EXPLORE All The Shades of Grey

Being cold really sucks, but sometimes, it's just the thing to save your life.

How can hypothermia save lives? Everyone's heard stories of people trapped on mountain tops or snow storms or at the South Pole who tragically die from the cold conditions. Hypothermia causes shivering, blue lips, frostbite and eventually death.

But, sometimes people didn't die from being too cold. So, scientists began to study hypothermia because every once in a while people (like Meredith) who have been trapped under cold water and deprived of oxygen for up to twenty minutes miraculously survive. Scientists wanted to find out what causes these unbelievable survivals. Could they recreate this on purpose to save a patient? They experimented with therapeutic temperature management and found that cooling a patient's core temperature can help reduce organ damage and prevent paralysis or even death. Therapeutic hypothermia is becoming a treatment option for heart attacks, strokes and traumatic spinal cord and brain injuries.

One of the ways therapeutic temperature management works is by reducing inflammation. Like when you ice a sprained ankle. But, there's one important difference. The spinal cord is housed in rigid bone - the spine - which can't expand to accommodate the swelling nerves. As the spinal cord become larger than the bone it is incased in it's crushed and damaged even more. In fact, the inflammation can cause more trouble than the initial injury, so preventing swelling significantly increases recovery. Hypothermia also slows down metabolism. For every degree the body temperature is lowered, metabolism slows 6%. This slows down cell death and halts the release of toxic-chemicals that follow a spinal cord injury.

Doctors cool patients by rushing cold saline into the blood supply through the femoral artery in the thigh. They drape the patients' head, neck, chest and groin area with special core cooling blankets. Body temperature is closely monitored, because even though hypothermia has many potential beneficial effects, it is also dangerous for the patient. So, it's a delicate balance between cooling the body enough to reap the benefits, but not so much that the patient's heart stops.

Callie makes the argument to cool the patient down before taking him in to surgery to decompress his spine. When the patient wiggles his toes at the end of the episode, they know that the cooling was indeed a success. Though scientists don't yet understand all the nuances of therapeutic hypothermia, doctors are becoming more and more open to cooling their spinal cord trauma patients. Thankfully, in this case, Callie's experiment was worth the risk.