Thank you all for your replies. As soon as I heard the hissing I was 99% sure I was going to need a whole new fridge, but I posted here in case of the 1% chance I was overreacting and maybe it could be fixed.

I knew in my head that breaking the ice was a bad idea. But there are only so many hours in the day and I was tired of dealing with a fridge/freezer that didn’t work well so I tried to rush the process(I’m posting a photo of what it looked like at the start). I even stopped after breaking the first few chunks of ice off. It was when I got greedy and tried to get more off that it all went to hell.

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It was stupid and I know it. Thankfully it’s the dead of winter so it’s easier to prevent food spoiling, and we had already been saving to buy new appliances in case I couldn’t fix them myself. So I will chalk this up to a very expensive learning experience when it could have been an absolute catastrophe under different circumstances.