Woman freezes solid, thaws and makes full recovery (1981)

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Jean Hilliard was literally frozen stiff, ''like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze,'' when a friend found her in the snow after a night of 22-below-zero temperatures. But the 19-year-old has made an unusual recovery.

''At worst, I might lose a couple of toes,'' she says. ''I can't explain why she's alive,'' Dr. George Sather, who helped treat the young woman, said today. ''She was frozen stiff, literally. It's a miracle.''

Miss Hilliard was frozen after a midnight automobile accident in rural northwestern Minnesota. When she arrived at the Fosston, Minn., hospital, her skin was too hard to pierce with a hypodermic needle. Her temperature was too low to register on a thermometer. Her face was ashen and her eyes were solid and did not respond to light.

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Mr. Nelson found her as walked out the door at 7 o'clock the next morning. Her body was so stiff that Mr. Nelson loaded her ''diagonally'' in the back seat of his car and headed for the hospital.

Doctors were unable to give her intravenous feedings because ''she was frozen too solid to penetrate the skin,'' said Dr. Sather's brother, Dr. Edgar Sather.

Her pulse, hardly registering through her frozen skin, was about 12 beats a minute. And her temperature was too low for a thermometer, with a low reading of 88 degrees, 10 degrees below normal. But in several hours, wrapped in an electric heating pad, she began to revive.

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