Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
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.
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