On the night of December 20, 1980, Jean Hilliard was driving to her home in Lengby, Minnesota, when her car started slipping on the frozen road. She lost control and slid into a ditch on the side of the road. Luckily, Hilliard got out of the car, unscathed. Unfortunately, her troubles that night were far from over.
Hilliard thought that the location of the accident was a few miles from her friend Wally Nelson's home, so she decided to walk there and call for help. It was a very cold, icy night, and she miscalculated her location. She wasn't as close to her friend's house as she thought.
"Every time I started climbing another hill I was sure I would see his house from the other side, and then I didn’t,” she recalled in an interview with local news network MPR. “The truth is I was more frustrated than scared.”
But then-finally, she saw his house and began to walk resolutely toward the door. But several feet before she got there, her strength gave out and she lost consciousness.
The next morning, Nelson woke up. He peeked out the window and saw his friend lying on the lawn, which was now covered in a thick layer of snow. Her eyes were wide open and frozen.
"I was so surprised when I suddenly saw her in my yard,” Nelson said to the local news station. “I ran out and grabbed her by her coat collar and slid her towards my porch. I was sure that she was dead, as she was frozen and hard as a board of wood. But then I saw some bubbles (of frozen air) coming out of her nose.”
Hilliard's body was so frozen and stiff that Nelson had difficulty getting her into his car to take her to the hospital. At the end he managed to get her into the back seat, diagonally.
Even at the hospital, the situation didn’t look good for Hilliard.
Without going into gruesome details, if your body tissues are so stiff that a needle can’t be inserted, the situation is really bad.
When the medical staff finally managed to find and measure her pulse, it stood at 12 beats per minute (normal range is 60-100 beats/minute). Her frozen pupils didn’t respond to light and her skin looked gray.
"Her body was completely cold and stiff, like a piece of meat right out of the freezer," Dr. George Sutter, who treated Hillard in the emergency room, told the New York Times shortly after the incident.
The doctors at the hospital were pessimistic about Hilliard’s chance for survival, especially considering that her temperature was so low that not one thermometer could read it. But they decided to try to save her, and wrapped her in several heated blankets.
"I was sure she was dead," Dr. Sutter said, "but then we heard a faint sigh and saw that there was someone inside to save.”
As Hilliard thawed out, her vital signs began to improve. She even woke up later that day and immediately expressed concern that her father would realize that she had ruined his car. Not too bad for someone who a few hours earlier had been frozen like a popsicle.
Doctors speculated that it would be necessary to amputate her legs, which had been badly damaged by the cold. When she arrived at the hospital her legs were welded to her boots. Yet, Hilliard was discharged with some unpleasant cold burns on her toes, but with all her limbs intact.
Was this a miracle or can Hilliard’s survival be explained?
While there is no denying that this is an incredible recovery, it’s not entirely a "revealed miracle."
"We have a saying that no one is really dead until he’s warm and dead”, said Dr. Richard Isaac, co-director of an emergency medical center in Boston, to the Boston Herald. He stated that he had also treated several cases of people who froze completely but survived.
His colleague Dr. David Plummer, an emergency medicine specialist from the University of Minnesota, agreed.
“We have patients who can be knocked on like a piece of wood,” he said. “They are so frozen that they become as hard as stone. It doesn’t stop us from trying to save them in any way, and we have a good percentage of success.”
One plausible explanation is that Hilliard wasn’t completely frozen, as reported by her doctors and friends. Because when the cells really freeze completely, they undergo a crystallization process and become glass-like crystals. In this process they are irreparably damaged.
"When the cells thaw after this process, all that is left of them is a mass of pulp," explained Dr. Alvin Merendino.
This is a main reason why it’s currently impossible for doctors to freeze people and bring them back to life a few years later.
Merendino's explanation for what happened to Hilliard is slightly different. He believes her body's stiffness was caused by a sharp contraction of her muscles in response to the extreme cold, while her brain went into survival mode and warmed her blood, at the expense of her limbs (this is usually what happens in hypothermia). The extreme slowdown in circulation and body activity allowed Hilliard to survive with a very low oxygen supply and an extremely slow breathing rate.
It's been more than 40 years since that cold night she almost froze to death, and Hilliard is a perfectly healthy woman today. But, she really tries to avoid driving on icy roads at night.