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

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.

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!

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.".

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.

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.

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...

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.)

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.