10 People Who Survived Gruesome Accidents Against All The Odds

When Jean Hilliard's car wouldn't start in the December of 1980, she decided to walk the rest of the way home, despite the fact that the temperature was -22°C.

The cold was too much for Jean, though, and she collapsed just 15 feet from her front door where she lay until her neighbour found he the next day. Jean was frozen solid and stiff as a board so that her neighbour then (rather stoically) had to lay her diagonally across the back seat of his car in order to take her to the hospital.

When she arrived at the hospital, it was feared that nothing could be done. When a nurse attempted to insert an IV into Jean's skin, the needle simply snapped against her frozen arm. None of her limbs would bend or move and doctors feared that even if they could save her, they would have to amputate - that's if she survived the multiple organ failure that was surely on the cards. There was also a possibility that the expansion of ice crystals in her brain would have caused severe, irreversible damage.

Still, the doctors wrapped Jean in an electric blanket and waited to see what would happen.

Incredibly, within a few hours, she began to twitch and convulse and by lunchtime her eyes had fluttered open like something out of a Disney movie and she woke up.

Aside from a little disorientation, Jean Hilliard was absolutely, miraculously, fine. Her frostbite disappeared, her mind was fully functioning and she left the hospital after a month and a half without losing so much as a finger.

To this day, nobody knows for sure how Jean survived. The general theory is that her body froze so quickly in the extreme cold that it went into a hibernation state before any damage could occur. This has been observed in the animal kingdom before but no one was ever sure as to whether it would also work with humans.