This story took place in Belarus. Its hero was a certain Granatkin, a storekeeper of a grocery store. It just so happened that he was a witness to a crime involving a major theft of food products.
And since Granatkin was considered a person of principle, the criminals did not have the slightest hope that he would not report what had happened to law enforcement agencies. So they decided to get rid of him. Granatkin was hit on the head with a heavy object, taken out of town and thrown into a pit, not forgetting to sprinkle his body with a thick layer of snow.
But by pure chance, three weeks later, the lumberjacks found Granatkin's numb body. In accordance with the instructions, an examination was required to find out the causes of death. But since the body was frozen, it was decided to wait until the corpse thawed.
The body was placed in a warm room. A few hours later, the surgeon again entered the room where the deceased was. Glancing at Granatkin, the doctor noticed that his eyes did not look like the eyes of a dead person. And when the surgeon pressed on the nails, they turned pink. Although both pulse and breathing were absent. Experience and intuition told the doctor that the person was alive …
Subsequently, analyzing this unique case, doctors came to the conclusion that Granatkin survived thanks to an accidental and, at the same time, unique coincidence of circumstances.
First, he was dressed warmly. Secondly, the criminals covered his body with a thick layer of snow, which over time thickened, turning into a dense insulating shell: it was she who protected the storekeeper from freezing.
And, thirdly, after the blow he received, Granatkin did not die, but plunged into a kind of lethargic sleep, which led to a significant slowdown in vital processes.
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However, doctors admitted that it is rather difficult to explain this case only by these reasons. After all, Granatkin was in a capsule made of snow not an hour, and not even a day, but as many as 22 days …
A similar case was described by W. Fleig in his book Attention: Avalanches, published in 1960: “After feverish shoveling of the snow until noon on February 2, 26-year-old Freisener, buried on January 21 at 2 am, was removed from under it. Freisener began to recover and even opened his eyes! He remained alive after 13 days of avalanche captivity …
In March 1960, the body of a man was delivered to a hospital morgue in one of the regional centers of Kazakhstan. The doctor who performed the examination made the following entry in the examination report: “The numb body is completely frozen over, with no signs of life. Tapping the body produces a dull sound like hitting wood. Body temperature is below 0 ° C. The eyes are wide open and a crust of ice has formed on them. Pulse and breathing cannot be heard. Diagnosis: general freezing, clinical death."
And yet, despite such a categorical conclusion, doctor P. S. Abrahamyan tried to save the man. As a result of a series of procedures, after an hour and a half, the man was brought back to life …
The incident that took place in the summer of 1967 in Tokyo can rightfully be called tragicomic. The heat was unbearable that day, and the driver of the refrigerator truck, in order to get rid of the heat at least for a while, climbed into the refrigerator. But, unfortunately, the door slammed shut …
When the driver was removed from the refrigerator a few hours later, he looked like an ice sculpture. After a cursory examination of the numb body, the doctor pronounced death. However, later it turned out that the unfortunate man was showing signs of life. He was immediately provided with qualified assistance and, thereby, saved his life.
Visited a refrigerated van and one Indian driver. This was reported on May 2, 1988 by a weekly newspaper published in Delhi. Literally, this publication looks like this:
“A daring attack was carried out by unidentified persons on a truck delivering seafood delicacies, thirty-year-old Raja Shakkar. A large sum of money was stolen. The driver himself was stunned, hitting the crown of the head with a stick, and then buried in dry ice that filled the van. When the police found Mr. Shakkar six hours later, he was indistinguishable from the frozen fish he was transporting. Doctors, we must pay tribute to their intuition, tried to resuscitate the victim by placing him in a bath with warm water, the temperature of which was raised very slowly, degree by degree.
The poor man soon began to show signs of life, although he was in a coma. The state of oblivion lasted six hours. Mr. Shakkar now fully adequately reacts to what is happening around him, recognizes his relatives. He cannot remember the details of the events fatal to him. He only remembers that there was a sharp pain in the back of his head and cold, replaced by heat, when his body came into contact with ice. After which, according to him, he began to rapidly fall into the bottomless dark abyss.
Doctors hope that the long stay in the frozen state will not adversely affect the patient's health and that he will be able to return to work. Gray hair remained in memory of the incident. Before that, Mr. Shakkar did not have a single gray hair …
A 23-year-old resident of Chicago, half-naked, lay in the snow for about 11 hours with air temperature fluctuations from -18 to -26 ° C. However, the doctors also returned her life, although they had to remove the feet and fingers from the injured foot …
Another incident of this kind occurred in January 1939 in the city of Kiselevsk, Kemerovo Region. Eight years after the incident, the doctor of the local hospital, Nikolai Mikhailovich Khokhlov, described the incident as follows:
“The village of Afonino is now within the city limits. To be honest, on the day of the distribution of parcels, the miners have a holiday, which cannot do without an intoxicating one. They sit at each other's house, if there is no shift in the morning, late. Frosts in Western Siberia are severe. For a drunk person, a night road is deadly. Sometimes they freeze in a snowdrift.
