The paramedics were convinced that 25-year-old Justin Smith was dead when they arrived. The Pennsylvania resident had no pulse or blood pressure and turned blue. Smith was drinking with friends at night, and was found swept up in snow the next day on the side of the road.
“When I saw him in this state, I had no hope,” said Justin's father, Don. Don was the one who found his son on the sidelines. “I thought, 'He must be dead.'
When ambulance personnel arrived at the scene, they were unable to detect any signs of life in the person who had been in the cold for about 12 hours by then. There seemed to be no hope, but Dr. Gerald Coleman, from the emergency department at Lehigh Valley Hospital, didn't believe Justin was dead.
"My clinical thought is very simple: you have to be warm to be dead," Coleman said. "Something inside me just said," I need to give this person a chance."
Although he acknowledged that the effort was likely to be futile, Coleman instructed paramedics to begin cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It took about two hours. It seemed that everything was in vain. One nurse recalled that his body was still as cold as a block of concrete.
“We knew we needed a big, big miracle,” said Justin's mom, Sissy Smith.
And it happened after a while. After Justin was admitted to the hospital, doctors hooked him up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to warm and supply oxygen to the blood. The machine did its job, and Justin's heart began to beat on its own as he warmed up. It was a victory, but the doctors were still concerned about the main thing - Justin's brain, which was deprived of oxygen for many hours. Typically, brain cells begin to die after a few minutes without oxygen. Justin's case, however, turned out to be far from typical.
“If you have a very low temperature, it can preserve the brain and other organ functions,” explained Dr. James Wu Lehigh.
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Everyone waited several weeks before Justin came to his senses and realized where he was. His brain seemed safe and sound. Although Justin ended up losing his fingers and two pinky fingers to frostbite due to the incident, by and large he was incredibly lucky. Coleman said the case could be more than a miracle. But
“We may have witnessed modern medicine moving forward in exceptional cases,” he said. "Its survival is the result of a paradigm shift in resuscitation medicine, and in the way we treat people who suffer from hypothermia."