Medical Professionals Can’t Believe These 70 People Survived…
Veterinarian here.
An approximately 6 week old puppy was presented that had been crushed by a car and thrown away in a dumpster, left for dead. A Good Samaritan found her and brought her in to a clinic for euthanasia. It was a Saturday afternoon, he was about to close up shop for the weekend, and now this.
She was a little fuzzy black ball, about a pound and a half, with soulful eyes. Abdomen gashed open, left leg mid shaft femur fracture, right side hip shattered and pelvic fractures. Had been this way long enough that her quadriceps had contracted and the leg was hyperextended bent backwards at the knee. He took the puppy in, looked at his nurses and said “I’m not starting my g*****n weekend like this, I’ll stitch up her belly and figure out what the f**k to do with her Monday.”
Monday rolls around and he brings her to the main clinic so that the vet student can practice fracture fixation before pup is euthanized. Vet student (me) says in tearful voice “If I fix her properly do I still have to put her to sleep? ” Answer was “Nah, but if you do that you have to find her a home.” Her name is “Bits”. Another vet student got the other hit by car stray dog to practice on, the nurses named her “Pieces” +1 for dark humor by nurses.
So I anesthetize her, prep the left leg planning for an IM pin. Start making the initial skin incision, and she doesn’t bleed. Pretty sure that was A Bad Sign, so I chose to wake her up from anesthesia, give a blood transfusion and try again the next day. In the interim I do diagnostics and this little munchkin has (in addition to both back legs crushed and belly wound) hookworms, roundworms, whip worms, coccidia, demodectic AND sarcoptic manges. I look at her and asked her “how the f**k are you still here, seriously?” She just looked at me and did little puppy grunts.
Next day her crit was holding steady so I move forward with surgery plan. Single IM pin in the femur, and I had to manually flex the knee to RIP through the scar tissue and return it to normal position.
She recovers well (held her in my arms). I put her in the cage and set off down the hall to see some walk in rooms in the meantime. Two hours later and I check up on her. Vitals great, in good spirits, but that d**n leg is sitting backwards at the knee AGAIN. In puzzlement, I ask my mentor what I should do. He tells me to flex the knee manually again. I asked if that was safe, to sedate her again so soon. He told me to do it without sedation.
Cue horrified, shocked look on my face. He sees my reaction, then tells me matter-of-factly that “you’re gonna have to do that every 2 hours for the next 2 days or that scar tissue will just come back.” I go back to the pup, love on her and apologize ahead of time for the pain I’m about to inflict (even with meds on board I knew this was gonna hurt like a sonb***h)
She screamed in the most heartbreaking way. I was expecting her to bite me but instead, she just licked my hand afterwards. I looked at her and said “You have got a home little lady. You’re coming with me TONIGHT.”
Two days later and I’ve got the scar tissue thing under control but flummoxed about how to keep the leg from flipping backwards. Both back legs broken, down to one working hip and one working knee on different sides. My mentor and I put our heads together and rigged up a contraption involving small IM pins placed transversely in proximal femur and distal tibia, bent into hooks on the end, connected by steel suture to limit extension and orthodontic rubber bands to encourage dynamic flexion. We didn’t have an Elizabethan collar small enough for her so I took xray film and cut one out and duck taped it together. She couldn’t use either back leg, she was dragging herself along using front legs when I took her outside, cutest little Franken-puppy. Spunky as hell, little yippy barks looking at the squirrels in my yard.
A week later and pelvic fracture sequelae rear ugly head– her abdomen is bloated, I’m in my yard at midnight giving her mineral oil enemas and promising God if He will help her poop I will build her a doggy wheelchair, I don’t care if she never walks again.
Three weeks later and furball tore up her e-collar, pulled the pins out of her bone with her teeth, and two days later is somehow running in same yard attempting to catch squirrels.
Three months later she is catching them, and anything else she can find. She was my bestest friend for 8 years, she went on to survive 3 water moccasin bites, an attack by a Boxer, and liver and kidney failure (probably damage from the snakes, F**K WATER MOCCASINS). I euthanized her at 8 years old, after her last stay in the hospital for kidneys, she came out and her old skeletal injuries were causing her pain. The day she laid on the porch and watched a squirrel in front of her without trying to chase him… she looked at me with such sadness I knew this was that quality of life moment.
