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April 15, 1912. The RMS Titanic has already filled with water. Above the din of steam coming from the
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safety valves, an officer is shouting, “Women and children first.” He's acutely aware that there
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aren't enough lifeboats for everyone. A woman looking radiant in her dinner dress clings onto
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her weeping child as they are guided onto a boat. Her husband stoically nods in their direction.
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When they are out of sight, he just stares into the distance. He knows that's where he's heading,
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into the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. Another passenger,
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a complete stranger, hands him a Camel filterless cigarette. “Do you think we will make it?” he
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says. The husband doesn't reply. He just keeps looking forward, transfixed on the dark. With
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great violence, the ship suddenly tilts. A giant wave sweeps many passengers into the ocean.
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Can this man survive, even though he won't make it onto a lifeboat? What were a person's chances of
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survival in that frigid ocean? Today you're going to find out, and you might just be surprised.
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Ok, so the ship hit that iceberg at about 11.40 pm. As you already know because you've watched
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the movie 15 times, it didn't just sink in the blink of an eye. In fact, for the first hour,
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the majority of the 2,224 people on board had no idea just over 1,500 of them were
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about to have a date with Davy Jones' Locker. The ship was letting in water from the beginning,
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but the flooding was incremental and slow at first. It took about 40 minutes for the
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loading of the first lifeboats to happen, boats that were filled with only women and children.
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This was somewhat problematic since some of the boats hit the water only partially filled
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because not enough women and kids could be put in them. When lifeboat number 7 rowed
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away from the sinking ship at about 12.45, only 28 passengers out of a possible 65 were on it.
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It wasn't until about 1.20 am when the flooding got much worse. That's about
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the time the ship tilted more and those onboard really understood the gravity of the situation.
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It's when couples said their tearful goodbyes and when the
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guy in our intro saw his beloved child for the last time... Well, if he died,
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we'll come back to him soon. We hope you have your fingers crossed for this dude.
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And just in case you're wondering, it wasn't as if all the women and children were spared that
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appointment with the freezing cold ocean. Of the 412 adult women on board, 108 died.
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Of the 112 kids on board, 56 died. That's a 75 percent and 50 percent survival rate respectively,
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which isn't bad going at all. The men did have it worse. Of the 1680 guys on the ship,
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1357 ended up with an unwanted sea burial. That's only a 19 percent survival rate. Add that up and
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you get 1,521 deaths. Some sources say 1,503 died. Others say 1,517 died. Let's just agree
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the number of deaths was in the early 1500s. Titanic the movie wanted to encourage you to
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be angry because it portrayed a scenario in which wealthier people had a greater chance of survival.
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This was a British-run ship. Still today that country judges you by the strength of your accent
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and then puts you into a class bracket, and back then people were a lot more obsessed with class.
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Titanic the movie got it right in some ways. The wealthy did fair better than the poor, although
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that bit where the third-class plebs are locked behind doors down below is totally fictional.
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Let's break this down, something we'll call class mortality rates.
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If you were a rich woman, you almost had it made. Of the 141 women who'd bought first-class tickets
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only four bit the dust. That was a 97 percent survival rate. One posh kid died, so that sucked
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for him. Of the 171 men in first-class, 105 died. Get this though. Of the 179 women in third-class,
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91 died. 55 out of 80 kids who were staying in the crappy part of the ship were killed.
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391 out of 450 of the men in third-class died.
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In terms of betting, if you were a woman without much cash you were an odds-on favorite to die.
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In all, only one-quarter of third-class folks survived when 62 percent of first-class folks
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survived. It also turned out that Americans had a better chance of survival percentage-wise than
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Brits, and it was those two nationalities that made up the bulk of the passengers.
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We can conclude, being a working-class family from Wolverhampton was not the ideal demographic for
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sailing around icebergs in those days. To give you an example, let's look at the Sage family who was
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emigrating from Britain to the land of the free. Mr. Sage and Mrs. Sage bordered the Titanic in
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England with third-class tickets and nine kids in tow. None of them made it to America. The
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Andersson family from Sweden also had third-class tickets, and all seven of them perished. As did
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the English Goodwins, also a family of seven, and another family looking for a new start in the USA.
