When the duty nurse tried to take her temperature, the reading came back so low it was off the scale of standard hospital thermometers, which stopped registering at 88 degrees Fahrenheit because temperatures below that were not generally consistent with survival.

When the attending physician, Dr.

George Sather, tried to draw blood or administer IV fluids, the needles would not penetrate the skin.

She was too frozen to inject.

Sather would later describe what he found in words that have been quoted in medical literature ever since: “The body was cold, completely solid, just like a piece of meat out of a deep freeze.”

And then, from somewhere inside that frozen body, something happened that changed everything about this story.