I took her to Popeyes and got chicken, let her eat until she was blowed up like a tick, then to the clinic. I held her in my arms and said “Goodbye my bad-a*s snake-killing, squirrel chasing miracle of a best friend. I love you forever.”
Dammit I’m sobbing now I miss her so much guys.
A guy I know with cancer smokes 2 packs a day and drinks a fifth of Fireball every day. He lives in a trailer so dirty there is a half inch of dirt according to his wife’s mother. He recovered from surgeries in that trailer. Eventually we got word he was quitting chemo and was just going to accept death.
5 years ago he was given 2 months to live. He is now completely cancer free.
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.
One year later I get a call from the hospice requesting a follow-up appointment for him. I was shocked that he was still alive and asked if I could talk to him. He was all better. Turns out he had the hots for his nurse in the hospice and did everything she asked in order to please her — including taking his medications for the first time! She had slowly nursed him back to health, convinced him to restart HIV meds, put him on a low salt diet for his liver disease, and then eventually got him up and mobile.
He spent another six months in a rehabilitation facility, then went back to work. He saw me in follow up for a while as we treated his hepatitis C, then his cirrhosis shockingly improved. After a couple of years he moved away to another place to start a construction company and became rather successful financially, and remains abstinent on his former vices.
He’s the only person that I’ve seen come back from death.
Kind of a retelling but…One time a cadaver on which I was performing an autopsy had a lung which was flipped upside-down. When I tried to flip it to the proper position, *bloop*. It flipped right back to upside-down.
After some due diligence we realized the lung was a transplant, and the surgeons who performed the transplant had attached the organ incorrectly. The lung had been fighting to be upside-down its whole life in this other man. After 15 or so years, the man eventually moved in a way that allowed it to flip over, resulting in his death.
Not really a “how the f**k is this person still alive,” but more of a “how the f**k did this person live this long with this condition.”.
Work in a hospital. A guy showed up who had burst a tyre going 180 km/h and flipped his car multiple times. His car was a write off. The only injuries he got were a few scratches and a bruise.
Edit: thanks for Internet points. No I don’t know what car he was driving.
An unlucky/lucky guy forgot his keys and was climbing back into his own apartment through the window. His cousin/friend thought that he was an intruder and pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger as the unlucky/lucky guy opened his mouth to say “don’t shoot”. The bullet went into his mouth and clean exited the back of his neck. After surgery, he was totally fine in a few days, somehow missed all major structures. Didn’t even chip a tooth. Really pissed at his cousin. (From my neurosurgery rotation in med school)
(edit: I didn’t delve into why, but for some reason the patient didn’t know that his friend/cousin was in the patient’s apartment, and the patient assumed that he was locked out.)
I’m not a doctor but I was diagnosed with Addison’s at age 13 or so. Was just generally feeling lethargic, vomiting, dizzy. Mom calls the hospital with symptoms and they said if I had all three at the same time to come in to be safe
Orderly or whatever checks my pulse in the lobby. 30/15, he laughs “well this one’s broken” and gets another machine. 30/15 “wait… What?!” Calls a doctor, they double check it and RUN me to the ER for fluids.
Again, not a doctor here, but apparently that’s not even high enough to have a pulse. They had no clue how I was walking let alone concious, but saw the numbers and after realizing it was accurate they freaked the hell out. And of course that freaked my mom out. Them telling my mom 30/15 is the BP of a dead person did not help. And then they said it’s either auto immune or cancer. My immune system apparently ate my adrenal glands, now I’m on meds for life, lucky me.
On the bright side though I never really have to worry about high blood pressure.
Not a doctor but a student nurse. I had a patient come into the psych ward from the emergency department after he had cut off his own right arm from the elbow down. With a f*****g chainsaw. He only survived because he apparently had some kind of rare clotting disorder that prevented him from bleeding to death. He was severely schizophrenic and believed that his arm was going to grow back.
Edit: I didn’t expect this to blow up the way it did. I love this story because my dad was a psychiatrist, and I finally have something way weirder than any of the tales of his profession he ever told. Happy y’all found it as interesting as I did!
Two that stick out.
Guy gets shot in the abdomen, drops to his knees; shooter puts one through the top of his head near his forehead. Bullet exits through his jaw. He wouldn’t stop complaining…about how much he hates that the guy who shot him.
Young girl driving a car gets t-boned on the passenger side by an Altima going at least 70mph. Her car looks like it was hit by an IED so we assumed she was deceased upon arrival when the other crew on scene said our focus was extricating the people in the Altima. Girl driving was completely unhurt. Buy a Volvo.
As a student had a young guy come in who self inflicted a .22 to the inside of his mouth and passed out. Awoke the next morning, didn’t recall the night prior, went to work. Two hours into work he says he’s not feeling right and starts acting odd. Co-workers call EMS. They take him in and while the ED is working him up they notice a mix of clear fluid and blood in the back of his mouth. They call ENT and get a CT Head. Shows 11 or so bullet fragments throughout his noggin’. The guy was acting by that time completely unfazed. I was very fazed.
Working in an aboriginal community a woman walked in complaining of a head ach behind her eye.
She was told to take a seat and as she turned around she had a butter knife sticking out the back of her skull. Aparently a drunk relative came home and stabbed her while she slept.
Edit: yes she survived. Was flown back to Townsville for imaging, then onto Brisbane for surgery.
Not a doctor. A classmate of mine in HS was out snowmobiling in the middle of the night. He was going about 50mph down a trail. Some a*****e had put a chain across the trail just to be an a*****e. He didn’t put reflectors on it and it wasn’t even on his own land. It was on state land.
Unfortunately, my classmate had a back rest on his sled. The chain hit him square across his chest. It slammed him into the back rest which fortunately broke off.
He rode back home and crawled into bed. Later, his mom made him go to the local clinic that had a small ER. They life-flighted him down to Duluth immediately. He had a ruptured spleen, part of his liver was torn, his heart was badly bruised, and he had a collapsed lung. He was bleeding pretty bad internally.
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.
When I was in college, there was a kid that exited a freeway at near freeway speed. Problem was, it was a construction zone at night, no lights, and it wasn’t supposed to be an open exit. Drove right into a pile of rebar. One of the poles went through the car into his face and pinned him to the seat through his head.
A couple of years later, I was in grad school, in anatomy seminar, and the surgeon presented that kids case as a study. Not only did he live, the rebar had slid right past the base of the brain/spinal column. It was so close, they had to twist it out like a screw because the ribbing on the bar threatened nerve damage. They literally rebuilt this kids skull around his brain.
His recovery photo was a totally normal kid smiling. He had a small scar on his chin.
I say kid, but he was like 17, just to be clear.
Edit: everyone keeps bringing up Phineas Gage, but this guy didn’t have any brain damage at all.
Had a lady WALK IN to the hospital with her face pointed at her chest. Her C1 vertebra had somehow fallen off C2, with her spinal cord delicately draped across the odontoid process. No damage to anything. Repaired with slow traction and a halo for a little while. Still baffles my mind 5 years later.
EDIT: lots of questions!
-This little old lady said it happened slowly over time, but when she woke up from her nap that evening, something felt different. No traumatic injury reported.
-She had been side-stepping for almost a year.
-i haven’t had time to draw a diagram yet, but I’ll come back in a little while when i have a chance to doodle one!
EDIT 2:
Behold! My attempt at a diagram of how she looked. I’m afraid it doesn’t make the situation any less scary.
Older woman called 911 for chest pain. Her vital signs were s**t and she had “the look” that anyone who’s ever seen a patient about to die will recognize instantly. Her EKG suggested multiple blockages in her coronary arteries, and we had to put her on a ventilator shortly after she got to the ER because she deteriorated so quickly. Cath lab confirmed the EKG findings: complete blockage of one artery and 99% blockage of two other major arteries. Unfortunately it was too extensive to resolve with PCI, so the only option was to fly her to the university hospital in the city for an emergent triple bypass. It turned out that she’d had multiple episodes like this (but not quite as severe) over the last 6 months and had refused bypass surgery not once, not twice, but *three* times in favor of a Mediterranean diet. Well at this point she didn’t have much say anymore and family agreed, so off to the OR she went. I took care of her again about 4 months later and she actually seemed to have made a remarkable recovery.
For me it was a guy who was cleaning his loaded shotgun and it blew half his face off, jaw and all. He was actually pretty good from the mid nose up. The thing that surprised me is how good of shape he was in afterwards. He didnt even go to the ICU we just admitted him to the med/surg floor. He was up communicating via whiteboard within a few hours and was adamant that he did not try to k**l himself. Got a psych consult anyway but they agreed. Another inch dorsal with the barrel of that gun and he would have been done for.