I remember a man - Anikin Egor. Healthy, hero. Frozen for a fun business. When he was brought to the point in a droshky, he was covered with a thick crust of ice. Without a sheepskin coat. In one shirt. There were no documents with him. A police investigator arrived. It was necessary to issue a death certificate. And for this it was required to identify the frozen one.
While the court and the case, they assigned the deceased to the cold part of the hut, the one where the paramedic station was located. The news of the frozen miner spread throughout the area. The day passed - no one showed up to identify. Another day - again there is no one. Four days have passed. To no avail. I went to the challenge. I return, our orderly and watchman, old man Ivan Khvorost, is running, shouting that someone is singing loudly in the barn. What kind of opportunity? I run to the barn. I turn on the light. And our deceased, on the floor where he was assigned, sits, sways and howls.
They moved him to the warmth. I did not find any traces of frostbite, skin necrosis. Body temperature is normal. The pulse is perfect, good filling. Blood pressure is for envy. The psyche is only damaged. Finally we arrived from the mine. Recognized it. The man was transported to the regional center, to a psychiatric hospital. Apparently, they considered it necessary to be transported to Moscow, where, as far as I know, the luminaries of medicine were closely engaged in it. I know that Egor Anikin died in 1944 from a stroke. His psyche never returned to normal. The cold killed the brain."
A truly incredible incident happened on July 3, 1969. On this day, a young worker at the Havana airport, Armando Ramirez, in order to surprise the girls who worked with him (according to another version, he deliberately wanted to escape from Cuba and therefore climbed into the recess for the landing gear), decided to ride on the landing gear of an aircraft taking off.
But suddenly the sleeve of his robe caught on one of the chassis elements. The plane took off with Ramirez and headed for Spain.
The flight lasting several hours took place at an altitude of eight thousand kilometers at a temperature of minus 41 ° C.
Surprisingly, Ramirez was not lost on the flight. Numb, "dressed" in a shell of thin ice, the guy was removed from the chassis at the airport in Madrid. Nobody believed that he was alive, so they sent him to the city morgue. However, three days later the "dead man" woke up.
The guy was immediately taken to a military hospital. Everything turned out to be all right with his health. And after a while he returned to his homeland. And here's what is surprising: Ramirez never got old and never got sick. He seemed to be mothballed. True, he was tormented by insomnia …
But if the majority of members of the human community suffer from cold and try to avoid it, then some people, on the contrary, tend to be closer to low temperatures.
Vitaly Mityukhin, a resident of Arkhangelsk, has such a difficult relationship with the cold. He suffers from a rare disease - a violation of heat transfer. The fact is that when the air temperature rises to + 5 ° C, the man begins to lose consciousness.
Mityukhin himself believes that he fell ill as a result of sunstroke, which happened to him in Krasnodar. And although several air conditioners were constantly working in Vitaly's old apartment, this did not help him: he still constantly felt bad. Therefore, he moved to Arkhangelsk.
Hypersensitivity to heat is a very rare condition. By the way, in the United States, a wealthy person who suffered from this disease was designed and made a special suit that allows him to lead an almost normal life …
However, all of the above examples were the result of unforeseen situations, that is, all the heroes of these stories became, in fact, victims of special circumstances.
But it turns out that for some people, resistance to cold has become a kind of sport, which even has its own champions.
For example, in early 2011, the Chinese Jin Songhao spent 120 minutes in a glass vessel filled with ice, and even in the searing cold. In this case, the record holder was dressed only in swimming pants. But this, as they say, by the way …
Of course, science is trying to explain the phenomenon of survival of a person who has been for a long time in low temperatures. Scientists have long been looking for those "buttons" and "levers" that trigger the defense mechanisms against death during hypothermia. However, they cannot yet find them.
So far, there are only hypotheses. So, supporters of one of them are sure that a person in conditions of imminent death remains alive only due to a state of shock, during which the mechanisms responsible for the course of biochemical reactions are blocked. As a result, these processes slow down significantly, that is, the person falls into a kind of suspended animation.
Let's assume that this is how it really is. But how, for example, to explain the cases when a person, after hypothermia, suddenly stops aging, as if gaining eternal youth.
By the way, back in 1930 the Soviet scientist M. I. Kislov, studying the physiological characteristics of the body of the Northern Fleet sailors who worked for a long time in low temperatures, came to the conclusion that one can not only get used to the cold. Applying low temperatures, a person can be tempered and even rejuvenated, significantly prolonging his mental, physical and emotional activity. Moreover, Kislov was sure that "a skillfully set freezing will surely open the doors leading to immortality for future generations."
And the scientist's predictions are beginning to come true. At least with the help of cold, many diseases begin to heal. And they even suggest extending a person's life.
Well, as they say, wait and see.