Today’s Resilient Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Humans are not particularly temperature-sensitive mammals – not much hair, not much fat. Coordination falters when an individual’s core temperature hits 95 degrees. By 86 degrees, you pass out and, now incapable of regulating your own temperature, require external heat to rewarm. By 82 degrees, liver and kidney failure are likely, as is a heart attack. Drop a few more degrees and most hypothermia victims die from cardiac arrest.
But not everyone who freezes dies, as has been the case on numerous occasions. One of the most memorable recoveries on record occurred near Chicago in 1984, when four-year-old Jimmy Tontlewicz chased his runaway sled onto the frozen surface of Lake Michigan, punched through the ice, and sank like a stone to the bottom. He’d been submerged for nearly half an hour by the time paramedics plucked him from the water – ghost white, pupils fixed, no pulse: clinically dead. But little Jimmy Tontlewicz didn’t die for good that day, despite the fact that his core temperature had bottomed out at 85 degrees. Within a week, doctors had revived him and started him on his way to a slow but full recovery. In 2001, a toddler from Edmonton, Alberta wandered into her backyard on a night that reached nearly 20 below. She was found at three a.m., facedown in a snowbank, with no pulse. After several days in intensive care, she was walking and talking.
Freezing quickly and being small help, but they aren’t a prerequisite. In 2000, a twenty-nine-year-old Norwegian skier named Anna Bagenholm tumbled down a snowy gully and became trapped in an ice-covered river. She fought her way into an air pocket, where she lasted for forty minutes before falling still. It took rescuers another forty minutes to pull her from the water. Bagenholm’s core temperature had plunged to 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit – the lowest ever recorded in a living human being. She spent two months in intensive care, but the only lasting effect was a tingling sensation in her hands.
“In our world, we don’t declare somebody dead until they’re warm and dead,” said Dr. Peter Cox, director of the critical care until at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
Culled from: Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest’s Most Controversial Season
Little Jimmy Tontlewicz being pulled from Lake Michigan:
Morbid Mirth Du Jour!
Thanks to Anna for sharing this one.