Both of the stories I’m sharing occurred during the Nepal Earthquake of 2015.
First was an infant who had a roof fall on his head. He was trapped for 10 min. before being rescued and took another 3 hours to drive him to the nearest functioning hospital (this happened in a remote area and he was brought in a taxi). His face was so swollen that it was probably more than double its original size. The top of his head was completely flat (like a dinner plate) and he had raccoon eyes. But somehow he was showing no danger signs and his vitals were normal. A CT scan miraculously showed that there was no brain damage or even an actual fracture, he had something called a Ping- pong fracture. The child recovered pretty well and was discharged in a couple of days.
Second was a lady who was roughly 8 months pregnant. Again, the roof of her house fell on her, sadly on her belly. From what she said, she was stuck under the rubble for about 4 hours, and it took a further 2-3 days to airlift her to the hospital. An x-ray of the pelvis was done which showed that it was broken badly in at least 4 places. But miraculously enough, there was very minimal bleeding. Someone with pelvis fracture can bleed to death easily, and she had multiple fractures in her pelvis. Nobody can say what happened for sure, but it was thought that probably the weight of the rubble was so strong that it actually helped stop the bleeding due to the applied pressure. More miraculously enough, the baby showed no signs of injury or even stress, even though the roof fell straight on her belly, and was delivered healthily via C- section.
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.
Our friend blacked out driving home, the last thing he remembers is pulling into the other lane to pass someone.
The car flipped twice and they had to cut him out from the top. He was unresponsive and the emts were ready to call him DOA. He broke a vertebrae in his neck and shattered his hand. They were floored when they realized he was still alive.
If it had been one vertebrae higher, he would have been paralyzed. As it was, he walked out of the hospital less than a week later.
He had been wearing his seatbelt which is literally the only reason he is alive today.
Not a doctor but my father is.
In his first rotation of residency, he had to assist in operating on an 8 year old boy. Poor kid’s dad was chopping wood, and he got in the way of the swing. Axe was lodged deep in his skull when he came into the ER.
According to my dad, the boy survived, but the way he describes the father’s devastation at having brutally injured his own son really makes me understand why my dad was always so uptight about things like fire, knives, and of course axes when I was a kid.
In nursing school I had an elderly patient who had a Whipple surgery (very extensive abdominal surgery to resect pancreatic cancer) and must have perforated. It took three days of worsening redness before the order came to remove the staples. I was helping out as the stench of blood, pus and poop filled the room. The next month of clinicals included seven times per day dressing changes, pulling yards and yards of blood and feces soaked packing out of the wound. Somehow this guy actually made it through. I have no idea how he didn’t get septic.
It was my first day rounding with the surgery team, and as we approached a patient’s room, one of the surgeons turned to me and said “check this out, this man has had more than 70 abdominal surgeries”. We walked into the room and the first thing I noticed was that it was really homey, which is unusual for a hospital. He had some aromatherapy going on, and pictures taped to the wall, a guest cot was set up with several pillows from home and a nice knit blanket in the corner. It was clear that he had been there a while. The patient was a somewhat overweight, probably obese, man who had indeed had more than 70 abdominal surgeries. Unfortunately, at some point the skin and fatty tissue on his abdomen had become infected and been removed. The result was a square cut out on his belly, from the n****e line to his belly button, extending across his entire stomach. It was perfectly square, with perfectly normal skin and fat around the cut out, and when he breathed, his abdominal muscles and intestines would just sort of come in and out of the abdominal cavity which each breath. He looked like something out of a zombie movie, but was apparently doing alright and living with it. He was attached to a machine called a wound vac that kept the wound clean and provided suction to remove any fluid (or in his case, feces) that developed in the wound. We were waiting for the day when he stopped leaking stool into the square to get him a skin graft. We were still waiting when I left the surgery service a month later.
Nurse here.
Man in his 50s has brain tumour, has surgery to remove the tumour and hemicraneotomy to relieve intracranial pressure (bone taken from the skull and left out).
Man walks out of this and has normal life.
Man is walking around minding his own business.
Building explodes. Shrapnel flies.
