On the night of December 20, 1980, the porch step at Wally Nelson’s farmhouse became the location of one of the more extraordinary events in American medical history.

A young woman collapsed there, face-down, and did not get up for six hours.

The temperature was 22 below zero.

There was no one nearby to help her.

There was no monitoring, no treatment, no intervention of any kind.

She simply lay there, and the cold did what the cold does, and her body ran the ancient program that evolution had given it, and somehow the program ran long enough.

The porch step is ordinary.