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The Little Girl Who Was Frozen Solid: MacKenzie Grace's Story of Surviving Incredible Odds by Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado
Tuesday, June 3, 2003
A little girl who had been left for dead after freezing in cold temperatures makes a remarkable recovery from her ordeal and is still alive today, thanks to the quick, lifesaving efforts of strangers and hospital personnel.
This is her amazing story.
Take a close look at the little girl sitting over there as her mommy reads a book to her. She looks like any other toddler who is enjoying her mother's company, but looks are definitely deceiving.
For MacKenzie Grace Chin Hollister is a child who should have not survived what she did. She nearly died this past winter when she was found outside her house, partly frozen, when she wandered outside in cold temperatures wearing only her sleeper set.
For this little girl with the stick-straight, silky black hair and Oriental features, the ordeal began last December. It was shortly before Christmas, and her father, Chuck, had gone out to look for a Christmas tree for the family, and he wasn't back yet. MacKenzie Grace, who was two years old, had been inside, sleeping, when she woke up, wondering where her father was. She wanted to see him, and in her sleepy, stuporous state, she went walking around the house, searching in every nook and cranny, hoping that she would see him; but he was gone. She thought he was outside, so she wandered out the front door, which, unbeknownst to her mother, had been carelessly unlocked.
MacKenzie started crying when she couldn't find her father, but she was determined to find him; so off she went.
Her mother, Heather, had been in the livingroom, reading, when she decided to check in on her sleeping daughter..only, to her horror, had discovered that the crib her daughter slept in was empty. She started calling MacKenzie's name, but there was no answer. The young mother then started searching around the house, just as MacKenzie had done earlier, but she couldn't find her daughter.
That was when she saw that the front door was standing wide open.
In a sudden state of fear and panic, Heather ran outside, crying and screaming out her small daughter's name. She was afraid something bad had happened to her, and she was scared for her young daughter's life. She had joined the family only a year before from China, and she was the apple of her parents' eyes. She was their first child, and they doted on her.
She went running around the house, searching, searching; and an hour later, nothing had turned up. She was starting to wonder where her daughter was when she saw something pink lying in the snow. She thought it was a blanket that her daughter had carried, but then she saw the fringe of black hair; and she knew at once that it was, indeed, her daughter. Her daughter was lying in the snow, and she wasn't moving.
It was every parent's worst nightmare.
The nightmare became quickly worse when she discovered that her daughter wasn't breathing. It was as though she were dead; her face was grey-blue in appearance, and her almond-shaped eyes were closed; and her skin felt awfully cold to her touch.
"Oh, GOD, Oh, GOD!" Heather screamed as she quickly ran her daughter into the house and put her onto the kitchen table, trying desperately to get the child's wet clothes off of her. She then took MacKenzie into her arms, and she quickly called for the paramedics, crying all the while. Little MacKenzie, meanwhile, remained limp and unresponsive.
Thankfully, the fire station was close by where the Hollister residence was located. The rescue truck came in less than five minutes. Soon, the paramedics were working feverishly on the unconscious little girl, forcing oxygen into her still lungs, and pushing on her tiny chest with their hands, in the hopes of getting her small heart restarted; but their efforts proved to be futile. Still, they were determined not to give up, and they continued to try to revive the little girl, even as they carried her, lickety-split, to the back of the ambulance, and placed her into the rear of the ambulance. (The ambulance had come shortly after the rescue truck.)
Chuck Hollister had come home later, only to see the ambulance and rescue truck in his driveway, and he quickly became alarmed, especially when he saw his wife sobbing and crying hysterically. All she could get out was, "It's MacKenzie! It's MacKenzie!", and she was crying so hard she could barely get the words out.
His heart slammed to his toes at the thought of their young daughter being in such dire straits. He was scared that he was going to lose her. He was going to ask the firefighter at the scene what had happened, but the firefighter only told him to follow the ambulance and the rescue truck to the hospital. "You can ask questions later", he told the father.
At the hospital, MacKenzie was still limp and not breathing. She was still unresponsive, and she was still being worked on. Her pajamas had been removed, and she now lay, naked and vulnerable on the table, as the doctors and nurses quickly attached lines and other monitoring equipment to the limp little body. Her body temperature was still low (only 89 degrees; a normal person's body temperature is 98.6 degrees), and she was in grave danger of dying or, at best, sustaining irreversable brain damage or even hypothermia (which she was; she was still awfully cold) or frostbite. She was still receiving full CPR, and she was still more dead than alive. Even a few shocks to the child's chest, by way of a defibrillator, proved to be unsuccessful. Still, they doggedly tried to resuscitate the child, and they were not about to stop their efforts.
About an hour and a half later, MacKenzie finally managed to get a pulse back. It was weak and irregular, but it was still a pulse. Still, she was not out of danger; she had been without oxygen for nearly two hours, and doctors were worried that she would be damaged physically and mentally as a result of the incident. She was then placed on life support, and slowly made her way back from her coma and her ordeal. She was in the hospital for nearly two months.
Now it was the beginning of June, and here was little MacKenzie Grace Chin Hollister, who had celebrated her third birthday; and she was alive--very much alive--, sitting on her mother's lap as she read to her. There was a smalll, child's-size wheelchair by her mother's side; and the little wheelchair belonged to MacKenzie, as she had sustained brain damage and cerebral palsy, but she was still very much alive, and was quite aware of her surroundings. True, she wasn't the same little girl as she was before the accident, but she was coming back, thanks to ongoing occupational and physical therapies at the hospital, and she was starting to get the "spark" back. She could smile and laugh now, and she was starting to talk again. She was also starting to enjoy having her mother read to her or play with her, and nothing made her happier than to be with her family, which consisted of her mother, father, and now baby brother, Gage, who had just joined them last month from Guatemala. Gage was just five months old.
There was also the good news of the chance that MacKenzie Grace would be walking by the end of the year, on crutches. She was coming a long way in her journey back to normalcy, and it was all thanks to the quick, lifesaving actions of people who cared enough to save the life of this remarkable little girl who was now known as "The little girl who was frozen solid". She was that, and much more, but above everything, she was also a bona-fide little Miracle Child who had survived impossible odds.
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Take a close look at the little girl sitting over there as her mommy reads a book to her. She looks like any other toddler who is enjoying her mother's company, but looks are definitely deceiving.
