JEAN Hilliard was driving home from a night out with friends when she lost control of her car on a patch of ice and got stuck in a ditch.
With snow coming down hard and temperatures dropping to -30C, she knew she urgently needed to find shelter.
Jean Hilliard lay unconscious in the snow for six hours and made it out alive
The then-19-year-old described her survival as a ‘miracle’
The then-19-year-old remembered her pal Wally Nelson lived in the area, so set out on foot to find his house.
But it turned out to be a far longer walk than she thought, and she was trekking in near-blizzard conditions for well over an hour.
Eventually, she turned into his driveway. But her relief was short-lived as she slipped over and ended up face down in the snow.
Everything then went black.
Jean lay there unconscious for six hours – warmth and all signs of life slowly draining from her body.
Wally discovered her the following morning, when she was “frozen solid like a piece of meat”.
Despite her limbs being rigid, her skin alarmingly white and her eyes stuck open, Jean pulled through.
In an interview with FOX 9, she said: “It was definitely a miracle that I survived.”
Jean’s near-death experience began in the small town of Lengby, Minnesota, on December 20, 1980.
Not long after graduating from high school, she had been on a night out with friends and her then-boyfriend Paul at the Fosston American Legion before heading home in her dad’s Ford LTT at around midnight.
Due to the wintry weather and the fact the vehicle was rear-wheel drive, Jean struggled to make the journey and soon skidded off the road on the edge of the White Earth Indian Reservation.
In cowboy boots, a coat and mittens, she decided to walk to Wally’s family home, which she believed to be about half a mile away.
It was actually four times as far, and Jean was bitterly cold by the time she neared the house.
“What I thought was just a cold night was a dangerously cold night,” she said.
Somehow, the teen lost her footing and she ended up on the ground, just feet from the front door. That’s the last thing she remembers.
“It’s like somebody just shut off the lights, and I just fell asleep,” Jean said.
She was outside for around six hours before she was eventually discovered at 7am.
Wally allegedly saw footprints on his front lawn leading to a lump in the snow, where he found his friend passed out.
He described her as feeling like a solid block of ice, with every joint and muscle “stiffer than a board”.
Noticing she had “a few bubbles coming out of her nose”, Wally rushed her inside and phoned for help, before taking her to the nearest hospital.
Astonishingly, her body was so hard, medics didn’t even need to use a gurney.
“I was that solid,” Jean said. “They carried me in, one had my feet, the other hand my shoulders.”
Her body was cold, completely solid, just like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.
Dr George Sutter
From then, it was a frantic scramble to heat her body up as quickly as possible to essentially bring her back to life.
Dr George Sutter, who treated her in A&E, told the New York Times shortly after the incident: “Her body was cold, completely solid, just like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.”
She was so chilly, her skin was too hard to pierce with a needle, her temperature too cold to register on a thermometer, and her 12bpm pulse barely registered, the paper reported at the time.
Staff removed her crispy clothes and covered her in heated blankets, and her family endured an anxious wait while she thawed out.
“It didn’t look very good at all and they didn’t really think I was alive, but I was a hometown girl and they weren’t going to give up on me right away,” Jean said.
“I was black from the waist down. And when your tissue turns black, there’s usually no coming back.
“They told my parents that they didn’t think I’d make it, and if I did, I’d lose both my legs for sure.”
A few hours later, she woke up. At midday, she was talking. And by late afternoon, she was almost back to her normal self.
Doctors were dumbfounded.
Jean remained in hospital for seven weeks so she could be monitored and learn to walk normally again, but other than a couple of numb toes and blisters, she suffered no real consequences and quickly fully healed.
She is still the only known person to ever come back from being ‘frozen’ with zero permanent injuries.
The now-mum-of-three said: “The first week was kind of tough.
“I remember being in pain, feeling like I’d run a marathon without training. I felt very stiff and sore.
“But after that, I was fine.”
And amazingly, she still enjoys the cold – though she refuses to drive on icy roads at night.
The science behind ‘frozen’ body survival
JEAN Hilliard’s survival sounds like a miracle, and to her family, it was.
But experts actually have a saying: “Nobody is dead until warm and dead.”
In short, extreme hypothermia doesn’t guarantee death, and many people are ‘brought back’ after enduring exceptionally cold conditions.
This is likely because while she appeared frozen, Jean’s body temperature was reportedly around 27C.
That’s 10C colder than where a healthy person should sit, but it’s not 0C so well above freezing.
There’s a world of difference between a metaphorical ‘chilled to the bone’ and literal solidified water in the veins, ScienceAlert reports.
Her body likely felt solid because of muscle rigidity – a common symptom of hypothermia.
And her eyes and skin appeared cold, white and stiff because her body had probably closed off channels to blood vessels to keep her vital organs functioning.
YouTubeJean thought the walk to her friend’s house was half a mile, but it was actually two miles[/caption]
Jean said: ‘What I thought was just a cold night was a dangerously cold night’YouTube