14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, an elderly woman living in the state of Oregon in the United States ended up spending some 18 hours outside after her hand accidentally got caught in the hood of her truck.
Information shared with the public says that, when the hood slammed shut over her hand, the woman, whose name has not yet been shared with the public, was just trying to charge the vehicle's battery.
The hood got shut due to a gust of wind that hit it, and caught the woman's hand in such a way that she was unable to sit down or at least kneel throughout the entire 18 hours that it took for her to be rescued.
To make matters even worse, the incident happened at a time when weather conditions were pretty harsh. Thus, the woman, said to be 70-something years old, also had to endure snowfall and low temperatures.
“Hand trapped, you can’t kneel or sit on the hood, and you are in a standing position for 18 hours. It actually snowed on her throughout the night,” a spokesperson for the Molalla Fire Department spokesperson told the press.
“It took a very strong will to survive that,” Mike Penunuri went on to argue, as cited by Daily Mail.
Apparently, the woman got trapped by her own vehicle sometime around 5 o'clock in the afternoon. She was rescued around 11 o'clock in the morning the following day, after her neighbors finally heard her screaming for help.
The septuagenarian is currently being taken care of at a hospital in Portland, and the doctors who have had the chance to examine her say that she has chances to make a full recovery.
In an interview, the woman said that, all things considered, she managed to survive due to the fact that, although she did not plan to spend 18 hours in a row in the snow, she put on several layers of clothes before leaving her home.
“She was dressed in several layers of clothing, several shirts, outer garments, a vest, a coat, and heavy pants,” Mike Penunuri detailed.
“I’ve gone out in jeans and tennis shoes to do something really quick. If she had done that, I don’t think she would have survived. The hypothermia would have killed her,” he stressed.
What's more, it appears that, at one point, the woman started jogging in place. This also helped her stay warm enough to survive the experience.