The Incredible Story of Jean Hilliard
On the night of December 20, 1980, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard's car ended up stuck in a ditch. Given the late hour, the freezing cold of Minnesota, and the isolated road, she tried to walk to get 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 story and what she remembers, she had walked a few miles and was exhausted by the time she saw the house. The last thing she remembers is being almost to the door and then everything went black.
The woman was left outside in the yard, exposed to temperatures of over -20 degrees for more than six hours.
When the man who lived there came out and saw her on the ground, he said she was as hard as marble, but he noticed that air bubbles were forming in her nostrils.
He loaded her into the car as if she were a tree trunk and took her to the hospital.
In the emergency room, she was still so frozen that they couldn’t get an IV into her arm. They thought she was dead, but they started warming her up anyway. They even called a priest to administer the last rites.
Miraculously, by midmorning, she woke up in spasms.
By noon, she was speaking coherently. In a matter of hours, she had gone from a block of ice to a frightened teenager, worried that her father would find out her car was in the ditch.
The details seem pretty miraculous, although David Plummer, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Minnesota, says this sort of thing happens occasionally. He’s an expert in resuscitating people with extreme hypothermia. There’s no hard data, but he’s handled a dozen such cases in the past 10 years.
When a person gets cold, he explained, their blood flow slows and their 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, since almost always the amputation of one or more limbs occurs.
That was in 1980. Today Jean is a woman who is married (although later divorced) with children. The press throughout the country is interested in her case l. Continue reading
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