When rescuers finally pulled her from the water, 62 minutes after her mother's call, she was very cold and blue. She had no pulse and was not breathing. Her pupils were fixed and widely dilated, as they would be with severe brain damage or death. A monitor detected no heartbeat.

Nevertheless, rescue workers began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, forcing air into her lungs and blood throughout her body. They continued it in a helicopter ambulance that flew her to the hospital.

In the emergency room, Dr. Bolte and technicians set up the bypass machine. When the child arrived, Dr. Bolte led a team in injecting warmed fluids into Michelle's veins and stomach. They squeezed warmed air through a tube into her lungs.

About three hours after the child had fallen into the creek, she still appeared lifeless.

''Many would have declared her dead at that point,'' said Dr. Howard W. Corneli, another pediatrician on the team. ''Other staff members thought Dr. Bolte was crazy.''

Dr. Bolte recalled in an interview: ''We had to decide how hard to push to save her life. You do not want to be in the position where you are creating a child that is going to end up in a vegetative state.''

One crucial factor was her temperature, measured in the hospital as low as 66 degrees Fahrenheit.

''Most important, the child was so profoundly cold,'' Dr. Bolte said. ''Also, we had a rough idea she had been under for about 45 minutes,'' the longest period from which anyone had ever recovered with their brain intact. If it had been much longer, he said he would have stopped.

Two other factors encouraged Dr. Bolte to forge ahead. One was a finding that the amounts of oxygen and other gases in Michelle's blood, although abnormal, were ''incredibly good under the circumstances.''