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Ok, so let's get back to our stoic man who's just bid farewell to his wife and kid.
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Not too long after he smoked that cigarette the ship tilted 30 to 45 degrees. The cacophony was
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absolutely deafening because the ship was coming apart in the water. The lights were still partly
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on, but then there was flickering followed by darkness. The people in lifeboats looked on in
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shock at the shadow of the behemoth sinking into the depths like a slain sea monster from a Greek
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myth. The crashing, the screaming, the surreal image, it was almost unbearable to look at.
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Onboard some people were being thrown down the now heavily tilted ship.
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Some of them were literally pulverized after being smashed against fixed objects;
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others flew through the air like ants in a hurricane. As the ship pointed skywards,
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those who'd managed to cling together in groups fell en masse hundreds of feet.
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Some of those people ended up in the icy water and believe it or not a few
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of them were still in one piece. Others weren't so lucky. They were
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cast into the sea only to be whacked by all the debris that came from the ship,
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stuff like giant pieces of timber and bits of beds. The theory is, some of the debris went
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down but being buoyant it came back up with a vengeance and hit the ill-starred swimmers.
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Maybe that was better than dying slowly in the freezing water.
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To say those survivors were cold would be an understatement. One of
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them later said the feeling was like being pierced by a thousand knives.
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The temperature was about 28 °F (−2 °C), which didn't give people much chance of surviving.
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People did survive, though. One of those people later said all he could hear was a terrible
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moaning sound, a situation he described as being “horrifying, mysterious, supernatural.”
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Some of the folks in the lifeboats, not so far away, said they felt hopeless as they peered
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into the darkness and listened to the poor souls whose moans were carried by the fog.
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The situation was dire, to say the least. You see, water is very dense. In fact,
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it's over 800 times more dense than air. That might not mean much to you, but it will if you
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ever find yourself immersed in very cold water. What it means is that in the water you cool down
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a lot faster than you do when outside in the open. In fact, the chilling is about 25 times faster.
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Let's say you weren't one of the passengers that swallowed a load of water on impact
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and so your lungs didn't drown. You'd still be breathing very heavily, and your teeth would be
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chattering as if they were powered by a generator. You'd also have the most horrific headache. The
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reason is nerves. They send a message to your good old brain and your brain thinks,
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hmm, this guy's head is freezing, I better send some warm blood up there. Your brain is
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now your enemy, because the warm blood causes swelling, and you get that terrible headache.
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Ok, so why do people shiver and why do their teeth chatter?
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The reason is shivering activates muscles to get moving and this warms up tissue in
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your body. Shivering is good for you. As for those mad chattering teeth,
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that's because all the muscles moving causes the jaw to spasm. If your teeth ever start
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chattering and you're not cold at all, you best go see your doctor asap, or a psychiatrist.
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Back to our man in the ocean. He's now been in the water a few minutes and is fortunate
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enough to find some flotsam to grab hold of in the shape of a rather well-designed
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cabinet. He's hyperventilating due to the shock, and that's not so good for him.
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Too much of that can release too much air from the blood and that can lead to reduced blood acidity.
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The upshot of that can be fainting, which is not great when you are in the water.
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But our guy, he's one of those strong, silent types and he aint gonna let a bit
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of hyperventilation bother him. Plus, he's got that cabinet to hold onto. The problem
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is, he's now shivering so much he almost looks like he's about to have a seizure. As we said,
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shivering is your friend in times of coldness, but it's a different matter
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when you are in the ocean or perhaps stuck on a mountain top. That's because in those
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situations you really need your muscles to work for you. Our guy is shaking around on his cabinet,
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and that's really not ideal. He needs his muscles working fine. He needs his strength,
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but because of all that moving around at times he almost loses his grip.
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He's strong, but he's no Wim Hoff, aka, the Iceman. Not the contract killer guy, but the Dutch
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guy that's trained his body to withstand extremely cold temperatures. Because our survivor is not
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trained like that, his brain is in a kind of fight or flight mode. As you likely know, a bit of this
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is good for you, but too many stress hormones firing up that amygdala in your brain is not good.
