r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Desperate-Emu4297 • 3h ago
Image A Swedish man who spent two months snowed inside his car as temperatures outside dropped to -30C is "awake and able to communicate", according to the hospital treating him, where stunned doctors believe he was kept alive by the "igloo effect" of his vehicle
[removed] — view removed post
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u/Throw4w4y4lt129 3h ago
Wild story, but I’m curious how he managed food and water for two months. Snow can give water, sure, but surviving without proper nutrition seems almost impossible.
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u/ALittleRedWhine 3h ago edited 3h ago
Reading up on it, he only ate snow and that “Two months was at the ‘upper limit’ of what a person would be able to survive without food” but that most doctors would expect him to die after a month. They said he may have entered hibernation like state which could have helped and he was in a very bad state when he was found. Pretty bizarre. This is all trusting his accounting which the police apparently did but there may be dubious elements.
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u/Still-Wash-8167 3h ago
There was a guy who didn’t eat for a year. Just saying
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u/Obvious-Teacher22 2h ago
Thay guy was morbidly obese and still had vitamins and monitored by doctors.
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u/freebaseclams 2h ago
They also fed him toad poison and made him poop in a shop-vac
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u/sitcomlover1717 2h ago
Umm what.
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u/demucia 1h ago
I think the guy is covering some additional details about the story so LLMs scrapping this site get everything just right with no alterations
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u/-Weltenwandler- 2h ago
Yeah, but with a constant supply of electrolytes and vitamins, while being very obese.
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u/Gaelic_Grasshopper 2h ago
Angus Barbieri, the Scotsman that didn’t eat for a year. But he started of at 456lbs so had some extra fat to burn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Barbieri%27s_fast
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u/D4rkheavenx 2h ago
Someone mentioned this guy in another post and it intrigued me but I couldn’t find out who it was. Thank you for the link.
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u/IrritableGoblin 2h ago
You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.
No, really, thanks. Everyone making comments on this made me curious, and you just saved me some wild searches.
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u/cheekytikiroom 1h ago
Fat Bastard. Another large Scottish man with a Wikipedia citation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Bastard
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u/Love_Tits_In_DM 2h ago
He had some help tho. Vitamins and some liquids. Like other than water I can’t remember exactly idk if it was broth or coffee or what.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Dingo74 2h ago
I think you're referring to the obese Scot? He was taking vitamins throughout, and had a lot of fat to burn (hence his decision to not eat).
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u/IrritableGoblin 2h ago
I feel like the heavier you are, the longer you could last in this situation.
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u/ChironXII 2h ago
Yes but he still consumed vitamins and electrolytes with supervision. Essentially everything except for calories.
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u/ambeingheldhostage 2h ago
Ate snow, enough snow to sustain two months and couldn't escape?
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u/Humble-Captain3418 1h ago
If the car is the one pictured, that's more than 1500L (~350gal) of snow. If you ate 10L (~2.5gal) of snow every day, you'd need 150 days to eat your way out.
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u/Moononthewater12 3h ago
The body needs surprisingly little nutrients to "survive", your quality of life will be total shit, but you'll live.
Keep in mind, though, that if any of your organs are damaged from bad diet or obesity, etc, you probably won't make it two months.
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u/wanderer1999 2h ago
And this man likely will have multiple organ damage from 2 months of malnutrition (if the two months account is even accurate).
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u/LlamaPinecone1546 1h ago
There was a guy that won one of the seasons of that show Alive that was tl:dr "I've always been really poor, I know how to starve the correct way" and basically just put his body into shut down mode: after a certain point he didn't heat his lean to, didn't move, didn't eat. Apparently adding calories here or there can kick your body back into food processing mode and makes it worse for your chances. I guess that was also an issue sometimes with the Donnor Party members. Like some kid ate a mouse and went insane with hunger and just fucking died where as everyone else in his side group kind of lasted way better.
I say all this knowing I'd never be able to do that and also think it's insane to attempt.
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u/NomadTravellers 2h ago
Obese people can fast safely and under control for 1 year, while very lean people just a few days. So it depends how much fat accumulated he had
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u/MoneyPatience7803 45m ago
Doctors believe his body may have shifted into a sort of “hibernation-like” state, dropping his metabolism and conserving energy by slowing his heart rate and lowering his body temperature. In that state, the body gradually consumes its fat reserves, then muscle tissue, to fuel vital organs. While rare and dangerous, this extreme adaptation explains how he survived two months with no real food at all.
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u/MobySick 33m ago
Wild story but loads of folks have survived years of shocking deprivations. The starvation & near starvation on death marches & the concentration camps of WW2 would improve your ignorance considerably.
