2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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created_at: '2012-12-28T15:06:52.000Z'
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title: The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death (1997)
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url: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/As-Freezing-Persons-Recollect-the-Snow--First-Chill--Then-Stupor--Then-the-Letting-Go.html?page=all
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author: BlackJack
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points: 431
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 184
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1356707212
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_BlackJack
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- story_4977935
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objectID: '4977935'
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2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00
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year: 1997
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2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
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---
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward
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into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first
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thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that
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you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for
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dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a
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moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from
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that.
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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![Headphones](/sites/all/themes/outside/images/icons/headphones.svg)**Listen
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to the Frozen Alive Podcast to Go Behind the Story with the Author**
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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Driving out of town, defroster roaring, you barely noted the bank
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thermometer on the town square: minus 27 degrees at 6:36. The radio
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weather report warned of a deep mass of arctic air settling over the
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region. The man who took your money at the Conoco station shook his head
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at the register and said he wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight if he
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were you. You smiled. A little chill never hurt anybody with enough
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fleece and a good four-wheel-drive.
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2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00
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2018-03-03 09:35:28 +00:00
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But now you’re stuck. Jamming the gearshift into low, you try to muscle
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out of the drift. The tires whine on ice-slicked snow as headlights
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dance on the curtain of frosted firs across the road. Shoving the lever
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back into park, you shoulder open the door and step from your heated
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capsule. Cold slaps your naked face, squeezes tears from your
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eyes.
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![Headphones](/sites/all/themes/outside/images/icons/headphones.svg)**Listen
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to the Frozen Alive Podcast to Go Behind the Story with the Author**
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You check your watch: 7:18. You consult your map: A thin, switchbacking
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line snakes up the mountain to the penciled square that marks the cabin.
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Breath rolls from you in short frosted puffs. The Jeep lies cocked
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sideways in the snowbank like an empty turtle shell. You think of
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firelight and saunas and warm food and wine. You look again at the map.
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It’s maybe five or six miles more to that penciled square. You run that
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far every day before breakfast. You’ll just put on your skis. No
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problem.
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There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes
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from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors
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calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The lowest
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recorded core temperature in a surviving adult is 60.8 degrees. For a
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child it’s lower: In 1994, a two-year-old girl in Saskatchewan wandered
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out of her house into a minus-40 night. She was found near her doorstep
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the next morning, limbs frozen solid, her core temperature 57 degrees.
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She lived.
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Others are less fortunate, even in much milder conditions. One of
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Europe’s worst weather disasters occurred during a 1964 competitive
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walk on a windy, rainy English moor; three of the racers died from
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hypothermia, though temperatures never fell below freezing and ranged as
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high as 45.
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But for all scientists and statisticians now know of freezing and its
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physiology, no one can yet predict exactly how quickly and in whom
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hypothermia will strike—and whether it will kill when it does. The cold
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remains a mystery, more prone to fell men than women, more lethal to the
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thin and well muscled than to those with avoirdupois, and least
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forgiving to the arrogant and the unaware.
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The process begins even before you leave the car, when you remove your
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gloves to squeeze a loose bail back into one of your ski bindings. The
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freezing metal bites your flesh. Your skin temperature drops.
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Within a few seconds, the palms of your hands are a chilly, painful 60
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degrees. Instinctively, the web of surface capillaries on your hands
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constrict, sending blood coursing away from your skin and deeper into
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your torso. Your body is allowing your fingers to chill in order to keep
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its vital organs warm.
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You replace your gloves, noticing only that your fingers have numbed
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slightly. Then you kick boots into bindings and start up the road.
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Were you a Norwegian fisherman or Inuit hunter, both of whom frequently
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work gloveless in the cold, your chilled hands would open their surface
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capillaries periodically to allow surges of warm blood to pass into them
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and maintain their flexibility. This phenomenon, known as the hunter’s
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response, can elevate a 35-degree skin temperature to 50 degrees within
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seven or eight minutes.
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Other human adaptations to the cold are more mysterious. Tibetan
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Buddhist monks can raise the skin temperature of their hands and feet by
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15 degrees through meditation. Australian aborigines, who once slept on
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the ground, unclothed, on near-freezing nights, would slip into a light
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hypothermic state, suppressing shivering until the rising sun rewarmed
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them.
