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

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

Life is just weird sometimes.

stay_fr0sty , Sandra Seitamaa/Unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

High-speed train moving fast on tracks with motion blur, illustrating unexpected survival in critical conditions. 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!

icjp , Getty Images/Unsplash (not the actual photo) Report

ADVERTISEMENT

Patient in hospital gown sitting on bed in medical room, illustrating medical professionals surprised by patient survival cases. 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.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Post Comment

RSS
Follow by Email