The severity of this winter is making me morbid.

Though many of us want to go out and play, it is not all fun and games in the snow. A proverb rightly suggests that winter “bites with its teeth or lashes with its tail.” This type of weather can be digit-reducing and deadly! 

Frostbite and hypothermia might be considered winter’s teeth and tail. Both are quite serious and can cause injury and death, respectively. 

Your body must maintain its internal temperature to work properly. When heat is lost from the body, frostbite or hypothermia can occur. In the case of frostbite, your body tries to reduce heat loss at the parts furthest away from its the core. Thus, fingers and toes may be sacrificed for the good of the heart and other internal organs.

Being aware can reduce the likelihood of cold-induced injuries. Before frostbite, frost nip will set in. The symptoms of this precursor include white, hard surface skin, with some softer tissue below. Numbness is typical, and most affected are the cheeks, earlobes, fingers and toes. Luckily, the damage is reversible.

Frostbite, on the other hand, is not. This condition can affect all the layers of skin and even go deeper to the muscles and bones. Loss of affected parts is not uncommon. Contemporary British novelist A.S. Byatt explains in her book, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, “ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.”

The other condition of great concern is hypothermia, which can be deadly. According to the Weather Channel, 22 people have lost their lives from hypothermia in the last few weeks, and other estimates suggest that hyperthermia’s average death count is about 600 per year in this country.

Hypothermia has been compared to being chilled to death; your body simply loses heat to the environment and its core temperature drops. It can happen during extreme cold, but also in less frigid temperatures. Water can often be a factor in the latter. Consider that in 32-degree water, a person can only survive approximately an hour, and even when water temperatures are a more comfortable 59 degrees, death can occur after six hours.

With hypothermia, your body simply runs out of energy and shuts down. The decline in body temperature and its effects have been well documented. The first signs include shivering and what is referred to as the ‘umbles.’ The ‘umbles’ are stumbles, mumbles, grumbles, and fumbles and describes the body’s initial reaction to lowering body temperatures.

The next steps, as the body continues to get colder, include loss of mental acuity, paradoxical undressing (removing clothes to stay warm), and amnesia. From there, skin will begin to appear blue and puffy, muscles will become rigid, and respiration and pulse will slow. Eventually, these factors will cause erratic heartbeat and oxygen depletion, and organs will shut down, making death imminent.

George R.R. Martin, in A Game of Thrones, could have been describing hypothermia when he observed, “Nothing burns like the cold. But only for a while. Then it gets inside you and starts to fill you up, and after a while you don’t have the strength to fight it.”

One final quote might help us all stay warm (and positive) in these challenging days, remember Percy Bysshe Shelley’s question: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature.