These doctors discuss the patients who somehow defied death.
On Borrowed Time
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“About 20 years ago, I had a patient come in with obstruction of his colon by a large colon cancer. The cancer had spread to his liver, and CT scan showed the liver had been replaced by the metastatic tumor. So he wouldn’t die of intestinal obstruction, the patient, his family, and I decided to try placing an expandable metal stent through the tumor. It worked! His obstruction was relieved and he was able to go home to spend his last days with his family.
Eighteen months later, the patient came in for an office visit for heartburn. He was even more jaundiced than when I first met him, but he felt well and was eating well. The stent was still functioning. I never saw him again and assume he finally succumbed to his disease, but he got at least 18 months of precious and good time.”
His Broken Face Saved His Life
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“A patient I took care of had a car fall on his face. He was underneath it working when it slid off of the jack. The only reason he survived was because he broke every bone in his face which allowed for his brain to swell. I was rotating through ICU so I first saw him just a day after the accident. His head was so swollen, he didn’t even look human. Fast forward a few weeks later. I was rotating through a different unit in the hospital and came across the same patient. He was recovering and had minimal neuro deficits.
At that time, he still had edema and was in the process of getting better every day. I used that wording considering the severity of his injuries. He had progress to make, but was able to walk and talk and had no memory deficits. I did not follow his care all the way through to discharge, so I don’t know what he was like then or in the months following the accident. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went on to go to college and is living a normal life. He was a younger patient and younger brains tend to be more ‘plastic’ in that they can recover from injuries better than someone who is older.”
He Could Have Died At Any Time
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“Pathologist here: Had a guy who had died suddenly and unexpectedly. I soon learned he was the recipient of a lung transplant about 15 years prior.
When I opened the man up, his transplanted lung was upside down. I flipped the lung into the proper position, and bloop. It flipped right back to upside down. That was quite alarming. The surgeons who originally performed the transplant incorrectly attached the organ. When he by chance entered the correct position, the lung flipped over, causing his pulmonary artery to seal shut, resulting in his death.
The man lived for 15 years with a lung that was dying to flip upside down. And it was only by sheer chance he didn’t move in such a way that allowed it to do so until the fateful day of his death. It is one of the most fascinating cases I have witnessed.”
Somehow, He Pulled Through
“I had a gentleman in his late 50s come in with multiple myeloma. A short history of progressively worsening breathlessness turned out he had a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in his lungs). He was a good candidate for surgery, so he had the blood clot removed, but unfortunately, the clot had caused such bad issues with his heart that he couldn’t be weaned off the bypass machine. Instead, he went to ICU on ECMO (like a circuit for your heart and lungs outside the body to give your heart/lungs time to ‘rest’). His chest was still open (cannulated centrally) but covered up with sterile stuff.
After three days, he was booked to be weaned off the ECMO or at least have the tubes put in peripherally so his chest could be closed. Morning of the procedure while he’s waiting to be moved, somehow the tubing of the ECMO machine broke (oxygenator tube) and blood spilled all over the floor and he went into cardiac arrest. The Cardiothoracic consultant had to do internal cardiac massage (basically CPR on the heart by squeezing it via his still open chest) until the circuit got fixed and he returned to a normal circulation. He ended up going to OT and having his chest closed but he had more clots pulled out of his pulmonary arteries (clots had recurred).
At this point, I thought this guy was utterly doomed. I figured if he even lived long enough to be woken up he’d have some degree of ischemic brain injury. After about two weeks, the guy left ICU and a week later went to rehabilitation. Speaking, walking, cognitively largely intact.
It was one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever seen during my short career.”
He Sees A Lot Of Trauma
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“I’m a pediatric resident in one of the largest cities in the United States, and I have two stories; both are about kids who suffered different types of trauma.
The first is a young, school-aged girl who was run over by an 18-wheeler. Her liver and spleen were each nearly split in two. The spleen and liver are both loosely organized bags of blood vessels, both of which filter various components of the blood. When they are crushed/injured/shattered, a tremendous amount of blood can be lost into the abdominal cavity. People can die because they ‘bleed out’ into their abdomen, even if there isn’t a single drop of blood that leaves their body. Anyway, this girl suffered an incredible amount of trauma, multiple fractures, and nearly died from blood loss, but walked out of the hospital.
