Woman Who Was Frozen to Floor Begins Recovery

From her brown eyes and toothless smile, you would never guess that 91-year-old Victoria Moryn almost died from being frozen to the floor of her icy apartment four days earlier.

“If you saw my toes, you would know what I went through,” the Polish widow said Friday through a translator as she continued to recover at St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital Center on the West Side.

Moryn is still in fair condition and may lose her toes, which are severely frostbitten and blue, doctors said. But she has not lost the capacity to appreciate the flowers, goodwill and many offers of help she has received since her ordeal became public.

“She is loving all this attention,” said Barbara Schillon, a hospital social worker. “She never knew what it was to have someone care about her.”

Concerned neighbors and police found Moryn kneeling, barefoot, in an inch-thick layer of ice from leaking pipes Monday in the front room of her unheated home, a first-floor apartment in an otherwise vacant building.

The temperature in Chicago was about 10 degrees at the time and had been below zero most of the weekend; no one is sure how long she had been stuck there.

Moryn had been heating her apartment with wood and coal in a potbelly stove, neighbors said. She was hospitalized in critical condition with frostbite, hypothermia and unstable blood pressure.

On Friday, after hospital workers put a bow in her hair, she posed for pictures and was eager to know when they would be developed.

“God bless you,” she told the many visitors to her room.

Moryn’s husband, who apparently was a factory worker, died in 1975, Schillon said.