Medical Mystery: The Woman Who Survived Being Frozen

Medical Mystery: The Woman Who Survived Being Frozen

Freezing to death is undoubtedly a grim fate. But we can scratch the death part if your name’s Jean Hilliard. This case proves that there are still many surprising things we don’t know about the human body.

The night of December 20, 1980 was promising to be a cold one as temperatures dropped to 22 degrees below zero. Jean Hilliard was driving home to her parents’ house in Lengby, Minnesota when she lost control of her car and went off the road. The engine stalled and since she wasn’t unable to get it to start, Jean decided to walk to a neighbor’s house about two miles away.

Unfortunately, her clothes weren’t enough to keep her warm and Jean collapsed only 15 feet away from his door. She lay unconscious in the snow until her neighbor Wally Nelson found her at around 7 in the morning. By that time, she was as stiff as a board and Nelson had to load her diagonally into the backseat of his car.

When she was brought to the hospital, doctors at the Fosston Hospital were stunned but there was little they could do. They attempted to give her an IV feeding but the needle just couldn’t penetrate her frozen skin.

She was so cold, it was like reaching into a freezer, like picking out a frozen stick of wood. Her face was absolutely white. Just this ashen, death look. We did hook her up to the monitor, and we got this agonal rhythm– like one beat. It was just like one and nothing. Then two. We knew we had something, but that’s a death rhythm,” remembers Dorothy Killian, one of the nurses at the time.

Her temperature was too low for a medical thermometer to register.

She was severely frostbitten. None of her limbs would bend or move. And, really, things looked very grim. When a person gets frostbite, what we’re basically talking about is freezing of the limbs. That actually means ice crystals forming in the cells, and in so doing, they destroy many of the cells of the body. After the hands and feet maybe start the initial stages of frostbite and the core temperature of the body drops, the heart, the lungs, the internal organs of the abdomen, the brain, when those start to cool, it becomes more and more difficult for them to perform their functions, until finally they stop. At that point, the patient would more than likely die,” said Dr. Ryan Kelly, who was called to examine Jean.

Things looked grim for Jean. Even if she regained consciousness, she would have suffered brain damage. The severe nature of the frostbites she had suffered in her hands and feet would have called for amputation. The doctors wrapped her in an electric blanket and that was pretty much all they could do.

Miraculously, at around 11:00 a.m., Jean started convulsing and by noon she regained consciousness. Understandably, jaws dropped in amazement. Apart from being a little confused, she was fine and even her frostbites began disappearing. She spent the next 49 days in the hospital but made a full recovery and not a single one of her fingers were amputated.

Although she had no idea how she managed to cheat death, Jean was grateful.“There are other people across the nation that same night that were found in the same condition I was in. And they died. I just think without all those people that I might not have survived,” she said.

To this day, nobody knows how her body managed to recover from being frozen stiff and her case remains one interesting mystery

source:http://locklip.com/