Shrapnel hits man, exactly where the burr hole was, travels through his brain and gets lodged behind his eye.
Man still alive.
It baffles me that of all the people who could have been hit by shrapnel it happened to a guy with a missing skull part and it hit him exactly where it was missing. It baffles me even more that he survived all of this.
Not a doctor. My grandpa though. Stepped on a landmine which resulted in lost fingers and stitches in his lower arm that were done with toothpicks. Was made to run for miles in the n**e as a prisoner of war with these injuries, all while hiding a journal in which he recounted all of these stories. Also was shot in the head and survived with no brain damage. There are other things that I can’t remember anymore, but he was tough as nails. When I was 7 or 8 (he was in his eighties) he used to outrun me in a race with no issues. A year later, f*****g cancer. He went from gardening and carrying bags of soil to his deathbed in two weeks.
Patient has a horrible lung infection from a chronic illness. Antibiotics are not working and he continues to become septic. All other sources of infection are ruled out, and the team is confident that his blood infection is coming from his lungs.
Now the patient is also on the lung transplant list because of his chronic illness. So, the team decides to remove his lungs, without a confirmed donor, and anastomose his pulmonary arteries to his pulmonary veins.
Then he’s put on ECMO without any lungs in his body and his infection clears.
About 10 days later a lung donor becomes available and he gets transplanted.
Wakes up about three days later, very sick, but very much alive. Lived without lungs for 10 days.
I helped take care of an old dude who had one leg amputated, and had broken his other leg so he was seeing us because of that. He was on oxygen and not being very compliant with using his wheelchair. We were talking with him and he was getting really argumentative.
“How am I supposed to chop wood in a wheelchair?” Was what he kept demanding. When asked how he was chopping wood with one leg in the first place he responded that he’d crawl into the woods and hop up to chop the wood. This was even more concerning.
When the doctor asked how he was carrying his axe, oxygen, and the wood he chopped he looked him straight in the eye and said: “I carry ‘em on my back.”
Not sure if he was serious, but he was pretty dang grizzled and looked like he may have been crawling through the woods.
Med Student here. My most memorable patient was a particularly pleasant middle-aged man who was flown back to my hospital in the Midwest after suffering a 6 story fall from a hotel balcony in the Caribbean.
The story goes this poor fella just arrived at his hotel planning to spend a week in paradise. Immediately upon arriving to his hotel, he stepped out on his balcony to watch the sunset and leaned on the railing only to have it collapse underneath him. He fell 6 stories straight down and suffered bilateral open tibial pilon fractures (which are particularly high energy and difficult to heal). The poor guy apparently fell into a locked backyard and his wife and kids had to listen to him screaming in pain and bleeding for over 2 hours before they could get the fire department to break down the gate. He was taken to the hospital on the island he was staying where he was stabilized and they recommended he have both legs amputated. He begged to be shipped back to the United States, and apparently, the government got involved and flew him to Miami where he was [externally fixated](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_fixation#/media/File:Ilizarov_Apparatus_External_Fixator.JPG) and transfused several times. I guess he had some internal trauma as well. About a week later, he was shipped up to the midwest to my hospital. Literally blew my mind the s**t this poor guy went through just because he wanted to enjoy a vacation.
Sadly, I think that he ended up losing one of his legs anyways because his wounds wouldn’t heal and he ended up with osteomyelitis (bone infection).
Vet here. Dog walked in, still eating and drinking that morning but acting lethargic. Had a ruptured splenic tumor with an abdomen full of blood and a red blood cell count of 4.1 (normal 35-55). No idea how he was still getting around.
Not a doctor, but I do have a story. Friend of a friend. She was hiking and got a scratch on her leg. Later that night she wasn’t feeling well, so she went to the hospital. They said it was flu and sent her home. She went back the next day and was diagnosed with sepsis. She wound up in a medically induced coma and had to lose all four of her limbs and have a lot of internal issues as well. She’s doing great now with prosthetics and an amazing attitude.
Not a doctor, but my former step uncle used to work on towers (like cell phone towers), his harness broke and he fell, landed straight on his back. Doctors said he was lucky to make it to the hospital alive and wouldn’t live.
Six months later he’s walking and talking again, he just has short term memory issues and his speech is slowed down. But he can still function and be a dad.
