Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
Three months later she is catching them, and anything else she can find. She was my bestest friend for 8 years, she went on to survive 3 water moccasin bites, an attack by a Boxer, and liver and kidney failure (probably damage from the snakes, F**K WATER MOCCASINS). I euthanized her at 8 years old, after her last stay in the hospital for kidneys, she came out and her old skeletal injuries were causing her pain. The day she laid on the porch and watched a squirrel in front of her without trying to chase him… she looked at me with such sadness I knew this was that quality of life moment.
I took her to Popeyes and got chicken, let her eat until she was blowed up like a tick, then to the clinic. I held her in my arms and said “Goodbye my bad-a*s snake-killing, squirrel chasing miracle of a best friend. I love you forever.”
Dammit I’m sobbing now I miss her so much guys.
A guy I know with cancer smokes 2 packs a day and drinks a fifth of Fireball every day. He lives in a trailer so dirty there is a half inch of dirt according to his wife’s mother. He recovered from surgeries in that trailer. Eventually we got word he was quitting chemo and was just going to accept death.
5 years ago he was given 2 months to live. He is now completely cancer free.
Life is just weird sometimes.
My resident called me urgently one night and said I needed to come to the hospital, a young man was cut in half by a train. I asked why I needed to come in, there was no way he could survive that. She explained that somehow he was maintaining his pressure and wasn’t bleeding out. When I arrived, I found that the the force of train had sealed off all the major vessels from the pelvis down!
One of my prior patients is a roofer who lived a very full life of alcohol, women, and d***s. He was infected with HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and was cirrhotic and didn’t really care about his health at all. He was ghostly thin and weighed 110 lbs on a 6 foot frame, which included 20 lbs of ascites in his abdomen. He was angry and didn’t listen to anyone, refusing therapy most of the time. I met him first in the ICU, where he had full blown AIDS, end-stage liver disease, hepatorenal syndrome, unexplained lymph nodes all over his body, variceal hemorrhage, Kaposi’s sarcoma, and spontaneous bacterial peritonitis. Prognosis of in hospital death was >90% even with therapy.
I was involved in his care for about 2 weeks and again he refused every therapy that his primary physicians suggested. I was surprised he lasted the 2 weeks. Finally, he was so fed up of the noisiness in the ICU that he requested transfer to palliative care, and was eventually sent to a hospice for patients with advanced HIV to live out his remaining few days.
One year later I get a call from the hospice requesting a follow-up appointment for him. I was shocked that he was still alive and asked if I could talk to him. He was all better. Turns out he had the hots for his nurse in the hospice and did everything she asked in order to please her — including taking his medications for the first time! She had slowly nursed him back to health, convinced him to restart HIV meds, put him on a low salt diet for his liver disease, and then eventually got him up and mobile.
He spent another six months in a rehabilitation facility, then went back to work. He saw me in follow up for a while as we treated his hepatitis C, then his cirrhosis shockingly improved. After a couple of years he moved away to another place to start a construction company and became rather successful financially, and remains abstinent on his former vices.
He’s the only person that I’ve seen come back from death.
Kind of a retelling but…One time a cadaver on which I was performing an autopsy had a lung which was flipped upside-down. When I tried to flip it to the proper position, *bloop*. It flipped right back to upside-down.
After some due diligence we realized the lung was a transplant, and the surgeons who performed the transplant had attached the organ incorrectly. The lung had been fighting to be upside-down its whole life in this other man. After 15 or so years, the man eventually moved in a way that allowed it to flip over, resulting in his death.
Not really a “how the f**k is this person still alive,” but more of a “how the f**k did this person live this long with this condition.”.
Work in a hospital. A guy showed up who had burst a tyre going 180 km/h and flipped his car multiple times. His car was a write off. The only injuries he got were a few scratches and a bruise.
Edit: thanks for Internet points. No I don’t know what car he was driving.
