Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
Then he’s put on ECMO without any lungs in his body and his infection clears.
About 10 days later a lung donor becomes available and he gets transplanted.
Wakes up about three days later, very sick, but very much alive. Lived without lungs for 10 days.
I helped take care of an old dude who had one leg amputated, and had broken his other leg so he was seeing us because of that. He was on oxygen and not being very compliant with using his wheelchair. We were talking with him and he was getting really argumentative.
“How am I supposed to chop wood in a wheelchair?” Was what he kept demanding. When asked how he was chopping wood with one leg in the first place he responded that he’d crawl into the woods and hop up to chop the wood. This was even more concerning.
When the doctor asked how he was carrying his axe, oxygen, and the wood he chopped he looked him straight in the eye and said: “I carry ‘em on my back.”
Not sure if he was serious, but he was pretty dang grizzled and looked like he may have been crawling through the woods.
Med Student here. My most memorable patient was a particularly pleasant middle-aged man who was flown back to my hospital in the Midwest after suffering a 6 story fall from a hotel balcony in the Caribbean.
The story goes this poor fella just arrived at his hotel planning to spend a week in paradise. Immediately upon arriving to his hotel, he stepped out on his balcony to watch the sunset and leaned on the railing only to have it collapse underneath him. He fell 6 stories straight down and suffered bilateral open tibial pilon fractures (which are particularly high energy and difficult to heal). The poor guy apparently fell into a locked backyard and his wife and kids had to listen to him screaming in pain and bleeding for over 2 hours before they could get the fire department to break down the gate. He was taken to the hospital on the island he was staying where he was stabilized and they recommended he have both legs amputated. He begged to be shipped back to the United States, and apparently, the government got involved and flew him to Miami where he was [externally fixated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_fixation#/media/File:Ilizarov_Apparatus_External_Fixator.JPG) and transfused several times. I guess he had some internal trauma as well. About a week later, he was shipped up to the midwest to my hospital. Literally blew my mind the s**t this poor guy went through just because he wanted to enjoy a vacation.
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