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You have no such defenses, having spent your days at a keyboard in a
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climate-controlled office. Only after about ten minutes of hard
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climbing, as your body temperature rises, does blood start seeping back
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into your fingers. Sweat trickles down your sternum and spine.
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By now you’ve left the road and decided to shortcut up the forested
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mountainside to the road’s next switchback. Treading slowly through
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deep, soft snow as the full moon hefts over a spiny ridgetop, throwing
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silvery bands of moonlight and shadow, you think your friends were
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right: It’s a beautiful night for skiing—though you admit, feeling the
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minus-30 air bite at your face, it’s also cold.
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After an hour, there’s still no sign of the switchback, and you’ve begun
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to worry. You pause to check the map. At this moment, your core
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temperature reaches its high: 100.8. Climbing in deep snow, you’ve
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generated nearly ten times as much body heat as you do when you are
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resting.
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As you step around to orient map to forest, you hear a metallic pop. You
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look down. The loose bail has disappeared from your binding. You lift
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your foot and your ski falls from your boot.
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You twist on your flashlight, and its cold-weakened batteries throw a
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yellowish circle in the snow. It’s right around here somewhere, you
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think, as you sift the snow through gloved fingers. Focused so intently
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on finding the bail, you hardly notice the frigid air pressing against
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your tired body and sweat-soaked clothes.
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The exertion that warmed you on the way uphill now works against you:
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Your exercise-dilated capillaries carry the excess heat of your core to
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your skin, and your wet clothing dispels it rapidly into the night. The
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lack of insulating fat over your muscles allows the cold to creep that
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much closer to your warm blood.
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Your temperature begins to plummet. Within 17 minutes it reaches the
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normal 98.6. Then it slips below.
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At 97 degrees, hunched over in your slow search, the muscles along your
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neck and shoulders tighten in what’s known as pre-shivering muscle tone.
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Sensors have signaled the temperature control center in your
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hypothalamus, which in turn has ordered the constriction of the entire
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web of surface capillaries. Your hands and feet begin to ache with cold.
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Ignoring the pain, you dig carefully through the snow; another ten
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minutes pass. Without the bail you know you’re in deep trouble.
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Finally, nearly 45 minutes later, you find the bail. You even manage to
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pop it back into its socket and clamp your boot into the binding. But
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the clammy chill that started around your skin has now wrapped deep into
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your body’s core.
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At 95, you’ve entered the zone of mild hypothermia. You’re now trembling
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violently as your body attains its maximum shivering response, an
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involuntary condition in which your muscles contract rapidly to generate
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additional body heat.
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It was a mistake, you realize, to come out on a night this cold. You
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should turn back. Fishing into the front pocket of your shell parka, you
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fumble out the map. You consulted it to get here; it should be able to
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guide you back to the warm car. It doesn’t occur to you in your
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increasingly clouded and panicky mental state that you could simply
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follow your tracks down the way you came.
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And after this long stop, the skiing itself has become more difficult.
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By the time you push off downhill, your muscles have cooled and
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tightened so dramatically that they no longer contract easily, and once
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contracted, they won’t relax. You’re locked into an ungainly,
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spread-armed, weak-kneed snowplow.
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Still, you manage to maneuver between stands of fir, swishing down
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through silvery light and pools of shadow. You’re too cold to think of
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the beautiful night or of the friends you had meant to see. You think
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only of the warm Jeep that waits for you somewhere at the bottom of the
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hill. Its gleaming shell is centered in your mind’s eye as you come over
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the crest of a small knoll. You hear the sudden whistle of wind in your
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ears as you gain speed. Then, before your mind can quite process what
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the sight means, you notice a lump in the snow ahead.
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Recognizing, slowly, the danger that you are in, you try to jam your
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skis to a stop. But in your panic, your balance and judgment are poor.
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Moments later, your ski tips plow into the buried log and you sail
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headfirst through the air and bellyflop into the snow.
