“How Are They Still Alive?”: Doctors Share 50 Stories Of Patients That Survived Against All Odds

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-k*****g, squirrel chasing miracle of a best friend. I love you forever."

Dammit I'm sobbing now I miss her so much guys.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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!

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.