is to move it around the body. >> the trick is get as many compressions in as you can, and then if you can get a little extra oxygen in, that's fabulous. but the priority is on those chest compressions. >> just so i'm clear, you're saying go up there and do it as fast and hard as you can. what are we talking here? 100 times a minute? >> 100 times a minute with pretty much enough force that, if you do it right, there will be sweat dripping off your nose after two or three minutes. >> your arms are straight over

the guy's chest, and you are -- >> just straight over. >> push, push, push, push. >> push, push, push. >> what you're describing could save lives? >> it has saved lives. >> dr. ben oversees emergency services for the arizona department of health. when he took over in 2004, the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest in arizona were just as grim as anywhere else. less than 3%. >> we said, you know, it's hard to do a lot worse than 97% of the people dying. >> one of the first things he did was change those cpr guidelines. prepare medics in arizona nowadays, it's 200 chest compressions in two minutes, then defibrillation or a shock four times over before giving that first artificial breath. >> you have two minutes to save a life. >> for lay people in training courses like this one and from 911 dispatchers, the advice is even simpler than that. don't bother giving any breaths at all. >> what i want to you do is we're going to do compression

only cpr. >> and within a year of babro's changes, there was dramatic success. >> in fact, a statewide survival rate has more than tripled. >> just think about that. it's more than tripled. in some parts of the states, it's even better than that. using several new procedures, including better cpr, paramedics in flagstaff now saved more than one-third of the cardiac arrest victims they see. but back in pennsylvania, time was still running out for chris brooks. next, another novel treatment to try and keep him alive. and when it does, men with erectile dysfunction can be more confident... in their ability to be ready with cialis. with two clinically proven dosing options, you can choose the moment that's right for you... ... and your partner. 36-hour cialis and cialis for daily use. cialis for daily use is a low-dose tablet... you take every day, so you can be ready anytime the moment's right. day or night.

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how old is he? 22 years old? >> 22. >> joan brooks, her son christopher is dying right in front of her. husband joe is doing cpr. >> then they say, well, do you have any heartbeat? is do you have any breath? and i'm listening. no, i don't. and just screaming, where are these people? it was taking -- 8:30 is a lifetime.

>> how close are they? >> i don't know if you can imagine how each second and a second is an hour, if you know what i mean. >> they're here now. >> have the people come in. >> oh, my god. come on chris! come on chris! >> it had been more than 15 minutes since chris' heart had stopped beating. >> when the medics got here, i had moved over to here, and i was pacing up and down behind this couch here. and i just -- i didn't watch them do their work. >> we're going to start with the cpr. adam, who was my partner that evening, shocked him. >> they hit him with the paddles, and he jumps, and they go nothing. well, that is -- nothing is nothing. i don't know how to explain what nothing is, but that's not -- you don't -- and then they did it again, and it was nothing. >> you see, joan had lost three family members in less than a year, and she was frantic. >> yelled at god, you took my

mother, my brother, you are not taking my son. and i yelled at my mother, mom, you don't want your grandson up there. don't let this happen. >> they had to shock him again. at that point, he went into asystole rhythm, which is flat line. >> this is important. the paramedics didn't quit here. they gave chris another shot of epinephrine and another job atropine, all of that to jump start his heart. >> it shocked him. his rhythm converted to a normal sinus rhythm. >> they gave him a needle in the heart, all of a sudden, i've got a heartbeat. out the door they went. >> paramedics rushed chris to the local hospital. it was just minutes away. chris brooks can't out of the woods, not yet. even after getting back a heartbeat, most people who suffer cardiac arrest don't make it. that's because, when the heart stops, a dangerous chain reaction is set into motion. it's triggered by a lack of oxygen, a chemical cascade in each and every cell, resulting in an explosion of free radicals and other dangerous elements.

once this whole thing starts going, it's hard to stop. >> cell death will actually occur for 12 to 24 hours afterwards. which is why we induce the hypothermia. >> in other words, chris' doctors would ice him down, lower his body temperature. here's the idea. by cooling chris, they would put the process of death into slow motion. so doctors wrap up chris in this special cooling blanket, but they also realize something else. he needed to be even colder, and they needed a more experienced team to do that. >> the absolute best place for him and the best chance he had for a full recovery was to be at university of pennsylvania. >> we accepted the transfer, and we got him here by helicopter as quickly as we could. chris had been down for quite a while. in these sort of situations, people often have crippling brain injury. >> you know, i would have thought chris brooks would have had a terrible brain injury as well, but abella's team was

fighting back. how? by cooling his body temperature below 90 degrees. on top of the extra minutes that chris got from the cpr, it was this cold that might buy a few hours. would it be enough? you're loobing at the life flight chopper with chris inside. this photo was taken by his father. >> i took my camera out and took a picture of him as they were leaving because i couldn't go with them to the hospital. >> next, a crucial test. >> we won't know until he wakes up, and it depends how good you kept oxygen to the brain. ...authentic... ...pure... and also delicious. ♪ like nature valley. granola bars made with crunchy oats and pure honey. because natural is not only good, it also tastes good.

