Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
The doc told him that, if he hadn’t been so muscular, he would have died out on the trail. The man was about 6 feet and 245lbs and ripped like a body builder when he started. 6 months and a bunch of surgeries later, he was maybe 130lbs. He looked like death and his whole chest was railroad tracks. They had to crack his chest twice to deal with his heart and opened up his abdomen numerous times to deal with infections.
Now, he’s the same loud crazy person he always was. A successful business owner with a wife and kids.
Everyone thought he was going to die. Including the doctors, but he pulled through.
You know those big, 16-18 inch kitchen knives that everyone has? Had a lady come in with one sticking sideways out of her neck, handle on the left side and top sticking out the right. She went to OR, where they removed the knife in one of the most tense, a*****e-clenched moments in history….Minimal bleeding. Apparently the knife split right between her major blood vessels and airway. Was lying right against them, didn’t scratch ’em. Absolutely incredible.
My dad. Walked a mile to see a friend and tried to walk up the stairs. Couldn’t get up one step. Walked back one mile to his office, looked up who his doctor was, since he hadn’t seen one in 20 years, and drove there. No appointment. Dr. hooks him up to an EKG, but it’s fine. Tells him there’s a cardiologist next door, it’s the end of the day, they’ll see him. Just in case.
They hook him up to a blood pressure monitor while he’s on a treadmill. The monitor is behind him, he can’t see it. He starts walking. They set a countdown timer for 3 minutes, and about 30 seconds in, one of the nurses steps out of the room. My dad is watching the timer and it counts down to zero. He feels fine and figures he’s going home but the door opens and two ambulance attendants are wheeling in a gurney.
While he was on the treadmill, his blood pressure dropped to zero, then restarted, then dropped to zero again. The nurse who stepped out of the room dialed 911. They let him finish because they figured as soon as he stopped, the heart attack would start in earnest. Quadruple bypass later and he lived, but note, he said he never felt the same. A bypass is not a panacea.
Edit: Panacea solution to all problems. (Apparently, not a commonly used word.).
Not a doctor, but firefighter. We had a 30’s year old male put a shotgun in his mouth pointing up to his nose pull the trigger and survive. We show up work him, he’s breathing, but missing most of his face and we transport him. He survives and we are all amazed. Three months later he does it again, but a .22 to the temple it bounced around and exited through his eye. He survives again. With some mental deficits and a glass eye, but still one of the craziest I’ve seen.
Obligatory “not mine, but” dad was an ER doc and one he told a lot one I was present for were…
—a guy with a blood alcohol level of .85 was basically dead on a gurney not breathing. Suddenly, this f****r sits up and punches my dad right in the face says “turn those d**n lights off.” and then lays back down and passes out. Apparently, he was a massive alcoholic and no one knew how he was still alive and he had some kind of crazy tolerance built up.
—car accident ahead of us on the freeway one day. Dad goes running up so I see none of the gore, but driver is suspended in his seat in a flipped over car. the car and the guy were both ripped in half at about mid-section. Dad goes to work on this guy who is fully conscious and rather concerned he’s missing everything below his hips. Being upside down kept enough blood in the guys brain that he was awake for a while – long enough the landed a helo on the highway and tried to fly him to the hospital. He didn’t make it, and I have never seen so much blood in my life. Dad left his clothes on the side of the road after giving the highway patrol a statement dropped me at school in his underwear. None of this struck him as strange at all.
A few years back my wife was doing clinicals at the local hospital while still in school and a guy came in with a blood sugar of 9…NINE!!! And he was totally conscious/lucid. As a type one diabetic myself I almost fell off my chair when I heard that.
Not a medical professional, but I used to hang around with one. They had a young woman brought in one night who had been stabbed 77 times and laid in a ditch for hours before someone saw her and called 911. She made a full recovery. My buddy was so shocked that she was alive and conscious that he called me from work to tell me about it.
And then there was a guy who fell off the third rung of a ladder, hit his head just right, and died instantly. Life is weird. Or..in this case, death is weird.
