Cooling machine saves Fort Worth heat victim

[TexasStooge]

By JIM DOUGLAS / WFAA ABC 8

FORT WORTH, Texas - The extreme heat now searing North Texas isn't just uncomfortable; it's dangerous.

Friday's high hit 102, the fifth straight day that temperatures have topped the century mark in Dallas-Fort Worth and the 12th day of the summer. A heat advisory remained in effect through 6 p.m. Saturday.

A Fort Worth woman was hospitalized Friday night after a short walk in the afternoon sun led to a heat stroke that nearly killed her.

Ruth Johnson, 66, went out to do her laundry and woke up in the emergency room at John Peter Smith Hospital.

For a while, it wasn't clear whether she would wake up at all.

Johnson's body temperature was over 105 degrees when an ambulance delivered her—unconscious—to the emergency room.

"We're going to keep you here overnight to make sure no damage was done to your kidneys or brain or anything else," Dr. Kent Taub explained to his patient.

Taub said JPS is getting close to a half dozen heat-related cases every day, Ruth Johnson's case has been the most serious one to date. "She was unconscious for 20 to 30 minutes," he said.

Johnson was pushing a buggy full of clean clothes from the laundromat. It was only a couple of hundred yards to her apartment, but in the afternoon sun, she never knew what hit her.

"They say my neighbor found me out in the yard," Johnson recalled. "I was wondering, 'What am I doing here?' You know? The doctor said I could have died."

Emergency room personnel first cooled her down with icy, wet towels. Then they wrapped her in the cold grip of a machine called the Arctic Sun.

"It's right on the skin," Taub said. "An ice pack can't control temperature like the machine does. The machine measures her core body temperature, and it's able to maintain her temperature at a steady rate."

Johnson has learned an important lesson. "I know not to push it next time," she said.