Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
On the trauma service just before Christmas several years ago. Get paged for incoming 911 trauma at some time near midnight. Walk out of the workroom on the top floor of the hospital and I can see several blocks away the road lit up with cop cars and ambulances – knew it was going to be bad.
20ish year old comes in after being shot 7 times in the chest; awake, talking. Every single bullet missed every vital organ and he survived.
His 16 year old buddy get shot just once in the chest, and dies on the scene immediately. Cops show me their body cam of the scene with them doing everything they can to save this kid but he was too far gone.
Police later caught the two suspects who had been doing home invasions including another murder, shooting another robbery victim in the street, and knocking over several pharmacies.
Wrong place, wrong time. 16 year old waiting for Christmas and the rest of his life, gone in an instant. Life just isn’t fair.
Had a patient who was shot in the chest and abdomen several times at very close range with a shotgun. Not only survived but was quite a pleasant person to treat. I’m a nurse btw. How this patient survived wasn’t a mystery though, just ironic. The patient was morbidly obese and the thick layer of fat acted almost like ballistic gel. Obesity saved someone’s life!
Another “weird world of genetics” post. Got a sample involving some kind of offbeat case, where they wanted prenatal paternity testing+analysis from my company without telling us anything about the patient and the background, as sort of a blind verification thing.
The paternal test results strongly suggested that the prenatal sample *appeared exclusively paternal*- the fetus only had one set of autochromosomes (humans have, usually, two sets). At this point we decided to stop referring to the prenatal… thing… as a fetus because genetically, this is generally incompatible with life.
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