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All this stress has caused our gracious man to have some internal problems. For one, his arteries
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have shrunk and so his heart isn't getting the blood it needs. That means his starved heart is
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pumping like crazy. Meanwhile, that selfish brain of his is portioning out blood to only the most
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vital organs, including it. What that means is all those less important parts of his body aren't
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getting as much blood, and some parts are going numb. When those parts get really cold, they no
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longer work so well, and when the bloodless parts get super cold the extremities can get frostbite.
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Suffice to say, our survivor has cold toes. Now he's been in the water for about ten minutes and
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basically, he can't feel his feet. His greatest risk right now isn't hypothermia although you'd
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think it would be. The biggest problem is the fact that when his legs and arms get too numb,
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he won't be able to either cling to that cabinet or even swim. This is known as “cold
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incapacitation” and it is likely the reason most of those water-bound Titanic passengers died. Most
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people in that water were slightly incapacitated after only two minutes, but after 15 minutes they
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were virtually paralyzed. In terms of drowning, this usually gets you before hypothermia does.
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That's not happened yet, though. What's also a stroke of luck is even though his
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heart is working overtime he hasn't had a heart attack due to the narrowing of blood
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vessels. It's just good fortune that the star of today's show is as fit as a fiddle.
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To survive in freezing cold water, strength, conditioning, and a healthy ticker are required.
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Even so, his body temperature is not what it used to be an hour ago.
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His regular 98.6°F (37°C) has been reduced, and if it goes below 90,
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he can say goodbye to consciousness, which again is not great when you are in the water.
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Still, people aren't all the same, and so while some of those moaners kicked
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the bucket after only 15 minutes, twenty minutes have passed and our guy is still
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holding onto that cabinet – albeit he's now turned a shade of blue and is not sure if he
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has legs any longer. Lucky for him most of his upper half is on that floating debris.
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At around the 25-minute mark, he's moved from stage one of hyperthermia to stage two.
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The first stage includes what we've already talked about, but now things get worse.
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We should say here that some people are just amazing. The record for surviving a body
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temperature drop in the water was someone who was once pulled out and lived to tell the tale even
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though their body temperature went down to 13.0 °C (55.4 °F). That shouldn't happen, but it did.
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He's now feeling kind of tired and he's even stopped shivering,
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but that's actually a really bad thing even though he feels better. He's losing his mind,
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and though he's able to hold onto his raft, he's kind of drifting in and out of reality.
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Part of him is in the water and the other part is having a picnic with his dear wife and kid
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on an atypical English summer's day when it actually didn't rain.
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He's tripping out because his brain cells aren't getting the oxygen they need.
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This can also work out in his favor since when cold the brain doesn't need as much oxygen. What
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that means is he could go into cardiac arrest but his brain would still be functioning.
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That person we just mentioned who holds the record for having the lowest body temperature
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and surviving actually went into cardiac arrest and survived 40 minutes in an air pocket
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before being pulled out of the water. Since her brain was in chill mode and working,
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she was revived and later ended up telling her story on CNN.
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Ok, so he's in stage two hypothermia and things aren't looking good at all,
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but then a lifeboat approaches and it brings him out of his reverie about that picnic. He
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can hardly be excited given his body is so numb, but he can hold on. He's not out of the water yet,
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though, both literally and figuratively, because there's a chance he might die from Post Rescue
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Collapse. This happens to about 20 percent of people who've suffered some serious hypothermia
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after being in cold water. A person can be dragged out of the water and go into shock,
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or they might suffer a serious heart arrhythmia, or their blood pressure might dangerously drop.
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That doesn't happen, and our man became one of 14 people pulled from the water.
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Those lifeboats could have actually saved a lot more people,
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most of them in fact if they had been on the scene earlier.
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He certainly was a resilient guy, because the rescue took 30 minutes
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and by that time almost all the moaning in the water had stopped. Believe it or not,
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after an hour when hundreds of dead bodies were seen floating in the water,
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four other men were found. Three survived and one died from Post Rescue Collapse.
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Our guy was fine. He went on to write a book called,
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“Why I'm never going on vacation again” and he even stopped smoking.
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Now you need to watch, “50 Insane Facts About Titanic You Didn't Know.” Or,
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have a look at, “Why Is Titanic Still at the Bottom of the Ocean?”