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chris brooks. 22 years old in critical care at the hospital at the university of pennsylvania. he survived 15 minutes without a heart beat. doctors kept him cool for 24 hours and then slowly, slowly started to rewarm him. and he's fine except for his brain, we have no tests that can tell his brain. we won't know until he wakes up how good you kept oxygen to the brain will depend will he have any brain damage. and i'm not trained in cpr or anything, so this could be good. >> and you were thinking i was

the one -- >> well, that's what they said. >> did they do a good enough job. >> oh, yeah. >> that's what you were thinking? >> that's how they put it. >> when they started repeating his body and they said they can't check his brain waves till he's conscious. started coming out of it. couldability talk because tubes were down his throat and everyone was holding his hands. chris, if you can hear me, squeeze my han, squeeze my hand. >> they can give you the two thumbs up sign they're okay because it's pretty high level. >> he had one hand under the sheet and -- he gave two thumbs up, which is like my son, not to listen to what he told. >> i'm touching you. >> six months after his hart stopped chris graduated from college. yes, he still goes bowling and he's got a job in philadelphia. he's trying to save money to buy

a house. >> i'm not letting this hold me back. >> he has a defibrillator now implanted under his skin. it's actually gone off twice. one time it was during a pickup football game. >> as i'm walking toward the sideline, boom, it hits me. it took me right off the ground. flash faced on the grass, out for ten seconds. >> you got shocked. >> yeah. and it kicked me. >> that's amazing. and if you hadn't had that. >> i would have gob into cardiac arrest again. >> i don't want to overstate this but this literally make as huge difference. >> it doubles which chances of survival. >> you think about multibillion dollar drugs. that gets the attention. this piece of plastic and this machine could lead to survival and no one talks about it. >> that's right. >> you could have been declared

dead. >> yes. >> what is the message for doctors, for everybody? >> don't give up, i guess. don't give up. >> next, an incredible story about a woman who redefined the limits of survival. she calls it the world record that no one wants to beat. we'll be right back. interesting grooming. thanks. i got the idea from general mills big g cereals. they put a white check on the top of every box to let people know that their cereals have healthy whole grain, and they're the right choice... (announcer) general mills makes getting whole grain an easy choice. just look for the white check.

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with are north of the arctic circle and this is the air ambulance team in north norway. >> doctors here at norway take runs like this every single day, taking care of skiers trapped in the mountains or a fisherman who's fallen into the frigid waters. may be among the most skbernsed doctors in the wield in treating accidental hypothermia. it's a lesson they finally mastered. in may of 1999 she was going

down a steep gully with two friends. marie fall kenburg and another. >> when it comes down to this frozen gully, it's steep, so i hit some steps and then i turned on my back and started to slide down the ice on my back. >> what happened was she landed upside down with her head stuck under water between water and a thick shelf of ice. in fact, this is the exact spot where this all happened. two of the men involved in her rescue showed us. >> she was where the water is over the cliff here. >> you can only imagine the december pier rag-friends must have felt as the moments star d starteded to tick by. she struggled for a while, and then she stopped. it took more than an hour and a shovel to free anna from the ice. he immediately start cpr.

as the clock was ticking, the helicopter flew anna to the university hospital of north norway. it's an hour away. she was taken straight to the operating room. >> she has completely dilated pupils, she is ashen, white, she's wet, ice cold when i touch her skin, an she looks absolutely dead. this is the double-edged sword again. the cold was protecting her brain. it was stopping her heart but protecting her heart. the brain was so cold that it did not need any oxygen. and the doctors began to slowly rewarm anna's blood. now, take a look at this. it's anna's heart. >> just saw some limbs shimmers and suddenly, suddenly it contracted. and there was a pulse. a second contraction.

ah. everybody goes like that. we had really tearful eyes all of us because it was a moment of victory. >> she had no heartbeat for more than three hours. her body temperature, 56 degrees fahrenheit. no one has ever been that cold and then survived. >> is it something you take pride in, the fact that you -- >> no, no, no. it's nice to have a world record, but -- >> you have a world record. >> nobody wants to beat. >> that's a very good way of putting it. anna was paralyzed for months after the accident. it turns out the cold is devastating to your nerves but she made a full recovery and now she's a radiologist at the very same hospital where doctors refused to september that she was dead. and in case you're curious, i was, anna still skis those mountains where she once cheated death. and there's something else to the story as well.