Suicide by hypothermia? Who?
Hypothermia is NOT a pleasant way to die. Trust me. The snow crunches softly in your ear. In the minus-20-degree wind chill air, your core temperature falls about one degree every 40 to 50 minutes, your body heat leaching out into the soft, enveloping snow. Apathy at 91 degrees. Stupor at 90.
You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.
By 87 degrees you’ve lost the ability to recognize a familiar face, should one suddenly appear.
At 86 degrees, your heart, its electrical impulses hampered by chilled nerve tissues, becomes arrhythmic. It now pumps less than two-thirds the normal amount of blood. The lack of oxygen and the slowing metabolism of your brain, meanwhile, begin to trigger visual and auditory hallucinations.
You hear something - the sound of a car, a voice? But it's just a hallucination.
Attempting to stand, you collapse.
Hours later, or maybe it’s minutes, you realize there is no shelter, no home, no car nearby. You’ve crawled only a few feet. The light on your wristwatch pulses in the darkness. Exhausted, you decide to rest your head for a moment.
When you lift it again, you’re inside, lying on the floor before the woodstove. The fire throws off a red glow. First, it’s warm; then it’s hot; then it’s searing your flesh. Your clothing has caught fire.
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before the loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.
All you know is that you’re burning. You claw off your hoodie or coat and shirt and fling them away.
But then, in a final moment of clarity, you realize there’s no stove, no home, no rescuers. You’re lying alone in the bitter cold, naked from the waist up. You grasp your terrible misunderstanding, a whole series of misunderstandings, like a dream ratcheting into wrongness. You’ve shed your clothes, your car.
And you’ve now ventured way beyond it.
No, it's not a good way to die, and I shed tears at the news of Brooke's death. I've seen too many like it out in the field.