I had a dog brought in that had eaten a bunch of anticoagulant rat poison about a week prior. They didn’t think anything of it at the time because the dog was “fine” immediately after. If a dog gets into anticoagulant poison, and you catch it right away, you can decontaminate them, and give vitamin K, and they’ll usually be fine. By the time they decided their dog should see the vet, it was dripping blood from every orifice, in shock, and had a packed cell count of 6%. For some reason, they’d let me hospitalize, and start vitamin K, but they would not let me transfuse that dog. It was bleeding from its freaking tear ducts, too weak to lift its head, and I was so convinced it was going to bleed out in front of me if I couldn’t buy it some time with some donor blood. That stubborn little pup pulled through, and was going strong when I saw her a year later for her regular checkup.
Not my story but my sister’s. She had an infamous d**g a****t in her 50s admitted for endocarditis (heart infection) who had multiple previous admissions in the same hospital. During her stay the patient went through withdrawal and had not one nor 2 but 3 cases of torsades de points that needed defibrillation. Where most people dont survive not even one of these arrhythmias this patient quickly recovered and was asking not a week later to be diacharged cause she was ready to party again.
My story would have to be a drunk 20 something that came after being stabbed on the forehead. We worked him up in casualty and found a large amount of air that had been sucked in his skull from the open wound. Patient clearly needed neurosurgical intervention but got impatiet and decided to abscond. We searched for patient and tried contacting him but couldnt find him. Patient returned a week later being brought in by his mother because he kept complaining of headaches.
A year ago, I was involved with treating a 65 year old lady, walking across the street to get lunch one day, she got hit by a semi truck doing 45. Broke all the bones on the left side of her body, some of them in multiple places. She also had a Morell-Lavalee (skin separates off the underlying tissue) that involved about 70 percent of her left leg, from hip to ankle. Had a pelvic fracture that was open into her r****m with a large perineal wound. Took multiple surgeries over several weeks, but at her most recent follow up (accident happened a year ago), she was walking and basically back to normal.
When I was at work someone pointed out this lady walking down the hall. They told me she was shot seven times in one go and survived.
Edit. Some context. I was told the lady was in a stolen car and they opened fire on the police. The police returned fire.
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.
The answer: It was DNA from the products of **molar pregnancy**, which I highly encourage no one to read more about, as it’s pretty f*****g creepy.
Not a doctor. But March 2018 my father, who is a type 2 diabetic, ended up in the ER because of high blood sugar. Don’t remember the exact number, but his blood sugar was over 1000. Handfuls of doctors and nurses told me that was easily the highest blood sugar reading they’d ever witnessed. They couldn’t believe he was alive or at least not in a diabetic coma. His blood was the consistency of syrup.
Not a doctor, but I once was visiting a friend in hospital and saw ambulance bring a dude with cut off arm and lumberjack axe stuck in head. Think he was assaulted by some drunk lumby dude in local bar. Apparently he survived.
Geneticist here. A healthcare company in our field sent us a sample for genetic testing of a certain gene, the paperwork said the patient was ~35 male. We found a mutation in the gene of interest which was squarely in the category of “this person shouldn’t be alive, this is a prenatally lethal disorder.”
Also we noticed the sample had no Y chromosome marker. *Facepalm*. The provider had put the patient label on the wrong sample before mailing it to us. This s**t happens way too much at some companies.
Not a doctor but every time I see My 600lb Life I wonder how the hell those people are surviving.
Followed this patient with my attending. 19/20 year old african american with sickle cell anemia. Stroked out and was in a coma. Intubated and put on a ventillator because they couldn’t breathe on their own. MRI was bad, looked like somebody emptied out a shotgun shell and scattered the pellets around the brain. Still haven’t seen another MRI like that one. With the brain, there is a essentially a 3 day rule. If you have little change 3 days after a neurological injury, the chances of meaningful recovery are slim. Week one goes by, daily spontaneous breathing trials (test to see if they can breathe on their own) failed, so the patient is kept tubed/vented. Second week goes by and we hit Thursday with no change in status. My attending and I are reviewing after we see the patient, and we make the decision that the next morning we are going to encourage the family to withdraw care. Friday morning, we go in. Spontaneous breathing trial has failed but the patient’s eyes are open and following us around the room. Their eyes hadn’t been open over those prior two weeks. My attending and I were absolutely shocked. We were convinced this kid was essentially brain dead but now we’ve been proven wrong. Still, we didn’t hold out much hope for more improvement. I mean, two weeks and they can open their eyes and follow people around the room? You can say we’re pessimistic about chance of recovery but experience does speak for a lot in these situations. It’s Saturday or Sunday, we can safely remove the breathing tube. Another week goes by, the patient is able to move their head around and starts to move the arms/legs. Another week goes by, they are able to sit at the edge of the bed.
