Knock on Wood

On December 20, 1980, nineteen-year-old Jean Hilliard was returning to her parents’ home in Lengby, Minnesota.  She was driving through rural northwestern Minnesota after visiting friends.  Hilliard had started home around midnight, taking a shortcut down a back road when her car slid off the road and into a snowbank.  She found herself stranded in frigid temperatures.

The car was cooling rapidly beside the road and no one was coming along that she could hitch a ride with.  She was dressed for a cool evening, with her jacket, pants, and cowboy boots.

That was nowhere near enough clothing, and she had to find someplace to get warm, before she froze to death.

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Jean could see the lights of a farmhouse and slogged her way toward it through the snow.  There was no one home.  Nor was there anyone at the next house.

She kept walking.  She knew her friend, Wally Nelson, lived a short distance from where her car had slid off the road.  She had to make it to Wally’s house, but she had misjudged the distance; it was actually about two miles away…through the snow and ice.

“I’d get over one hill, thinking his place would be there, and it wasn’t,” she said. “I was more frustrated than scared.”

Jean’s core body temperature was falling and she dropped into hypothermia.  Her brain’s functioning began to slow down but, somehow, she managed to keep slogging determinably toward her friend’s home.  She turned into his driveway when she finally saw his mailbox, and slowly began struggling the final 1/8 mile to his house.  Jean fell, got up, and fell again, over and over.  Just fifteen feet from Nelson’s front door, she collapsed and did not rise again.

That was at 1:00 a.m.  She lay there as temperatures fell to -22° F.  Yes, that’s 22° BELOW ZERO…54° below freezing.

She lay in the snow in deep freeze temperatures for six long hours.

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At 7 a.m. Wally Nelson headed out his door to go to work.  You can imagine his surprise at seeing an apparent human body lying in the snow in his front yard.

“What a shocker it was, “Nelson said.  “There she lay – and only 15 feet from my door.  Her face was ghost-like and her body was stiff as pulpstick.

I figured she was dead.  But then I thought I heard a slight moan.  I rushed her to the hospital.”

Jean was so stiff that her arms and legs would not bend and she had to be slid into the backseat of Wally’s friend’s automobile.

She was frozen solid, according to witnesses at the medical facility.

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Dr. George Sather was on call and soon arrived at the hospital.  “I thought she was dead,” he said.

Her eyes were wide open, eyeballs frozen solid, pupils fixed and dilated.  Her feet were frozen in the shape of her boots.

Dr. Sather added, “But then we picked up an extremely faint whimper.  We knew there was a person existing there then.”

Was she frozen?  Her temperature was too low to register on the old mercury thermometers they used back then (below 80° F).  Attendants report not being able to get an IV into her arm; they kept breaking needles.  When they were finally able to get a pulse reading, it was 12 beats per minute.

Thinking she was mostly dead, they decided to warm her anyway.

University of Minnesota professor of emergency medicine David Plummer said, ” In emergency medicine the dictum is no one is dead until they’re warm and dead.”

A devout member of the hospital staff called her husband, a Baptist minister, and started a prayer chain.  It spread throughout the area.

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The details seem pretty miraculous, although Plummer says this kind of thing happens occasionally. He’s an expert at reviving people with extreme hypothermia.

As a person cools down, he explained, their blood flow slows way down 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.

“We have patients you can knock on like wood,” he said. “They feel rock solid frozen. That in no way dissuades us from the resuscitation attempt. And we do have a track record of success with that.”

The strange part of Hilliard’s case, Plummer said, is where and when she made her recovery.  Today, doctors use a special device that pumps the patient’s blood through a heater, warming their vital organs from the inside.  In 1980, at the rural hospital Jean was taken to, all they had were some heating pads and a lot of prayer.

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Due to the obvious indications of extensive frostbite, doctors considered amputating both Jean’s legs to avoid infection, but then something amazing happened.

”The reaction didn’t appear until two or three hours after she started thawing out,” Dr. Sather said. ”The body was cold, completely solid, just like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.”

According to Hilliard, “My legs and feet, instead of getting darker as Dr. Sather expected, started to lighten and regain their natural color. One after another, the doctors and nurses filed in to marvel at the pinkish tinge appearing at the line of demarcation where the darkness started on my upper thighs — the place where Dr. Sather said he thought they might have to amputate.”

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Forty-nine days later, Jean left the hospital without so much as a scar, and having lost no body parts to frostbite.

“It’s like I fell asleep and woke up in the hospital,” she said. “I didn’t see the light or anything like that. It was kind of disappointing. So many people talk about that, and I didn’t get anything.”

Jean has no lingering health issues from the ordeal. She went on to marry and have children, and now works at a Wal-Mart in Cambridge, Minnesota.  These days, she doesn’t spend much time thinking about that night in 1980. She just bundles up, and doesn’t drive on icy back roads late at night.

I don’t think I would either.

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