Meet ‘Lazarus tot’ whose heart stopped for 1 hour

Gore Otteson, 2, was underwater for 25 minutes, but he’s OK today

Little Gore Otteson toddled around the TODAY show set Friday morning, rosy-cheeked and rambunctious. Pretty normal for a 2-year-old — except that Gore has made a miraculous recovery after apparently drowning in an irrigation ditch earlier this summer.

The toddler was submerged for 25 minutes, and his heart stopped for an hour. When he was pulled out of the frigid water, pale and lifeless, his mother thought he was dead. Doctors at a Denver hospital told his parents that Gore had less than a 1 percent chance of survival — and even they can’t totally explain his amazing full recovery.

“I thought I had lost him,” Amy Otteson told Meredith Vieira Friday, in a TODAY exclusive. “I thought for almost an hour that he was dead.”

But Gore is alive and healthy today, thanks to an experimental body-cooling treatment — and, his parents believe, a whole lot of prayers.