`Frozen` man brought back to life
Jan. 19--Justin Smith was not breathing when his father found him lying in a foot of snow last February.
He had no pulse and no blood pressure.
The McAdoo man was essentially frozen solid.
"All signs lead us to believe that he has been dead for a considerable amount of time," a paramedic said on a call made the morning Justin was found unconscious alongside the Tresckow Road.
On the other end of the line was Dr. Gerald Coleman of Lehigh Valley Hospital-Hazleton.
Coleman knew the report was grim. The young man had no vital signs. A coroner was on his way.
"But something inside me just said, 'I need to give this person a chance,'" Coleman recalled.
He advised the paramedic, "This is probably going to be a futile effort but I think we need to do our best for him. Okay?"
And with that, he ordered resuscitation efforts.
Justin, 26, visited Hazleton campus Monday to thank doctors, nurses, emergency responders and others for saving his life.
"I am eternally grateful and I can honestly never thank you enough," he said.
Coleman called Justin's experience "a story of survival against all odds." Others called it a medical miracle.
Justin's ordeal began around 9:30 p.m. Feb. 20, 2015, when he decided to walk home after an evening out with friends at the Tresckow Fire Company. It was snowing, he said, and temperatures slid to 5 degrees below zero.
He doesn't remember much else.
When Don Smith realized that his son hadn't returned home the following morning, he set out to look for him. He spotted a pair of boots peeking out from a snow pile. It was Justin.
"Seeing him in that condition. There was no hope. I thought, 'He's, you know, dead,'" Don said, struggling with his words. He remembered shaking his son's rigid body, pleading with him, asking him to "not leave."
Emergency personnel arrived soon after but failed to detect any vital signs. At that point, Justin had been in below-zero temperatures for almost 12 hours.
As Don phoned Justin's mother, Sissy Smith, to tell her that their son was dead, paramedics phoned Dr. Coleman for guidance.
"My clinical thought is very simple: you have to be warm to be dead," Coleman said of making the call for CPR.
Medical responders from American Patient Transport Services and McAdoo Fire and Rescue started chest
compressions on the way to the Hazleton campus. Inside the hospital, medical personnel waited to warm his body and continue chest compressions.
Over the course of almost two hours, 15 staffers continued CPR.
"That daunting task was even more difficult (because) when he arrived, his chest wall was frozen solid," Coleman said.
Justin was so cold, a nurse said, that his body felt like a block of concrete. His face was purple, and his extremities were black.
Despite their efforts, his body did not warm. Coleman contacted Dr. James Wu at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest for help.
Wu was skeptical.
"For all intents and purposes, he was clinically dead," Wu said.
Still, the staff didn't give up on Justin. His age worked in his favor -- and with it being so cold, there was a chance that brain damage -- if any -- was minimal.
MedEvac crews flew him to the Cedar Crest campus, where Wu connected him to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to warm and supply oxygen to his blood.
Early that evening, Justin's heart began to beat on its own.
Doctors, however, were worried about the extended time he had gone without oxygen. In time, his brain began to regain function and he opened his eyes for the first time on March 5.
A setback came on March 12, when doctors amputated all of Justin's frostbitten toes. They also removed two fingers from his hands.
Within a few weeks, he was showing progress, even though he needed continuous care since neither his kidneys nor his lungs were functioning.
On March 31, Justin was released from the hospital and began therapy at Good Shepherd Rehabilitation. He returned home May 1 and is back to playing golf and rooting for the Phillies. He is planning to return to college.
"I consider myself a miracle," he said.
Its a description that Hazleton campus president John Fletcher is familiar with.
"I can recall hearing pieces of this story when it began last winter and as it progressed and our patient rebounded against daunting obstacles -- often to the astonishment of many -- I heard the term 'medical miracle' on more than one occasion," Fletcher said.
Coleman called the experience "one of the most amazing resuscitation efforts in modern medicine." He has since learned that Justin had the lowest body temperature of anyone to have survived exposure-related hypothermia.
"We may have witnessed a game changer in modern medicine -- medicine moves forward in extraordinary cases," Coleman said. "His survival is a paradigm change in how we resuscitate and how we treat people that suffer from hypothermia."
jwhalen@standardspeaker.com
Copyright 2016 - Standard-Speaker, Hazleton, Pa.
