Jean Hilliard – Surviving being frozen

The story of Jean Hilliard is one that has baffled people for years and her situation hasn’t been repeated since. Her tale begins during a snowy night on December 20th, 1980 when she was on her way to visit a friend of hers that lived in a rural area of northwest Minnesota. The drive was quite a long one and because of the time of year it got dark early, this combined with the thick ice that had built up on the roads made Jean drive cautiously and slowly.

She was so late her friend thought she wasn’t coming and went to bed for the night, Jean on the other hand was finding it increasingly difficult to navigate the frozen roads with high snowy winds blocking her view. At around midnight she lost control and slid off the road into a ditch, with the car firmly stuck at an angle she couldn’t drive out of.

Since this was 1980 no one had mobile phones and Jean found herself with the option of staying in the car or walking what she thought was a small distance to her friend’s house. Since car heating wasn’t that great in 1980 she chose to walk a distance of what she believed to be about 2 miles to her destination.

She actually made the walk but upon reaching her friend’s house around 1 am, Jean collapsed from exhaustion and passed out about halfway up the driveway. The temperature that night was about −30 °C which is cold enough to kill someone laying unconscious on the floor in under an hour.

For the next six hours Jean lay face down on the driveway and succumbed to the effects of extreme cold, an event that no one should be able to survive. The problem with getting frozen is that when living tissue freezes it expands enough to burst the cell walls which kills them, and when the tissue is thawed out it’s already effectively dead. This is how someone who experiences frostbite will have the affected part drop off like a scab after it has been thawed for long enough.

At about 7 am Jean’s friend came out of his house to find her lying face down in the driveway, with pale white skin and looking completely frozen solid. He put her in the back of his truck, with some claims that he had to put her in at an angle since she was frozen stiff, and drove her as fast as he could to the local hospital.

Upon arrival, she was wrapped in an electric blanket and taken to intensive care. The attending doctors claimed her skin was frozen so badly that they were unable to get a needle through and couldn’t even find an internal temperature above freezing. The liquid over her eyes was frozen and the only reason no one thought she was dead at that point was the detection of a very quiet heartbeat running at 12 beats per minute.

The doctors expected the worst as no one could come out of being frozen this badly without extreme effects on their bodies. They thought at the very least she would be blind, lose most of her limbs and parts of her face and more than likely have severe brain damage, and that’s if she even lived at all.

Around 2 hours after arriving at the hospital she started to experience muscle spasms and regained consciousness, asking for a glass of water as soon as she could speak. At this point, she was unable to move and had no use of her arms and legs which she claimed to be completely numb. Since she could speak normally it appeared that her brain didn’t freeze and she avoided serious damage to it, but her limbs would soon start to experience the beginning of decomposition and would have to be removed.

Over the next few days, Jean got back feeling in her body and was able to use her arms again, with the use of her legs following over the next few months. One year later she has made a full recovery without any of the expected side effects of being frozen, something that is considered a miracle by some and pure luck by others. One of the doctors treating her suggested the reason she didn’t freeze internally was due to the alcohol that she had drank on the walk, something that has a much lower freezing point and could have stopped her vital organs from getting too cold.

The only injuries she sustained were a few skin grafts to replace parts of her outer layers of skin that froze too badly to recover, but none of her fingers or toes were lost, and no thin tissue areas like the ears and nose were lost which some people would call impossible.