American Jean Hilliard was found completely frozen after a winter night spent outside. But she finally got out without major consequences.
- The normal temperature of a healthy human body is between 36°C and 37.5°C depending on the time of day.
- We speak of hypothermia – that is to say “involuntary cooling of the internal temperature of the body” in medical language – when the body temperature is below 35°C.
Even completely frozen in the cold, it is possible to come back to life, as the TV show recently recounted. Unsolved Mysteries.
Eyes fixed and wide open
On December 20, 1980, American Jean Hilliard was leisurely driving home to Lengby, Minnesota when she veered off the icy road and landed in a ditch. Believing that she was only a few miles from a friend’s house, she set off on foot to seek help. But, when she arrived in the garden, she felt ill before she could knock on the door.
The next morning, the friend in question found Jean Hilliard lying in her garden, completely frozen. His eyes, wide open, no longer responded to the light. His body temperature was so low that it was not even measurable with a conventional thermometer. Her pulse had dropped to just 12 beats per minute, and her skin had turned gray and could no longer be perfused.
“A piece of meat taken from a freezer”
“I thought she was dead. She was stiffer than a board, but I saw a few bubbles coming out of her nose,” says his rescuer, who will not even be able to put Jean Hilliard correctly in his car to take him to the hospital, the body being too stiff to be bent over the seats. “The body was cold, completely solid, like a piece of meat from a freezer.” will tell the New York Times the doctor who treated her at the hospital, Dr. George Sather.
But, against all odds, after placing heating pads against Jean Hilliard’s body, she gradually came back to life, without any amputation being necessary.
After the broadcast of the show Unsolved Mysteries, David Plummer, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota, told the Herald newspaper that he had seen similar cases of human thawing before. In fact, death actually occurs when freezing affects the vital cells of the human body. Before this stage, the body concentrates all its energy in the brain, and abandons the peripheral organs to survive, which obviously happened for Jean, who still lives today without any sequel to his cold misadventure.
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