{"id":6099,"date":"2015-10-31T15:56:21","date_gmt":"2015-10-31T20:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6099"},"modified":"2023-12-16T10:01:27","modified_gmt":"2023-12-16T16:01:27","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-october-31-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=6099","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for October 31, 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

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May your Halloween be filled with morbidly mirthful surprises!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Today’s Profoundly Cold\u00a0Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/h3>\n

Allow me to set the scene: \u00a0You’re driving your Jeep on a remote road in the snowy, sub-freezing mountains\u00a0for moonlit skiing and dinner at your friend’s cabin. You slide off the road and get stuck in a snowbank. You sit for awhile and when you realize that help is not going to come by anytime soon, you decide to ski to your friend’s cabin. \u00a0You take off through the woods, figuring their cabin must surely just be over this ridge. \u00a0After a while, as darkness settles in, you become disoriented, the house is nowhere to be seen, and the cold begins to creep through your fingers and toes. You realize that this was a Very Bad Idea. \u00a0You decide to ski back to your warm Jeep down the hill. \u00a0On the way down, you fail to see a tree limb peeking through the snow until the very last second. \u00a0The collision sends you tumbling down the hill, breaking your ski, severely injuring your ankle and causing you to lose a glove and your hat. This is the story of what happens next, as\u00a0culled from:\u00a0Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An hour passes. At one point, a stray thought says you should start being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in your brain less efficient. With every 1-degree drop in body temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5 percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can’t keep the numbers in your head. You’ll remember little of what happens next.<\/p>\n

Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the -35 degree air, your core temperature falls about 1 degree every thirty to forty minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.<\/p>\n

You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.<\/p>\n

By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear from the woods.<\/p>\n

At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.<\/p>\n

You hear jingle bells. Lifting your face from your snow pillow, you realize with a surge of gladness that they’re not sleigh bells; they’re welcoming bells hanging from the door of your friends’ cabin. You knew it had to be close by. The jingling is the sound of the cabin door opening, just through the fir trees.<\/p>\n

Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles. That’s okay. You can crawl. It’s so close.<\/p>\n

Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize the cabin still sits beyond the grove of trees. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.<\/p>\n

When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.<\/p>\n

At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.<\/p>\n

All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile sweater and fling them away.<\/p>\n

But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this ingenious technology, you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the equator.<\/p>\n

And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.<\/p>\n

Culled from:\u00a0Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance<\/a><\/p>\n

So are you dead or are you rescued? We’ll find out with tomorrow’s MFDJ!<\/p>\n

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It’s Not Cold In Here, You’re Just Dying<\/h3>\n

Confessions of a Funeral Director<\/a> points out that Halloween decor and nursing homes aren’t always the best mix.<\/p>\n

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The Legend of the Banshee<\/h3>\n

I thought I’d share a spooky legend in honor of Halloween:<\/p>\n

Banshees wailed for the dying throughout the British Isles and France. The name comes from the Gaelic bean side<\/em>, meaning “woman of the fairy folk,” and some banshees were indeed of fairy lineage; others, it was thought, were ghosts themselves. They seemed attached to individual families, and they mourned the coming intrusion of death into the clan. Family members might hear their terrible cries swirling around the house in the night, rising, it seemed, from the very walls and floors. Sometimes the wailing came from out of doors, and those within who looked from a window would see a rail-thin woman, her face white, her long hair streaming, her eyes blood red with weeping. She would drift in the air around the walls, peering through the windowpanes, to search for the one whose death she awaited. When she found that one and beckoned, the person had to go.<\/p>\n

In Scotland, the banshee took another form. She was called the bean-nighe<\/em>, or “washing woman.” Small and squat – sometimes even grotesquely childlike in appearance – the bean-nighe<\/em> was seen by travelers passing remote pools and fords. She ceaselessly beat bloodstained shrouds upon the river stones and wrung the water from the cloth, and sometimes she crooned a dirge all to herself. It was said that the traveler who dared to address her would hear the names of those about to die and would also hear – if he wished – his own fate foretold. \u00a0(I’ve always though the Washing Woman would be a fantastic Halloween costume, although I’d have to explain it to everyone I saw. – DeSpair)<\/em><\/p>\n

The bean-nighe<\/em> was frequently described as a ghost herself – usually the ghost of a woman who had died in childbirth. This was an untimely death, a curtailment of the normal course of a life. The dead mother was doomed to be a beckoner of the living, washing the shrouds of those among them who were about to join her, until the date of what would have been her natural death had been reached.<\/p>\n

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Culled from:\u00a0The Enchanted World:\u00a0Ghosts<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May your Halloween be filled with morbidly mirthful surprises!   Today’s Profoundly Cold\u00a0Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Allow me to set the scene: \u00a0You’re driving your Jeep on a remote road in the snowy, sub-freezing mountains\u00a0for moonlit skiing and dinner at your friend’s cabin. You slide off the road and get stuck in a snowbank. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts","category-mirth","category-sundry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6099"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11923,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6099\/revisions\/11923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}