During this time of rapid improvement, they still lacked fine motor skill and could not produce coherent speech. The patient would get frustrated, tearful, and despondent. In discussion with the family, I make the comment to my attending in private that the patient appears depressed. My attending brings up the likelihood of depression and mom just snubs that. “X has nothing to be depressed about! X is alive!” We argue our case for depression with her, “A month ago, X could walk, talk, and eat without assistance. X cannot do any of those things now. X’s life won’t ever be the same. X has every reason to be depressed.” She was still in denial about the prospect of her child being depressed in that situation.
The patient was discharged to rehab a few days after that conversation, and I don’t know what happened to them after that. That case really is one of those cases that qualifies as a “miracle” to me. I don’t believe in a higher power but that was a very significant and completely unexpected recovery. Everybody involved in the care of that patient was sure that the patient was going to die, and we were all proven wrong. It’s a nice reminder that there are outliers.
Not a doctor (or a patient) but my SO and his mom were in an accident a few years back and was t boned by a drunk kid speeding home from prom. His mom broke her pelvis (and more but i cant remember what else she broke exactly) and she is now curruntly running marathons and my SO on the other hand broke the top vertebra in his neck, crawled out of the wreck, somehow didnt die from breaking his neck and on top of that he isnt even paralyzed and apparently he was doing push ups with the neck brace on
Alright the SO is here to fix my story because i did it wrong, here we go
First kid wasnt drunk, just stupid. He was going to prom and tboned us at 55 mph. My mom, in the drivers seat, had broken her pelvis, various ribs, blood filled her lungs, and has metal in her arm abd pelvis. My sister lacerated her spleen and my ex broke her pelvis. I broke a rib and the c4 bone in my neck. My mom was hospitalised for 5 months and is running and living, not as well as she used to but she doesnt quit for anything. As for me I was hospitalized for 3 days and wore a neck brace for two months. Later I would break my leg going down a half pipe on a ripstick but thats a story for another day.
When my dad was in residency, he was helping deliver babies. One came out stillborn. It was a rough time for everyone. Dad had to carry the baby away, and the entire time he carried the body away he did chest compressions. The baby started to breathe again. Dad had to bring the baby back. By all accounts, the likelihood of that working was EXTREMELY low, as they had already done everything they were supposed to for longer than they were supposed to do it.
The parents had to go through some trauma therapy after that. That’s all I know about that story.
I was a resident at the time, it was the end of my shift, and I walked past a guy walking to the front desk with a g*****n harpoon in his head. It came in from below the chin, and got out through the top of the skull.
Dude wanted to go harpoon fishing, there was an accident in the boat, and he shot himself, so he turned the boat around, sailed to shore, got into his car and drove to the nearest hospital, where he parked, and walked into the reception. He was completely conscious, and couldn’t speak for obvious reasons, but he wrote down eloquently.
I heard he was sent home the very next day, with no complications.
Had a patient who was out having drinks and fishing at night. Well a wave hit and he stumbled right onto his pole, somehow impaling it through his eye and touching the back of his skull. Amazing that he survived it given the fishing pole sized crater through his brain on the mri.
I know a gentleman who has both of his carotid arteries completely blocked off. He obviously gets enough blood flow from other vessels to keep going, and I’m sure these other routes have developed over the years, but still. I remember reading the scan results and having to go over them more than once, like,”100% blockage, ok that’s bad. Wait, on the left AND the right?? D**n.”.
A twenty something boy got shot in the head, straight on mind you. Dude came to the hospital awake and talking. I personally saw the CT scan with the bullet still in his skull. My favorite part was he claimed it was a drive by shooting; I have never seen anything more centered on someone’s forehead, dead center no joke, seems highly unlikely that it was random.
I had a friend who got ~.23BAC drunk and stole his friends car around 2 a.m. He went for a drive way out in the country and lost control while speeding, hit a tree, basically broke the car in half and rolled 5 times. He got ejected and ended up pinned under the car when it came to rest. He laid under the car for several hours until someone going to work early in the morning spotted him and phoned EMTs.
