Being frozen to "death" saved this man's life. (Longish)

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Don Smith saw the boots first, just the toes, peeking out from a drift of snow along the side of the empty road.

He brought his car to a stop, clambered out into the early-morning chill and peered through the half-light, searching for a sign of his son.

“I looked over and there was Justin laying there,” Smith recalled Monday to Pennsylvania TV station WNEP. His voice was tight at the memory of it. “He was blue. His face — he was lifeless. I checked for a pulse. I checked for a heartbeat. There was nothing.”

The 25-year-old had been lying in the cold for nearly 12 hours. It was 5 degrees below zero and snowing.

When emergency personnel arrived, they couldn’t find signs of life either. Someone draped a white sheet over Justin Smith’s lifeless body. A coroner was called, and the state police started work on a death investigation. Meanwhile, a despondent Don phoned Justin’s mother to give her the unimaginable news. Their son was gone.

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Smith of McAdoo, Pa., had been walking home from an evening out with friends about 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 20 when something happened — he thinks that he tripped — and he fell into the snow.

“All signs lead us to believe that he has been dead for a considerable amount of time,” a paramedic had said in a phone call to the hospital, according to the Standard

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Something inside me just said, ‘I need to give this person a chance,’” Coleman told the Standard-Speaker. “This is probably going to be a futile effort,” he recalled telling the paramedic. “But I think we need to do our best for him. Okay?”

So they did their best. For two hours, emergency staff pumped Smith’s chest and puffed breaths into his open mouth until he could be flown — through a dire snowstorm — to another hospital branch in Allentown, Pa., according to WNEP.

Once there, doctors pumped Smith full of warm, oxygenated blood. Early that evening, his heart began to beat on its own.

No one was sure, though, how Smith’s brain might have been affected by the prolonged period without oxygen. Conventional medical wisdom says that the human brain can withstand just four minutes without oxygen before cells begin to die. But Smith’s case was anything but conventional.

When he awoke from his coma two weeks later, he was disoriented and weak. But his brain was unharmed. In the end, the night in the snow cost Smith his toes and both pinkies (all of which were amputated because of frostbite) but, incredibly, not his life.

Smith was released from the hospital in March and returned home May 1. He is now enrolled at Penn State University and is finishing up his degree in psychology

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