On the night of December 20, 1980, nineteen-year-old Jean Hilliard's car ended up in a ditch and remained stuck. Given the late hour, the freezing Minnesota cold and the isolated road, she tried to walk for help. She was found in the morning in the yard of a local cattle rancher, completely frozen and stiff as a log.
According to her account and what she remembers of her, she had walked a few miles and by the time she saw the house she was exhausted. The last thing she remembers is being almost to the door and then everything went black.
The woman remained outside in the garden, exposed to temperatures of over -20 degrees for more than six hours.
When the man who lived there came out to her and saw her on the ground, she said that she was as hard as marble, but she noticed that air bubbles were forming in her nostrils.
He loaded her into the car like she was a tree trunk and took her to the hospital.
In the emergency room she was still so frozen, they couldn't put an IV in her arm. They had thought that she was now dead but they started warming her anyway. The priest had also been called for extreme unction.
Miraculously, however, the woman woke up in the throes of spasms mid-morning.
By noon she spoke coherently. In just a few hours, she had gone from a block of ice to a scared teenager, worried that her father would find out that her car was in the ditch.
The details seem pretty miraculous, although University of Minnesota emergency medicine professor David Plummer says this kind of thing happens occasionally. He is an expert at resuscitating people with extreme hypothermia. There is no hard data, but he has handled a dozen similar cases in the last 10 years.
When a person gets cold, he explained, his blood flow slows and his body requires less oxygen. It's like a form of hibernation. If their blood flow increases at the same rate as their body warms up, they can often recover.
The strange and somewhat miraculous part was the way and speed with which the girl recovered and without any consequences, given that the amputation of one or more limbs almost always occurs.
This was in 1980. Today Jean is a married (though later divorced) woman with children. The press across the country was interested in her case.
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