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You lie still. There’s a dead silence in the forest, broken by the
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pumping of blood in your ears. Your ankle is throbbing with pain and
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you’ve hit your head. You’ve also lost your hat and a glove. Scratchy
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snow is packed down your shirt. Meltwater trickles down your neck and
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spine, joined soon by a thin line of blood from a small cut on your
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head.
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This situation, you realize with an immediate sense of panic, is
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serious. Scrambling to rise, you collapse in pain, your ankle crumpling
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beneath you.
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As you sink back into the snow, shaken, your heat begins to drain away
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at an alarming rate, your head alone accounting for 50 percent of the
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loss. The pain of the cold soon pierces your ears so sharply that you
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root about in the snow until you find your hat and mash it back onto
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your head.
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But even that little activity has been exhausting. You know you should
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find your glove as well, and yet you’re becoming too weary to feel any
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urgency. You decide to have a short rest before going on.
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An hour passes. at one point, a stray thought says you should start
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being scared, but fear is a concept that floats somewhere beyond your
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immediate reach, like that numb hand lying naked in the snow. You’ve
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slid into the temperature range at which cold renders the enzymes in
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your brain less efficient. With every one-degree drop in body
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temperature below 95, your cerebral metabolic rate falls off by 3 to 5
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percent. When your core temperature reaches 93, amnesia nibbles at your
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consciousness. You check your watch: 12:58. Maybe someone will come
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looking for you soon. Moments later, you check again. You can’t keep the
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numbers in your head. You’ll remember little of what happens next.
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Your head drops back. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the
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minus-35-degree air, your core temperature falls about one degree every
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30 to 40 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping
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snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
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You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time
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your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned
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the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like
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crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of
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your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys,
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however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when
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the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids
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toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing
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you feel at all.
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By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face,
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should one suddenly appear from the woods.
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At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled
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nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the
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normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of
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your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory
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hallucinations.
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You hear jingle bells. Lifting your face from your snow pillow, you
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realize with a surge of gladness that they’re not sleigh bells; they’re
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welcoming bells hanging from the door of your friends’ cabin. You knew
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it had to be close by. The jingling is the sound of the cabin door
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opening, just through the fir trees.
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Attempting to stand, you collapse in a tangle of skis and poles. That’s
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OK. You can crawl. It’s so close.
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Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize the cabin still sits
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beyond the grove of trees. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on
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your wristwatch pulses in the darkness: 5:20. Exhausted, you decide to
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rest your head for a moment.
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When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the
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woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First it’s warm; then it’s
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hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.
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At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished
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paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as
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paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims
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are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though
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researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is
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that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels
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near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of
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extreme heat against the skin.
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All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your shell and pile
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sweater and fling them away.
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But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no
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cabin, no friends. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the
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waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of
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misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed
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your clothes, your car, your oil-heated house in town. Without this
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ingenious technology you’re simply a delicate, tropical organism whose
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range is restricted to a narrow sunlit band that girds the earth at the
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equator.
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And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.
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There’s an adage about hypothermia: “You aren’t dead until you’re warm
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and dead.”
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At about 6:00 the next morning, his friends, having discovered the
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stalled Jeep, find him, still huddled inches from the buried log, his
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gloveless hand shoved into his armpit. The flesh of his limbs is waxy
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and stiff as old putty, his pulse nonexistent, his pupils unresponsive
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to light. Dead.
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But those who understand cold know that even as it deadens, it offers
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perverse salvation. Heat is a presence: the rapid vibrating of
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molecules. Cold is an absence: the damping of the vibrations. At
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absolute zero, minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, molecular motion ceases
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altogether. It is this slowing that converts gases to liquids, liquids
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to solids, and renders solids harder. It slows bacterial growth and
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chemical reactions. In the human body, cold shuts down metabolism. The
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lungs take in less oxygen, the heart pumps less blood. Under normal
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temperatures, this would produce brain damage. But the chilled brain,
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having slowed its own metabolism, needs far less oxygen-rich blood and
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can, under the right circumstances, survive intact.
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Setting her ear to his chest, one of his rescuers listens intently.