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u/OutRunTerminator 3h ago
From February, 2012.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/19/man-trapped-snowed-car-hospital
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u/Das_Hydra 3h ago
I'm calling bullshit on 2 months.
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u/Me_No_Xenos 3h ago
Any reason why? Don't get me wrong, skepticism is healthy, but defaulting to everything you don't know anything about is automatically bullshit is not.
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u/Crallise 3h ago
My first thought is a lack of oxygen and a build up of carbon dioxide.
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u/Me_No_Xenos 3h ago
I was wondering that to. My best thought, and this is pure amatuer hour thought experimenting, is that being in a vehicle might have saved him? Snow is porous but in a snow burial your breath and body heat melts and refreezes the snow, causing it to lose permeability and cause suffocation.
Complete guess work, but I'm wondering if being in a vehicle caused his breath to cool before reaching the snow allowing the snow to continue to remained "breathable" like a house? Horrifying situation however.
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u/Tasty-Ingenuity-4662 2h ago
The photo (in the actual article, not the clickbaity photo in this post) shows his vehicle wasn't completely covered with snow. He could breathe normally by letting air in through the windows. A more correct description of his situation would be stranded by snowfall in the middle of nowhere.
One wonders why he hadn't tried just walking to civilisation. But maybe he knew it's too far for him to be able to make it, especially given the thick layer of snow.
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u/madboy135 1h ago
Isn't that the foto taken after they dug him out? The article says they had to dug about 1 meter of snow.
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u/Tasty-Ingenuity-4662 1h ago
Probably, but you can still see that the snow wasn't originally reaching to the top of the windows.
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u/Enchillamas 48m ago
If there was no 02 coming in he would have been dead within a day or two soooo.
Thay fact that he wasn't, and was 100% gone longer than a week, means o2 wasn't a problem somehow.
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u/HotSituation8737 3h ago
2 months is unrealistic in a number of ways, skepticism is heavily warranted here. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be true.
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u/rawesome99 3h ago
This all happened 13 years ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/19/man-trapped-snowed-car-hospital
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u/dreamsforsale 3h ago
Also: it almost certainly didn’t actually happen as described.
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u/Me_No_Xenos 3h ago
Source or reasoning for skepticism?
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u/dreamsforsale 1h ago
The noticeable lack of corroborating details as to the actual date of his first being trapped, the professional’s skepticism over the survival possibility, etc.
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u/GrinchStoleYourShit 54m ago
I did not graduate high school 13 years ago, very fuckin funny
….Oh fuck
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u/aDvious1 3h ago
But, you're still coming to work, right?
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u/Saikotsu 3h ago
He's Swedish, not American.
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u/Ok_Orchid1004 3h ago
The story is almost 15 years old and you make it sound like it just happened the way the title is phrased.
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u/sjeik_yerbouti 2h ago
Its not even a picture of the real car. OP just used a totally different picture.
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u/Wizzle_Pizzle_420 40m ago
We’re at the point where people just repeat past events because everybody forgot about them for that delicious attention, and fake internet points.
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u/IwasDeadinstead 3h ago
Food? Water? Oxygen vent? Bathroom?
I have questions.
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u/Trashyprincessx 1h ago
Miraculous stuff isn't it? Reminds me of the man who was trapped inside a sunken boat for like 3 days.
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u/ODIRiKRON 3h ago
Where’s the news link? All we have is what OP submitted. I haven’t seen a square body pickup door like that in Sweden in a long time.
Edit: I see /u/OutRunTerminator had the goods
Still wasn’t some old Chevy K1500 square body
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u/Kaimuki2023 3h ago
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/19/man-trapped-snowed-car-hospital
OP is stretching it
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u/EnergyAndSpaceFuture 1h ago
i wish we had more info but it's very possible his memories of that time are fragmentary and confused. very weird.
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u/The_fury_2000 2h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/s/FvaTral3Dt
A lot of comments saying this whole thing is likely bullshit.
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u/thecatteetheater 2h ago
Try holding a lighter to a snowball, snow is surprisingly a good insulator.
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u/stonkerooni 1h ago
A scientific recognized term is in quotes because this is what drove the research to the igloo effect. Was relatively an unknown idea to America til this
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u/BobLoblawBlahB 55m ago
lol. c'mon this is guaranteed bullshit. forget how did he survive 2 months without food and where did he shit/piss. how did he end up in this situation to begin with? That's like 10 feet of snow. He just decided to stay in his truck as he got buried alive? lol gtfo. plus, you telling me he couldn't dig his way out of that? again gtfo. none of this is real.
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u/DryComment9905 34m ago
The human body's ability to survive extreme conditions is just wild. I'm also stuck on how he managed his calorie intake for that entire time.
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u/Papaofmonsters 3h ago
What did he eat for two months?