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The Greatest Medical Mysteries in History
Frozen: The woman who froze like a lump of meat in the freezer - and survived to tell
She was found completely frozen with her eyes wide open in a friend's yard, he could barely get her into the car because she was stiff, and even at the hospital they were not optimistic about the woman who "froze like a lump of meat in the freezer."
But she survived - how is that possible?
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snow
Hypothermia
medical history
cold
Stagnation
Walla!
health
Thursday, 26 August 2021, 07:32 Updated: 07:37
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On the night of December 20, 1980, Jean Hilliard was driving home in Langby, Minnesota, when her car started slipping on the frozen road.
She lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a ditch on the side of the road.
Luckily, Hilliard got out of the vehicle unscathed.
Unfortunately, her troubles that night were far from over.
Hilliard thought the location where she had the accident was a few miles from her friend Wally Nelson's home, so she decided to walk to Nelson's home and call for help.
It was a very cold night in the icy December of Minnesota, and Billiards miscalculated its location.
She was not as close to a friend's house as she thought.
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Hilliard walked for hours in the snow, until it collapsed a few feet before the destination.
Woman walking in snow (Photo: ShutterStock)
"Every time I started climbing another hill I was sure I would see his house from the other side, and I found out I did not. The truth is I was more frustrated than scared," Hilliard said in an interview with local news network MPR.
But then - at last, she saw the house and began to walk resolutely towards the door.
But a few meters before the target, her strength exhausted and she lost consciousness.
"I was sure she was dead, but then bubbles came out of her nose"
The next morning, Wally Nelson woke up in his bed next to a woman he had met the night before. He peeked out the window and saw his girlfriend Jean Hilliard lying on the lawn (which was now covered in a thick layer of snow of course) in front of his house - her eyes wide open and frozen. "I was so surprised when I suddenly saw her in my yard. I grabbed her by the collar and slid her towards the porch. I was sure she was dead, she was frozen and hard as a plank. But then I saw some bubbles coming out of her nose," Nelson told local news.
Hilliard's body was so frozen and stiff that Nelson had difficulty getting her into his car to evacuate her to the hospital. At the end he managed to get her into the back seat, diagonally. Even in the hospital the situation does not look promising for Hilliard - without going into too much technical detail, let's say that if your tissues are so stiff that it is not even possible to insert a needle through the skin, the situation probably does not warn.
Her boyfriend found her completely frozen, her eye wide open. A woman's eye in frost (Photo: ShutterStock)
When they finally managed to find and measure her pulse, he stood at 12 beats per minute. Her frozen pupils did not respond to light and her gray skin. "The body was completely cold and stiff - like a piece of meat coming out of the freezer," Dr. George Sutter described treating Billiard in the emergency room to the New York Times shortly after the incident.
Doctors at the hospital were not optimistic about Billiard. , Especially given the fact that her body temperature was so low that the thermometers that were in the hospital could not measure her at all, but they decided to try to treat her anyway, and wrapped her in heating pads. "I was sure she was dead," Dr. Suth said. R., "But then we heard a faint sigh and knew there was more to save there inside."
As the billiards thawed, her vital signs began to improve. She even woke up later that day and immediately expressed concern that her father would find out he had ruined his car.Not bad at all relative to someone who a few hours earlier had been in an ice poplar accumulation state.
The thermometer failed to measure her body temperature, because it was too low.
Woman in hospital (Photo: ShutterStock)
Doctors speculated that there was a good chance it would be necessary to amputate her legs, which had been badly damaged by the cold.
When she got to the hospital her legs were in the shape of the boots inside which they froze.
But even that was not necessary, Hilliard was eventually released from the hospital with some unpleasant cold burns on her toes, but with all of her original limbs still attached to her body.
If this is not a miracle, then what is it?
While there is no denying that this is an incredible recovery, it is not entirely an "visible miracle." "We have such a saying that no one really dies until they are hot and dead," Dr. Richard Isaac, co-director of the Boston Emergency Medical Center, told the Herald-Journal, adding that he too had encountered several cases of people who froze. Completely and survived it.
Even his colleague Dr. David Plummer, an emergency medicine specialist from the University of Minnesota, tends to agree. "We have patients who can be tapped like on a piece of wood. They are so frozen that they become as hard as stone. It does not in any way prevent us from trying to save them, and we also have not bad success rates with it."
One plausible explanation is that Billiard was not really completely frozen, as reported by her doctors and friends.
Because when the cells really freeze completely, they undergo a crystallization process and become glass-like crystals.
In this process they are irreparably damaged.
"When the cells thaw after this process, all that is left of them is pulp of nothing and nothing," explained Dr. Alvin Merendino.
"No one really dies, until he is hot and dead," it turns out to be a proverb (Photo: Giphy)
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Dr. Merendino's explanation for what happened to Billiard is slightly different. He believes her body's stiffness was caused by a sharp contraction of her muscles in response to the extreme cold, while her brain went into survival mode and warmed her blood, at the expense of her limbs (this is usually what happens in hypothermia) The extreme slowdown in circulation and physical activity has allowed Hilliard to survive with a very low oxygen supply and a very slow breathing rate.
It has been more than 40 years since that cold night when she froze to death, and Gene Hilliard is a perfectly healthy woman today. Avoid driving on icy roads at night.
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