# Being frozen to death, might not kill you.



## Brushpile (Jan 20, 2016)

*Being frozen ‘to death’ saved this man’s life. It could save others,’ too*

In February 2015, Justin Smith was found face down in minus-4 degree weather. Doctors initially thought he was dead, but it turned out being frozen solid actually saved his life. (Lehigh Valley Health Network)
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.

Except, he wasn’t. Not according to Gerald Coleman, the emergency department physician on duty at the Lehigh Valley Hospital early on the morning of Feb. 21.

“My clinical thought is very simple: You have to be warm to be dead,” Coleman told the Hazelton, Pa.Standard-Speaker.

Coleman ordered paramedics to start performing CPR on a man who had no pulse, no blood pressure and by all appearances had taken his last breath half a day before. And almost a year later, on Monday, Justin Smith held a new conference to thank him.

Smith’s improbable survival is a story from the cutting edge of emergency medicine and, indeed, the edge of life itself. Thanks to new technology and an evolving understanding of what it means to be dead, doctors are increasingly able to bring “frozen” people back from the brink. And they’re starting to take advantage of the same mechanisms that allow the body to withstand seemingly lethal cold to save a whole host of other patients — victims of gunshots, heart attacks and spinal injuries and premature babies on the verge of brain damage who might otherwise be considered beyond rescue.

The secret that saved Smith — and countless others — lies in the way the body slows down as it gets colder. According to Outside, metabolism slows by about 5 or 7 percent for every one-degree-Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) drop in body temperature. At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, just 3.6 below normal, a person will begin to shiver uncontrollably. At 90, their lips will turn blue and their speech will slur. At 82 degrees, they’ll lose consciousness. By the time their temperature plunges into the 60s, their heart will stop beating altogether.

It’s an alarming course of events, but in some cases, such as Smith’s, it can save a person’s life. When a person’s body chills at the right rate, the associated slowing of metabolic processes will protect them from the other effects of exposure. Their lethargic cells don’t require as much oxygen, so the fact that their heart has slowed and their breathing stopped is dangerous rather than deadly. These people hang virtually in a state of suspended animation, seeming dead by all the standard measures but not irreversibly gone.

If the patient is discovered before the heart stops, and their doctor knows to immediately begin CPR, as Coleman did, they have a decent chance of making it.

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.

He wasn’t discovered until 12 hours later. His body temperature was under 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit).

“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-Speaker.

But Coleman ordered them to start CPR anyway, acting on an ICU truism: “You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.”

“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.

“I consider myself a miracle,” he said in an interview with the Standard-Speaker on Monday.

Coleman told the newspaper that Smith is the coldest person known to have survived exposure-related hypothermia.

“We may have witnessed a game-changer in modern medicine — medicine moves forward in extraordinary cases,” he said. “His survival is a paradigm change in how we resuscitate and how we treat people that suffer from hypothermia.”


*https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...e-it-could-save-others-too/?wpisrc=nl_az_most
*


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## LogSawyer74 (Jan 20, 2016)

Incredible!! Makes you really think about all the possibilities that modern medicine has yet to discover.....


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## USMC615 (Jan 20, 2016)

Read an article on this...amazing!!


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## LegDeLimber (Jan 20, 2016)

OK. The article says that a trip/fall, while walking, is believed to be what put him in that predicament.
I'm thinking about those missing toes and wondering
how bad are this guys chances of a fall going to be,
from now on...??


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## Brushpile (Jan 21, 2016)

Here is a BBC video link to this incredible story.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-ca...social&ns_campaign=bbcnews&ns_source=facebook


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## Dumf (Jan 27, 2016)

It's the "Mamalian Diving Response" based on evolutionary theory of our origins. Only effective if you are in excellent condition, 20's or younger, and have no circulatory problems such as heart conditions.
Check it out, interesting stories of survival in cold, in water, under ice.
This will not affect most of us/you old farts here; forgetaboutit.


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## Fubar (Feb 4, 2016)

i wonder what the longest someone has been froze and brought back to life ? he went at least 12 hours .


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## capetrees (Feb 4, 2016)

We'll find out when they thaw Ted Williams out.


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