After a week in a coma, he woke up and did months of physical therapy to get back to walking and eventually made a full recovery to the point that he was squatting almost 400lbs.
Then he died of a Fentanyl o******e.
I’m an ER doc and went to see a hall patient with a complaint of “toe pain”. Sat down to really talk with the guy since it was a lull in my shift. Said his toe hurt because he dropped a knife on it. Asked him, “were you cooking, or what?” He looks up from his foot and I notice a thin red line on his neck, below his Thyroid cartilage (Adams apple). My heart sank, then started pounding. It’s *really* hard to slit your own throat without bleeding to death, but not impossible if you hit the trachea just right and it lines back up when you look down…which is what this guy had done. He had cut nearly all the way through his trachea (windpipe), and just the muscle in the back was preventing it from falling into his chest causing him to die by suffocation. Once that happened, I wouldn’t be able to help him, not with intubation (breathing tube) or cricothyroidotomy (cutting into neck) since his trachea would be retracted into his chest.
VERY CALMY I call cadiothoracic surgery and ENT and got the guy to the OR (still looking at his toe to maintain the seal) for a tracheal repair. He was discharged to the psych floor 3 days later, since this was a s*****e attempt, but did well. I knew he had already decided to live, since we had about a half hour to calmly talk to each other waiting for the OR to be ready. If he wanted to finish himself off, he would have just need to look at the ceiling!
Like many patients in the ER, his story was poignant, his acuity wasn’t immediately obvious, and there is morbid humor associated with the case. When we tell our trainees about this case we refer to him as “the Canadian”.
Not a doctor, but the patient.
Less than a year old, started seizing. This led to a severe case of the Not Breathing, quickly followed by everyone s******g themselves trying to get me to breathe. Two frantic rides to the hospitals later (first one couldn’t take me because they didn’t have machines for someone so small), and now they’ve got machines keeping me alive. Several surgeries solely reacting to more s**t going wrong, a month (half of which spent in a coma), and I woke up on my own. Didn’t even need the machines anymore. Only lasting effect is a small scar from a machine they left on for too long, and asthma for about five years.
They never figured out what the hell happened. So, there’s a chance that it could happen again some day.
Here’s hoping for the same luck that got me through it the first time.
Not a doctor, but my dad survived diabetic ketoacidosis, massive heart attack and kidney failure. Doctors told us to prepare for his death, we called in the priest, brought all the family in. He was on life support for a week and kept on improving. They gradually brought him out of it, when he came to he ripped out his tubes. The doctor who prepared us for his passing came back from vacation and saw my dad alive and recovering and said : “you are the last person I thought to see again.” My dad blinked and asked, “who is that?” He’s still alive.
Guy was running from the cops in his car. Went off road and crashed the car. Ran on foot. Police were closing in so he sliced his neck on both sides with a razor blade to avoid arrest. He didn’t hit any major arteries and lived. Then I got to sew his neck wounds shut. I don’t think he got in trouble either – just wound up at an inpatient psych ward for a while.
Don’t do m**h kids .
Recently coded a patient for 40+ minutes, everybody wanted to stop but he was young (50s), so I persisted. People don’t come back from codes that long. Then, all of a sudden he gets a pulse back.
So we think this is temporary, and wonder about anoxic brain injury. I leave service, come back days later and dab smack on day one discharge him home in stable condition. He had a full blown conversation and was so thankful, tearful and kept saying ” Thank you for not giving up on me” He had no deficits. Mind blown.
Had a guy come in with acute onset blindness in both eyes.
Did a blood gas which showed a pH of 6.6 and Bicarb of 0.5.
To give some perspective for non-medical peoples – these numbers shouldn’t be compatible with life. Normal blood pH is 7.35 to 7.45. And because pH is a logarithmic scale, this guys blood was almost 10 times as acidic as it should be. The fact that he had no bicarbonate (acid-base buffer in the blood) in his system reflects that he had exhausted his usual compensatory mechanisms.
We were convinced initially that it would turn about to be metahnol poisoning but all his toxicology turned out to be normal. He needed 10 days of dialysis in ICU, but eventually made a full recovery. We never were able to work out what caused his severe metabolic derangements.