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Seconds pass. Then, faintly, she hears a tiny sound—a single thump, so
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slight that it might be the sound of her own blood. She presses her ear
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harder to the cold flesh. Another faint thump, then another.
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The slowing that accompanies freezing is, in its way, so beneficial that
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it is even induced at times. Cardiologists today often use deep chilling
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to slow a patient’s metabolism in preparation for heart or brain
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surgery. In this state of near suspension, the patient’s blood flows
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slowly, his heart rarely beats—or in the case of those on heart-lung
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machines, doesn’t beat at all; death seems near. But carefully
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monitored, a patient can remain in this cold stasis, undamaged, for
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hours.
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The rescuers quickly wrap their friend’s naked torso with a spare parka,
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his hands with mittens, his entire body with a bivy sack. They brush
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snow from his pasty, frozen face. Then one snakes down through the
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forest to the nearest cabin. The others, left in the pre-dawn darkness,
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huddle against him as silence closes around them. For a moment, the
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woman imagines she can hear the scurrying, breathing, snoring of a world
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of creatures that have taken cover this frigid night beneath the thick
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quilt of snow.
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With a “one, two, three,” the doctor and nurses slide the man’s stiff,
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curled form onto a table fitted with a mattress filled with warm water
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which will be regularly reheated. They’d been warned that they had a
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profound hypothermia case coming in. Usually such victims can be
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straightened from their tortured fetal positions. This one can’t.
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Technicians scissor with stainless-steel shears at the man’s
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urine-soaked long underwear and shell pants, frozen together like
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corrugated cardboard. They attach heart-monitor electrodes to his chest
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and insert a low-temperature electronic thermometer into his rectum.
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Digital readings flash: 24 beats per minute and a core temperature of
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79.2 degrees.
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The doctor shakes his head. He can’t remember seeing numbers so low.
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He’s not quite sure how to revive this man without killing him.
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In fact, many hypothermia victims die each year in the process of being
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rescued. In “rewarming shock,” the constricted capillaries reopen almost
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all at once, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. The slightest
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movement can send a victim’s heart muscle into wild spasms of
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ventricular fibrillation. In 1980, 16 shipwrecked Danish fishermen were
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hauled to safety after an hour and a half in the frigid North Sea. They
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then walked across the deck of the rescue ship, stepped below for a hot
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drink, and dropped dead, all 16 of them.
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“78.9,” a technician calls out. “That’s three-tenths down.”
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The patient is now experiencing “afterdrop,” in which residual cold
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close to the body’s surface continues to cool the core even after the
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victim is removed from the outdoors.
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The doctor rapidly issues orders to his staff: intravenous
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administration of warm saline, the bag first heated in the microwave to
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110 degrees. Elevating the core temperature of an average-size male one
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degree requires adding about 60 kilocalories of heat. A kilocalorie is
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the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water
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one degree Celsius. Since a quart of hot soup at 140 degrees offers
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about 30 kilocalories, the patient curled on the table would need to
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consume 40 quarts of chicken broth to push his core temperature up to
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normal. Even the warm saline, infused directly into his blood, will add
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only 30 kilocalories.
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Ideally, the doctor would have access to a cardiopulmonary bypass
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machine, with which he could pump out the victim’s blood, rewarm and
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oxygenate it, and pump it back in again, safely raising the core
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temperature as much as one degree every three minutes. But such machines
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are rarely available outside major urban hospitals. Here, without such
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equipment, the doctor must rely on other options.
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“Let’s scrub for surgery,” he calls out.
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Moments later, he’s sliding a large catheter into an incision in the
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man’s abdominal cavity. Warm fluid begins to flow from a suspended
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bag, washing through his abdomen, and draining out through another
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catheter placed in another incision. Prosaically, this lavage operates
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much like a car radiator in reverse: The solution warms the internal
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organs, and the warm blood in the organs is then pumped by the heart
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throughout the body.
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The patient’s stiff limbs begin to relax. His pulse edges up. But even
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so the jagged line of his heartbeat flashing across the EKG screen shows
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the curious dip known as a J wave, common to hypothermia patients.
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“Be ready to defibrillate,” the doctor warns the EMTs.
