the.com/frostbite
your body deciding which fingers it can no longer afford to keep
means injury to skin and tissue caused by freezing, most often striking the extremities like fingers, toes, ears, and nose.
from A plain English compound of "frost" and "bite," both ancient Germanic words — frost from the same root as "freeze," and bite from the verb for sinking teeth in. The cold doesn't just touch you; it bites, gnawing into flesh the way a predator would. The word does exactly what it describes: two blunt, old, frozen syllables clamped together.
- silent thief
- numbness means the warning system already quit
- rewarm carefully
- thawing then refreezing causes worse damage than staying frozen
- no rubbing
- ice crystals shred tissue when you rub frozen skin
- deep cold
- severe cases freeze muscle and bone solid
- weeks to know
- true tissue loss can take a month to declare
mount everest 1996 disaster — multiple climbers including beck weathers suffered severe frostbite above 8000m during the may blizzard
korean war amputation crisis — 1950-1953, tens of thousands of soldiers had digits amputated due to frostbite in subzero temperatures