The second was another school-aged girl who drowned. She wasn’t a strong swimmer and was pulled beneath the surface of the water by a rip current. Some heroic swimmers and the on-duty lifeguard pulled her ashore and gave her CPR. When EMS arrived, they put a breathing tube in, but she woke up and pulled it out en route to the first ER. She was relatively stable in the first ER, so she transferred to ours.
When she got there, she had carbon dioxide narcosis, which looks like an angry, disoriented state. We put (another) breathing tube in and she was on a breathing machine for about two or three days. After that, we pulled the tube out, and she walked out of the hospital a day or two later. To this day, I still think that the most significant action that saved her life was effective CPR by the lifeguard.
In the pediatric ICU, we treated her ‘secondary drowning,’ which can result from inflammation and fluid leakage into the lungs as the result of inhaling a large volume of water deep into the lungs. But, one day after we stopped sedating her and took out the breathing tube, she was back to being a normal kid playing games on an iPad and watching cartoons. I almost cried when I came back to work and saw her awake and talking again.”
It Was Like A Scene From “The Walking Dead”
“Paramedic here. I once responded to a well-being check (basically check on someone no one has heard from in a while). We get there and police advise the woman is dead and appeared to be so for a while. I could smell her before getting close to the house, put on protective gear and airpacks to move the body. She is rotting, maggots and flies, and you can see organs.
We go to carefully move her into a body bag and she opens her eyes and gasps. She was alive and rotting alive, we got her to the hospital alive and she lived for several more days.”
“It’s The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Seen”
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“I’m a paramedic and got a call to an attempted suicide.
The guy had put the weapon under his chin and shot his face off, but missed his brain. No mouth, no teeth, no tongue, no nose, and no eyes. Just a bloody half-head that was still alive and breathing through a hole where his mouth used to be.
It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen.”
Nobody Believed Him
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“A guy comes in with chest pain and tells me the big coronary artery on the front of the heart was blocked. I ask him ‘who told you that?’ He says his doctor did about 10 years ago. I don’t believe him because patients never get any of the stuff their doctor tells them right. I let the cardiac surgeon know what this guy said and he too goes, ‘haha 100 percent? So he’s dead?’
If the biggest coronary artery is totally occluded and for 10 years no less, you are a dead man. Lo and behold we get an angiogram and it was 100 percent occluded. The artery on the back of the heart made a connection with the front of the heart to pick up the slack. It was some lucky stuff.”
HOW Does This Happen?
“A patient stabbed himself in the neck with a thermometer that pierced his trachea. Missed all the important arteries (carotids, vertebral); just hit some minor nerves.
The patient provided his own temperature reads until they removed the thermometer.”
Miracle Kid
“I’ve been a paramedic for 15 years. Once I had an 8-year-old kid on a ripstick (similar to a skateboard) lose control and roll into the path of an oncoming SUV in his neighborhood. He was hit by then run over by the vehicle. We arrived to find him face down under the vehicle, unconscious and barely breathing.
After all was said and done he had: bilateral femur fractures, one lower leg fracture, multiple rib fractures, a blown pupil, and open skull fracture, subdural brain bleed, a tension pneumo (air escaping lungs into the chest cavity- will squish the lungs and heart if untreated), and when we were bagging him (breathing for him) we felt subcutaneous emphysema (free air that crackles like rice crispies/bubble wrap) in his hip. Yes. Hip.
We flew him to the children’s hospital expecting him to die within the hour. He was in a coma for days and had to have multiple surgeries, but made a complete recovery. He graduates high school in the spring. His case was such an amazing case the hospital made him one of their ‘miracle kids of the year.'”
How Did He Live Like This?
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“I used to work as a clerk in diagnostic imaging at a hospital, and we had a man come in for an x-ray complaining of chest pain. His records showed his last visit was two years prior when he over-drank and fell into a fish tank, breaking it. ER stitched him up and sent him home.
Fast forward two years, and we are all gathered around the computer screen looking at an X-ray that showed a 12-inch-long piece of fish tank glass sitting in his chest, with his aorta resting right on top of it (it was on an angle running from his left shoulder down towards his right hip). There were other shards of glass too, but this one was the biggest. Emergency surgery happened right away.”
What Were They Thinking?
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“I had a college student come into the unit on the night of their 19th birthday. They wanted to party but had a test the next morning. One of their ‘friends’ told them that if they took one pill for every drink that they had, they’d be sober by the morning. They had 15 shots and 15 20mg tablets.
