Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
Our friend blacked out driving home, the last thing he remembers is pulling into the other lane to pass someone.
The car flipped twice and they had to cut him out from the top. He was unresponsive and the emts were ready to call him DOA. He broke a vertebrae in his neck and shattered his hand. They were floored when they realized he was still alive.
If it had been one vertebrae higher, he would have been paralyzed. As it was, he walked out of the hospital less than a week later.
He had been wearing his seatbelt which is literally the only reason he is alive today.
Not a doctor but my father is.
In his first rotation of residency, he had to assist in operating on an 8 year old boy. Poor kid’s dad was chopping wood, and he got in the way of the swing. Axe was lodged deep in his skull when he came into the ER.
According to my dad, the boy survived, but the way he describes the father’s devastation at having brutally injured his own son really makes me understand why my dad was always so uptight about things like fire, knives, and of course axes when I was a kid.
In nursing school I had an elderly patient who had a Whipple surgery (very extensive abdominal surgery to resect pancreatic cancer) and must have perforated. It took three days of worsening redness before the order came to remove the staples. I was helping out as the stench of blood, pus and poop filled the room. The next month of clinicals included seven times per day dressing changes, pulling yards and yards of blood and feces soaked packing out of the wound. Somehow this guy actually made it through. I have no idea how he didn’t get septic.
It was my first day rounding with the surgery team, and as we approached a patient’s room, one of the surgeons turned to me and said “check this out, this man has had more than 70 abdominal surgeries”. We walked into the room and the first thing I noticed was that it was really homey, which is unusual for a hospital. He had some aromatherapy going on, and pictures taped to the wall, a guest cot was set up with several pillows from home and a nice knit blanket in the corner. It was clear that he had been there a while. The patient was a somewhat overweight, probably obese, man who had indeed had more than 70 abdominal surgeries. Unfortunately, at some point the skin and fatty tissue on his abdomen had become infected and been removed. The result was a square cut out on his belly, from the n****e line to his belly button, extending across his entire stomach. It was perfectly square, with perfectly normal skin and fat around the cut out, and when he breathed, his abdominal muscles and intestines would just sort of come in and out of the abdominal cavity which each breath. He looked like something out of a zombie movie, but was apparently doing alright and living with it. He was attached to a machine called a wound vac that kept the wound clean and provided suction to remove any fluid (or in his case, feces) that developed in the wound. We were waiting for the day when he stopped leaking stool into the square to get him a skin graft. We were still waiting when I left the surgery service a month later.
Nurse here.
Man in his 50s has brain tumour, has surgery to remove the tumour and hemicraneotomy to relieve intracranial pressure (bone taken from the skull and left out).
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