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For another hour, nurses and EMTs hover around the edges of the table
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where the patient lies centered in a warm pool of light, as if offered
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up to the sun god. They check his heart. They check the heat of the
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mattress beneath him. They whisper to one another about the foolishness
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of having gone out alone tonight.
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And slowly the patient responds. Another liter of saline is added to the
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IV. The man’s blood pressure remains far too low, brought down by the
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blood flowing out to the fast-opening capillaries of his limbs. Fluid
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lost through perspiration and urination has reduced his blood volume.
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But every 15 or 20 minutes, his temperature rises another degree. The
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immediate danger of cardiac fibrillation lessens, as the heart and
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thinning blood warms. Frostbite could still cost him fingers or an
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earlobe. But he appears to have beaten back the worst of the frigidity.
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For the next half hour, an EMT quietly calls the readouts of the
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thermometer, a mantra that marks the progress of this cold-blooded
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proto-organism toward a state of warmer, higher consciousness.
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“90.4...
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“92.2...”
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From somewhere far away in the immense, cold darkness, you hear a faint,
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insistent hum. Quickly it mushrooms into a ball of sound, like a planet
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rushing toward you, and then it becomes a stream of words.
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A voice is calling your name.
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You don’t want to open your eyes. You sense heat and light playing
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against your eyelids, but beneath their warm dance a chill wells up
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inside you from the sunless ocean bottoms and the farthest depths of
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space. You are too tired even to shiver. You want only to sleep.
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“Can you hear me?”
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You force open your eyes. Lights glare overhead. Around the lights faces
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hover atop uniformed bodies. You try to think: You’ve been away a very
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long time, but where have you been?
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“You’re at the hospital. You got caught in the cold.”
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You try to nod. Your neck muscles feel rusted shut, unused for years.
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They respond to your command with only a slight twitch.
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“You’ll probably have amnesia,” the voice says.
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You remember the moon rising over the spiky ridgetop and skiing up
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toward it, toward someplace warm beneath the frozen moon. After that,
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nothing—only that immense coldness lodged inside you.
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“We’re trying to get a little warmth back into you,” the voice says.
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You’d nod if you could. But you can’t move. All you can feel is
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throbbing discomfort everywhere. Glancing down to where the pain is most
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biting, you notice blisters filled with clear fluid dotting your
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fingers, once gloveless in the snow. During the long, cold hours the
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tissue froze and ice crystals formed in the tiny spaces between your
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cells, sucking water from them, blocking the blood supply. You stare at
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them absently.
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“I think they’ll be fine,” a voice from overhead says. “The damage looks
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superficial. We expect that the blisters will break in a week or so, and
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the tissue should revive after that.”
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If not, you know that your fingers will eventually turn black, the color
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of bloodless, dead tissue. And then they will be amputated.
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But worry slips from you as another wave of exhaustion sweeps in. Slowly
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you drift off, dreaming of warmth, of tropical ocean wavelets breaking
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across your chest, of warm sand beneath you.
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Hours later, still logy and numb, you surface, as if from deep under
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water. A warm tide seems to be flooding your midsection. Focusing your
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eyes down there with difficulty, you see tubes running into you, their
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heat mingling with your abdomen’s depthless cold like a churned-up
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river. You follow the tubes to the bag that hangs suspended beneath the
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electric light.
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And with a lurch that would be a sob if you could make a sound, you
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begin to understand: The bag contains all that you had so nearly lost.
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These people huddled around you have brought you sunlight and warmth,
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things you once so cavalierly dismissed as constant, available, yours,
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summoned by the simple twisting of a knob or tossing on of a layer.
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But in the hours since you last believed that, you’ve traveled to a
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place where there is no sun. You’ve seen that in the infinite reaches of
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the universe, heat is as glorious and ephemeral as the light of the
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stars. Heat exists only where matter exists, where particles can vibrate
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and jump. In the infinite winter of space, heat is tiny; it is the cold
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that is huge.
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Someone speaks. Your eyes move from bright lights to shadowy forms in
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the dim outer reaches of the room. You recognize the voice of one of the
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friends you set out to visit, so long ago now. She’s smiling down at you
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crookedly.
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“It’s cold out there,” she says. “Isn’t it?”
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