Thawing Frozen Hearts

Wearing only a diaper and a pink T-shirt, 13-month-old Erika Nordby wandered outdoors into the ­24 degree weather during the night of February 23, 2001. Hours later, Erika’s mom, Leyla, found her lying in the snow, frozen stiff. By the time paramedics reached the house, Erika’s heart had stopped beating for as long as two hours, her lungs had stopped breathing, and her body temperature was 21 degrees Celsius below normal. She was clinically dead.

But paramedics, one of whom had been in attendance at a similar case seven years earlier in Saskatchewan, did not give up. They began CPR, inserted a breathing tube in the little girl and rushed her to hospital. The staff there hooked the baby up to a machine that warmed her blood outside of her body and then returned the blood to her.

Just as they were about to hook up the machine that would cause her heart to beat for her, Erika’s little heart started to beat on its own. The next day, just like any other toddler, Erika was eating, drinking from her sippy cup, watching Barney on TV and babbling happily away to the doctors, nurses and her mom. A month later, Erika Nordby went home from hospital, with a small skin graft on her left foot from frostbite the only permanent damage she had to show for her ordeal.

Everyone said it was a miracle. But the experts said that because it was so cold, Erika’s entire body, heart, brain, everything, had frozen so quickly that it was perfectly protected, and that once warmed up, her body was in perfect condition to start up again as if nothing had happened.

My friends, there are an awful lot of people in this world who go through life with frozen hearts. Unlike little Erika’s, our hearts didn’t freeze suddenly and quickly. For most of us, it is a much longer and more painful process than that.

It starts when we’re children, 8 or 9 years old maybe. It starts the first time we give ourselves to someone else, and they reject us. Do you remember that feeling, the coldness that almost literally closes around the heart? It happens to everyone, and when it happens, we begin to learn how to freeze others out.

By the time we’re adults, we’re experts. Some of us are blessed in that we have families or friends with whom we can let down our guard a little, with whom we can be our true selves. But most of the time, we hold back, hiding who we really are, because so long as we hide, we will not get hurt. Like little Erika showed the world, a heart that is frozen may not work very well, but at least it is protected from being hurt.

And so we go through life with frozen hearts, hearts that don’t break at every slur or insult aimed our way. Hearts that can survive the breakdown of a relationship, because our hearts are so very rarely fully in the relationship in the first place. Hearts that are capable of quickly changing the channel when one of those infomercials about starving children in the Third World come on TV. Hearts that can accept that homelessness and the need for food banks is just a reality in modern-day society.

Sure, there are very good reasons to live with a frozen heart. Living in this world without the hard shell of protecting yourself makes you vulnerable. Hearts that aren’t frozen are very likely to be broken. Opening up our hearts, taking the risk to trust others, to love, to care, means you will almost inevitably get hurt.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #21317]