Ice: it's great for our drinks and can be fun to slide on.
Historically though, it's proven to not be so great a thing to take naps under.
Yet in 2016 one man was buried under ice for several hours and despite what you might expect,
he came back to life when resuscitated.
Yet how did this lucky man managed to do the impossible?
It was a blustery winter morning in Pennsylvania when Don Smith spotted his son's boots sticking
out from under a snow drift on the side of the road.
Screeching his car to a halt, he rushed out into the snow and started digging his son
out of the snowdrift under which he was almost completely buried.
To Smith's horror, his son's face was blue and he could feel no pulse or heartbeat.
In a panic, he called 911 and as emergency responders braved the icy roads, he silently
prepared himself for the worst.
His son had been lying under a snow drift for twelve hours in minus four degree fahrenheit
(-20° C) weather, how could there be any chance he would survive?
Smith was flown via helicopter to a nearby hospital where a team of doctors and nurses
warmed his body and attempted unsuccessfully to restart his heart with CPR.
The paramedics were unable to find any signs of life in Justin Smith's body, and one even
draped a sheet over what was presumed to be a corpse.
Yet as the coroner was called and police began their investigation into the exact circumstances
surrounding his death, emergency department physician Gerald Coleman ordered a potassium
test of Smith's blood, as high levels of potassium in the blood indicates that heart muscle activity
is either significantly reduced or has completely stopped.
However to the surprise of everyone, the test results came back normal, giving the hospital
staff hope that the heart could in fact be restarted.
Using a technique called extracorporal membrane oxygenation, the doctors began to pump warm,
oxygenated blood into Smith's heart and then throughout his body.
Incredibly, the heart began to slowly quiver, and using shock paddles the doctors managed
to shock the heart into restarting completely.
Smith was then hooked up to ventilators which would breathe for him, and warm, oxygenated
blood continued to be pumped through his thawing body.
Despite the miracle of restarting Smith's frozen heart, doctors feared that he would
in effect be brain dead after an incredible twelve hours of lying frozen under a snow
drift.
Against all odds scans began to pick up electrical signals given off by neurological activity,
and as the signals increased it became clear that Smith was experiencing completely normal
brain activity.
Though he would lose his toes and little fingers to frostbite, Smith would eventually wake
up from his coma and make a complete recovery.
As incredible as it may seem, freezing might have actually saved Smith's life.
When the body is frozen at the right rate, the slowing metabolic processes will actually
protect the body from the effects of exposure.
Cooling cells slows down their metabolic activity and they don't require as much oxygen to function
anymore, and as the heart slows and breathing stops, the body enters a state of suspended
animation.
The key to Smith's survival was that his heart had kept very slowly beating for hours after
his burial in ice, and doctors managed to begin CPR on him not too long after it had
stopped beating.
The still-oxygenated blood in his system helped keep his organs alive thanks to their vastly
reduced metabolic activity, not at all dissimilar to the way that hibernating animals can dramatically
reduce both their heart beats and their breathing rate and still remain alive.
Smith's miraculous recovery has encouraged modern medicine to consider that there is
no temperature too low to try to resuscitate someone, and his story is mirrored throughout
history, with a little girl in 1994 being brought back to life after freezing solid.
One winter morning five year old Karlee Kosolofski woke up to her father saying goodbye as he
prepared to go to work.
He tucked Karlee in bed with her mother and promptly left.
Unbeknownst to her father though, Karlee had gotten up and tried to follow her dad outside,
leaving the house dressed in nothing more than her pajamas.
Once outside the door closed behind her and she realized she was too short to reach the
outside door handle.
For five hours little Karlee lay against the front door of her house in below zero winter
weather, discovered by her mother frozen stiff.
Her mother, who had been trained in CPR, immediately began to try and resuscitate her but was unable
to.
Karlee was rushed to the hospital where doctors would successfully warm her body up and bring
her back to life.
