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Early on New Years Eve in Minnesota in 1980, a man named Wally Nelson fell on his friend’s body, lying in the snow a few feet from his door.
19-year-old Jean Hilliard’s car had stalled as she drove home to her parents after a night out. Dressed in little more than a winter coat, mittens and cowboy boots, she took to the night air of minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) to enlist the help of her friend.
At one point, she tripped and lost consciousness. For six hours, Hilliard’s body lay in the cold, the heat vanishing to leave her – according to several accounts – “frozen solid”.
“I grabbed her by the collar and slid her onto the porch,” Nelson reported years later in an interview with Minnesota Public Radio.
“I thought she was dead. She froze stiffer than a board, but I saw a few bubbles coming out of her nose.”
Without Nelson’s swift response, Hilliard might have become one of the thousands of hypothermia-related deaths each year. Instead, its story has become part of the medical tradition and a scientific curiosity.
How could a body survive being frozen?
Stories of people surviving freezing temperatures are unusual enough to be newsworthy, but they’re not exactly uncommon either. In fact, cold climate physicians have a saying, “No one is dead until they are hot and dead.”
The realization that extreme hypothermia is not necessarily the end of a life has become the basis of therapy itself. Under controlled conditions, lowering body temperature can cool down the metabolism and reduce the body’s insatiable hunger for oxygen.
In medical settings, or on rare occasions elsewhere, an icy body can put the brakes on the entire dying process long enough to cope with a weak pulse, at least for some time.
Where Hilliard’s account stands out is the extreme nature of his hypothermic state.
Forget the fact that his body temperature was barely 27 degrees Celsius, which is 10 degrees below that of a healthy human. She was – apparently – frozen. His face was ashy, his eyes solid, and his skin would have been too hard to be punctured by a hypodermic needle.
In the words of George Sather, the doctor who treated her, “The body was cold, completely solid, just like a frozen piece of meat.”
Yet in just a few hours, warmed by heating pads, Hilliard’s body returned to a state of health. She spoke at noon, and with barely more than a few numb and swollen toes, she was soon discharged to live a mundane life unaffected by her night as a human popsicle.
For friends and family in his community, it was all thanks to the power of prayer. But where is the biology in this matter?
Unlike many materials, water occupies a greater volume in solid form than in liquid form. This expansion is bad news for cold-frozen body tissues, as their liquid contents may swell to the point of shattering their containers.
Even a few stray ice crystals that bloom in the wrong place can pierce cell membranes with their needle-like shards, reducing the ends to blackened patches of dead skin and muscle, or what we commonly call frostbite.
Some animals have developed clever adaptations to deal with the dangers of sharp and expanding ice crystals in sub-freezing conditions. The deep-sea fish known as the blackfin icefish of Antarctica produce glycoproteins as a kind of natural antifreeze, for example.
The wood frog turns the contents of its cells into syrup by flooding its body with glucose, thus resisting freezing and dehydration. Outside of their cells, water is free to turn into a solid, enveloping the tissues in ice and making them, for all intents and purposes, as solid as frog-shaped ice cubes.
Without more to do than external observations, it’s hard to say for sure how Hilliard’s body withstood freezing. Was there something unique about her body chemistry? Or the makeup on her handkerchiefs?
Perhaps. A much more important question is what exactly “frozen” means in this case. Although low, Hilliard’s core body temperature is still believed to be well above zero. There is a world of difference between a metaphorical “chilled to the bone” and literally solidified water in the veins.
The fact that Hilliard’s body feels solid is a common sign of severe hypothermia, as muscle stiffness increases to such an extent that it can even resemble rigor mortis, the stiffening that happens to a dead body.
That the surface of her body was cold and white, and that even her eyes looked glassy and “solid,” might also be less than surprising. The body will close the channels to the blood vessels under the skin to keep the organs functioning, to the point that a body will look ashy and remain remarkably cool to the touch.
For medical staff who are persistent enough to take a chance using a smaller caliber hypodermic on severely constricted veins, especially if they are covered with thin layers of dehydrated skin pressed against stiff muscles, we might even imagine a twisted needle or two. .
With little to do other than a few surprised accounts, we can only speculate whether Hilliard’s “frozen” body was typical, so shocking, or even eerily unique in its ability to withstand such an extreme change of state. There is no doubt, however, that she was lucky.
The more we learn about the amazing things the human body can accomplish, the less we can count on saving lives like hers in the future and the more about medical advancements and rapid responses.
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