If you were wondering, no, that does not make you sober. It does, however, make you rip off all your clothes in a hallway, spit at the nurse that is trying to help you, poop all over everything, and then die. Luckily for them, they weren’t dead for good. We got them back and they spent most of their sophomore year of college in a hospital, with a hole in their neck, learning how to walk again.”
He Just, Casually, Died For A Bit
“An old guy comes in with his wife. She tells me, ‘he passed out last week and I couldn’t wake him up. After about two minutes he came around and he didn’t want to go to the hospital, so we booked an appointment to see you.’
I’m a little concerned by this, and his heart rate is a little slow, so I send him for an EKG (heart rhythm tracing). I get a call about an hour later from the cardiologist reviewing the EKG calmly thanking me for sending him in because the wiring in his heart wasn’t working and he could drop dead at any moment. He didn’t pass out the week before, he died. Through some lucky miracle, his heart started again.
He’s got a pacemaker now, and he and his wife are doing great.”
He Was Banged Up
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“I work in cardiology, and my doctors all do rotations at our hospital. Our hospital is a level 5 trauma center, and it’s the closest hospital to a lot of rural areas, so a lot of incidents that happen in the middle of nowhere end up at that hospital.
This guy came in after having been in a car accident; he was covered in road rash and his chest was more or less torn open. Apparently, as we all later learned, he’d been drinking and riding passenger in his friend’s car. He wanted out of the car, his friend said no, so this guy decided to try and jump out of the car window. He somewhat succeeded, but his shirt caught on the side view mirror and he got dragged until the driver stopped flipping out enough to come to his senses and stop.”
A Crazy First Day
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“I was in my fourth year of medical school, and this was my first day as an intern in a trauma hospital (after training). There was a bus crash at the start of my shift, so all the staff was occupied when a woman came in screaming: ‘I AM GOING TO DIE! I GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD!’ When I look up, I see a thin woman, deep eyes, skin as white as snow with a bullet hole in the center of her forehead. She told us she owed a dealer and he put a weapon against her head, fired and ran. Now, I can see she has burn marks and weapon powder right around the hole in her head.
Now, remember that I am a student, and there were no available doctors in the moment. So I run to my professor who was with another patient and tell her the story and also that the patient is lucid. My professor ordered me to do a CT scan. The CT shows that the bullet entered the forehead through the first layer of the frontal bone, but not the second, and headed down through her palate, trought and stopped at a vertebra (c5 if I recall correctly). There was no brain damage at all.
We take her in for a tracheostomy, a plan for emergency reconstructive surgery (only a first, not definitive approach), along with a cervical collar.
We get her stable three hours later and put her in a room on the third floor, then we go down to see other patients. Then the emergency room gets a call:
‘Hello. We are from the hospital (about 20km away from mine) and we found a patient of yours in our emergency room.’ Then the nurses on the floor realize this patient was missing. She had jumped a third-story floor, broken her ankle and taken a bus to the other hospital. Why?
‘I saw him in here, he came to finish the job.’
Some people lost their jobs that day.”
She Looked Like A Skeleton
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“I saw a patient with advanced anorexia. She was 5 foot 7 inches tall and weighed 43 pounds. By all parameters, she should have been dead of heart failure, and she actually did die of that a couple months after I saw her. She was told to eat four tablespoons of peanut butter a day, but she had not been. Anorexia patients lie about intake, but her parents ratted her out.
Her sincere answer was she was afraid she would gain weight too quickly. Even at that skeletal weight, she was still obsessed with feeling fat. It was phenomenally sad, but I do remember thinking, ‘How are you still alive?'”
“Why Can’t I Open My Eyes”
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A guy tried to kill himself and his wife; he put the weapon to his temple and held his wife’s head against his own so that it would go through his head and kill her too. He managed to shoot just in front of his brain, exploding his globes and shredding his optic nerves, leaving him perfectly awake and alive but blind. He was just wailing over and over ‘she was going to leave me’ and ‘why can’t I open my eyes.’
The bullet then pierced his wife’s skull and lodged near her temporal lobe, but she was somehow still awake and neurologically intact. Bizarre and horrific case.
“Are You OK?”
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“I once saw a guy with a machete lodged up into his skull. Asked him if he was OK (not sarcastically, just threw a generic question to check his ability to respond), he said ‘yup!'”