Incredibly Karlee also suffered no brain damage despite her prolonged ordeal, and the only
major injury was the amputation of the lower part of her left leg due to frostbite.
In 1980 nineteen year old Jean Hilliard was driving home in her hometown of Lengby, Minnesota
on a night with minus twenty two degree weather.
Suddenly, her truck hit a patch of ice and the brakes locked, sending her into a ditch.
Living in a rather rural area, Jean began to walk to try and find help, wearing only
a jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots.
One of her best friends lived only two miles down the road, and Jean was confident she
could make the walk.
As she walked along the icy road though she began to feel lethargic and confused, early
signs of hypothermia, and then when she finally saw the lights of her friend's home, Jean
collapsed and blacked out.
The next morning her friend woke up and discovered a large lump in the snow just fifteen feet
from his door, and investigating he was horrified to discover that it was Jean.
Rushed to the hospital, the medical staff was pessimistic about Jean's chances of survival.
Her body was frozen so stiff that they were unable to pierce her flesh with hypodermic
needles- the needles simply snapped on contact with her frozen-solid body.
Her body temperature was so low that it didn't register on a thermometer, and her face was
ashen-gray in color.
Deciding that she was dead, the staff still tried to warm her body up with heating pads,
and when her body reached a temperature of eighty eight degrees, physicians were shocked
to discover a faint pulse of twelve beats a minute.
Then, the doctors heard a very faint whimper, and they knew Jean was alive.
Incredibly, Jean would be up and talking normally just a few hours later, worried about what
her dad might think of her wrecking his truck.
Medical technology has come a long way since 1980, and today doctors have found that half
of hypothermia patients who are treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, the process
of pumping warmed blood into the heart and body that saved Justin Smith's life, all make
a recovery even if they have been in cardiac arrest for an extended period of time.
Shockingly, if the patients had actually become hypothermic before their oxygen levels dropped
too low, doctors believe that they could have escape the worst of the long-term damage that
comes from having your heart stop for long periods of time.
Doctors are swiftly adopting new techniques that involve chilling patients who have suffered
from extreme trauma, and at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, surgeons have
been experimenting with pumping a cold saline solution into the arteries of patients suffering
from gunshot and knife wounds in order to bring down the body's temperature.
The emergency procedure would at one time have been considered practically murder, yet
today doctors understand that gradually cooling the body slows down the metabolic processes,
and can buy time for saving the life of someone who's suffered major blood loss.
The reduced need for oxygenated blood from chilled organs means that they can last longer
without suffering damage that could prove to be fatal, or lead to severely diminished
function- especially in the brain.
Yet as revolutionary as these new procedures are, some doctors have long known the benefits
of chilling a patient's body.
Since the 1960s surgeons in Siberia have been putting babies in snow banks before major
operations, and induced hypothermia has been useful for treating pediatric heart patients
elsewhere for a long time.
In most places though the procedure is a bit more refined than simply dumping a baby into
a bunch of snow, but then again as they are fond of saying in Russia: if it works, it
works.
The process of rapidly replacing a patient's blood with icy salt water though is relatively
new, and quite radical.
Yet the technique seems to be working, and doctors refer to the procedure as suspending
life, wary of the science-fiction implications of calling it “suspended animation”.
The body seems to be incredibly resilient, and as medical technology advances we are
learning ever more incredible things about it.
Sadly though, thousands of people still freeze to death every year across America, and perhaps
with more examples of these miraculous recoveries doctors may learn more about what exactly
happens to the body as it freezes, and how it may be brought back from what appears to
be death.
For the time being though we are going to go ahead and recommend that you don't make
it a habit to take naps under large piles of snow, and if you get in a car accident
in the middle of a blizzard, the best thing to do is to stay inside the cab of your vehicle
and keep yourself warm.
Wait for someone to come driving by, or if you're in a really remote area, at least wait
for the weather to clear a bit.
How long do you think a person could stay frozen and still come back to life?
Let us know in the comments!
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