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On December 20th, 1980, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard experienced what doctors call medically impossible. After her car slid off an icy road in rural Minnesota during a blizzard with temperatures at -22°F, Jean made the difficult decision to walk two miles through whiteout conditions to reach her friend Wally Nelson's farmhouse. Dressed only in cowboy boots and a winter coat, she battled brutal winds and life-threatening cold for over an hour.
In a cruel twist of fate, Jean collapsed just 15 feet from Wally's front door, where she lay face-down in the snow for six hours. When Wally found her the next morning, she was frozen solid - literally crystallized, with her body rigid as a board and her skin hard as stone. Hospital staff initially thought he was bringing them a corpse, as her body temperature was too low to register on their thermometers and they couldn't find a pulse or blood pressure.
Yet incredibly, Jean not only survived but made a complete recovery with no amputations or permanent damage. After 49 days of observation, she walked out of the hospital completely healthy, leaving medical professionals baffled. This episode explores the science behind her miraculous survival, featuring insights from hypothermia expert Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht (aka "Professor Popsicle"), and examines how Jean returned to a normal life after becoming briefly famous as "The Miracle Girl from Lengby, Minnesota."
0:00 Introduction to Case Knives
Email us! [email protected]
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thecruxpodcast/
Get schooled by Julie in outdoor wilderness medicine! https://www.headwatersfieldmedicine.com/
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
By Kaycee McIntosh, Julie Henningsen, Bleav3.9
416416 ratings
On December 20th, 1980, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard experienced what doctors call medically impossible. After her car slid off an icy road in rural Minnesota during a blizzard with temperatures at -22°F, Jean made the difficult decision to walk two miles through whiteout conditions to reach her friend Wally Nelson's farmhouse. Dressed only in cowboy boots and a winter coat, she battled brutal winds and life-threatening cold for over an hour.
In a cruel twist of fate, Jean collapsed just 15 feet from Wally's front door, where she lay face-down in the snow for six hours. When Wally found her the next morning, she was frozen solid - literally crystallized, with her body rigid as a board and her skin hard as stone. Hospital staff initially thought he was bringing them a corpse, as her body temperature was too low to register on their thermometers and they couldn't find a pulse or blood pressure.
Yet incredibly, Jean not only survived but made a complete recovery with no amputations or permanent damage. After 49 days of observation, she walked out of the hospital completely healthy, leaving medical professionals baffled. This episode explores the science behind her miraculous survival, featuring insights from hypothermia expert Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht (aka "Professor Popsicle"), and examines how Jean returned to a normal life after becoming briefly famous as "The Miracle Girl from Lengby, Minnesota."
0:00 Introduction to Case Knives
Email us! [email protected]
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thecruxpodcast/
Get schooled by Julie in outdoor wilderness medicine! https://www.headwatersfieldmedicine.com/
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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