Unbelievable Survivals: 70 Patients Defied All Odds Against Grim Medical Diagnoses
Infantry guy in Afghanistan in 2009. Some old guy came up to us in a bazaar and asked us to give him a ride to a city. His arm was wrapped up. We said no, since we don’t exactly do that. He unwrapped his arm. His hand/wrist was missing and his two arm bones were exposed and white. Everything else was green and black. I have no idea how he was alive, much less up and walking around.
15 years ago my mum dated a guy who had both a brain tumour and leukaemia. To treat the leukaemia they had to stop treating the brain tumour and vice versa. He was given 2 years to live, he told my mum that he needed to focus on getting his affairs in order and spend time with his kids (they’d only been dating a few months, very casually).
Saw the dude a few weeks ago, still kicking! Still has the tumour, they successfully treated the leukaemia, but now he has osteoporosis(?) and a sort of not-epilepsy(?). They found out he had brittle bone when he had a seizure and broke a lot of bones falling down. But he’s just getting on with it.
Couldn’t k**l the guy with an axe!
Best one I saw was a guy shot in the back, half an inch from his spine, he was totally stable sitting and talking to us. We saw the bullet sitting in between his svc, aorta and esophogus with injuries to no vital structure. Walked out a day or two later with just a band aid. Literal millimeter either way and he would’ve been a corpse, paralysed or needed major reconstructive surgery.
Edit: to be clear we saw the bullet on CT scan.
My grandfather, he had one eye from a roofing nail that flew up and destroyed it, a large scar on his forehead from an axe head flying off and the blade side hitting him, prostate cancer, and oh yeah he was hit by a train in his truck and was in a body cast from his armpits down for almost a year in the 50s…he lived till 96.
My wife treated a foreign student at the university she worked at who took some d**g, I don’t recall which, thought he could fly, and jumped out a third floor window, landing directly on his face. He went into a coma and when they x-rayed him (or some other scan), they found he’d aspirated all of his teeth. It took days to figure out who he was and over a week to contact his family.
ER nurse here. The one that immediately stands out in my mind was the diabetic who was, of course, noncompliant with her regimen, and came in feeling like c**p because her blood sugar was high.
How high? Try just below 1300.
For reference, diabetics are supposed to manage their blood levels and keep them no higher than 180, and even that’s kind of pushing at the limit.
By all accounts, this girl should have been in a diabetic coma. At best. Yet SOMEHOW she was conscious, walking, talking, and arguing with us every step of the way. Despite the fact that her pee was almost pure sugar (and resembled crystallized honey), it was a 20-minute argument to get her to stop drinking her diet mountain dew (she firmly believed that the fact that it was diet meant it was fine). Her blood was syrup: how we got enough to run blood tests was a minor miracle in itself. She kept complaining and asking for snacks and junk and just… she was not a pleasant person at all.
Obviously, she gets to go up to the ICU. Twenty minutes after we get her up and transferred she walks out of the hospital. Why? She was mad that they only would give her water to drink. Priorities, I guess?
Haven’t seen her since, but I still wonder about her from time to time…
Witnessed a sedan with a trailer flip four times at ~75mph on a highway into a ditch right in front of me. A 12yo wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown from the vehicle through an open window. He had a superficial laceration of his leg, and was in shock, but otherwise apparently unharmed. We did a quick trauma evaluation of the family, everyone seemed okay, and applied pressure to the kid’s bleeding leg until EMS got there. When we were running to the wrecked car as the dust was settling, I was sure we were just going to see disembodied pieces of that kid everywhere, but he was really, really lucky. Wear seatbelts, folks. Everyone who remained buckled in the car didn’t even have a scratch.
Oooh this is a good one for me. My roommate is a heavy drinker. He had to have some tests done a few months ago and it shows his liver function and how well it’s doing. This kid drinks himself to oblivion weekly, eats like s**t, doesn’t exercise, weighs like 350 lbs, and smokes. I’m thinking his liver, and most of his other organs, looks like a mummy’s shriveled up s*****m.
His liver function test comes back perfectly clean. He’s perfectly healthy on paper, other than being overweight. He showed me cause I didn’t believe him, blew my g*****n mind.
