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20 doctors shared their 'how did you survive that' moments.

Given the intensity of their job, it&#39;s safe to say that doctors have a monopoly on miraculous workplace stories. Not many jobs involve being put in a position to potentially save someone&#39;s life, and while there are some relatively untreatable injuries and diseases out there, for every rule there is an exception.One of the absurdities of mortality is just how arbitary it can feel at times. Some people survive brutal violence, extreme accidents, and pernicious diseases, while others pass away suddenly. Since stories of senseless loss seem to flood the newscycle, it&#39;s nice to scope out the rare, sometimes inexplicable tales of survival.In a recent Reddit thread, doctors shared the wildest injuries they&#39;ve seen patients walk away from.1. GiveItAWeek is still not sure how that man lived. Not a doctor, but I&#39;m a firefighter so I see my fair share of trauma. About a year ago, we responded to a call that went out as an &quot;individual who had a car fall on his face&quot;. He was hot-boxing in his garage while working underneath his car that was supported by scissor jacks. Something to note, the car didn&#39;t have any tires on the front end where he was working.  One of the scissor jacks had slipped out from underneath the car, and the whole weight of the car landed directly onto the side of his head with no tires to stop the fall. We got our rubber airbags out, lifted the car, pulled him out, and got him onto a stretcher. After taking 2,500 lbs of weight to the head, he somehow got out of it with a fractured orbital and a laceration on his cheek. 2. Gizmo9483 is just glad they helped a man survive. First year of my core surgical training I was on call in a very small rural hospital. This hospital only had 2 doctors on at night, me and a medical trainee, and no emergency doctors.  It&#39;s about 11pm and this guy, 26 comes in after being in a fight. Blood pumping from his nose which was clearly fractured. I suspected he probably had other facial fractures underneath but he was awake and talking to me, otherwise seemed fine. I spent about 45 minutes trying to stop the blood, using all sorts of nose packs, pressure, even tried a catheter balloon to try and tamponade it. Nothing was working, and he was starting to go into shock, and I was basically shitting myself at this stage. Based on his vitals I&#39;d estimated he&#39;d lost almost 1.5 litres of blood so far. Nearest proper surgical hospital was 45 minutes away, and my consultant was at home, 25 minutes from the hospital.  Eventually I got four bags of o neg from the lab (the lab tech happened to be in, which was very lucky), put this guy in the back of an ambulance, still bleeding, and sent him blue light to the surgical centre in the city. Got a phone call about 3 hours later from a surgeon at the other hospital, saying he had brought the patient to theatre and been able to control the situation. He was probably 15 minutes from dead.  If you come into that kind of small hospital with that much bleeding, all stats say you&#39;re in trouble. The guy was very lucky his friends got him in so quickly. 3. kberrysauce watched a kid with a skewered leg take a piss. I was a surgical resident in a small town hospital. We got paged to see a patient for a speared piece of driftwood through the leg. We were thinking it was a nicked femoral artery and discussing if this poor kid needed amputation when we saw him he was standing on the skewered leg taking a piss. Turns out the wood missed every single one of the vital vessels and no fracture - just muscular damage. 4. Ratethendelete saw a man come back to life. Junior doc on the Trauma team. Doors to Resus fly open to reveal a man carrying a second blood soaked man in his arms. Get him onto a stretcher and it is clear he has gunshot wound to his chest and has gone into cardiac arrest (asystole). Chest compressions start and within minutes the A&amp;E consultant is performing an open thoracotomy in order to start cardiac massage.  Cardiothoracics join us quickly and get to work on the heart - a hole in the right ventricle is identified and plugged with a Foley catheter. All the while bag after bag of o neg is being pushed into the patient in an attempt to replace everything that had pumped out of his heart and into his thoracic cavity. 15-20 mins into this the impossible happens - we get ROSC (the heart starts beating in its own).  Patient is taken directly to theatre where the hole is definitively repaired and bilateral chest drains are inserted to drain the blood filling his lungs (technically the pleural space). Somehow his heart continued beating and after a couple weeks on ITU, the patient is returned to the trauma ward awake and alert. Several weeks, some mild hypoxic brain injury, and a gnarly chest scar later and he walks off the ward with his dad, the man who carried him in. ETA definition of ROSC: Return Of Spontaneous Circulation. 5. Slidingscale has seen what meth can do. Every time I think this question, the answer is usually &quot;meth.&quot;  One guy got hit in the face hard enough to let air into his brain cavity and was being an absolute arsehole (which seemed to be normal for him) and literally asked &quot;got any meth?&quot; when I offered some pain relief. To my understanding, he recovered without any need for surgery. 6. Ocean4951 saw a toddler survive the unthinkable. I was working in the emergency department when a toddler came in after falling out of a 3 story window completely unharmed. The sad thing was they were from a rough neighbourhood and the Mum hadn&rsquo;t noticed for about half an hour.  Apparently the friendly apartment pot smokers found found him, checked him over and sat with him for half an hour and when Mum didn&rsquo;t show up went to find her. The child was admitted overnight mostly for social reasons but it&rsquo;s just amazing how well kids bounce. 7. elandy126 saw a man with a chainsaw in his neck. Emergency Nurse.  Once had a guy come in who had been cutting a tree with a chainsaw when it hit a knot in the wood and kicked up into his neck. Finished cutting the tree because he knew his wife would make him get rid of the chainsaw. Put a towel on it and drove himself to the hospital. CT showed no vascular damage, simple wash out and home the next day.  One of the paramedics who saw him said to his patient &quot;that&#39;s a real emergency, why don&#39;t we ever get those&quot; Edit: Location Australia Queensland 8. Zeethro saw an impaled man survive. Not a doctor (yet), but I worked in a trauma center as a scribe before starting med school. Basically, I was attached at the hip with a doctor to do their documentation.  One guy wrecked his car into a wooden fence, and a wooden fence post went in his mouth and came out the back of his neck. It was the kind of fence post that was double the size of his mouth. It had basically pushed all of the important anatomy to the side as it impaled him. There were consulting doctors for like 10 different specialties working on this guy in the hospital. Several weeks later, after he fully recovered, he walked back in the emergency department to thank everyone. 9. Mrbl-Hplr put a few bandaids on a man after a bad car wreck. Not a doctor, yet, but during one of my night shift as a medical student, I had to take in charge a patient who came to the ER for a &laquo; car accident &raquo;. Well, that&rsquo;s quite common... What is not is that he came by himself, from 40kms, by calling a taxi because his car was absolutely wrecked in the accident.  Normally, when your car ends up upside down, after 2 or 3 roll overs at 60km/h (which the patient did), you are not really fine... However, he was totally OK ! No broken bone, no head trauma, no abdominal pain, nothing ! He just came to the ER because he had little dermabrasions over his knees and one elbow, and &laquo; it hurts when it rubs against my clothes &raquo; Three band-aids later, and he was good to go! 10. Jssolms&#39; patient lived to see a better day. I had a patient that attempted suicide with an AR-15 under the chin. Put a hole in the soft tissues of the floor of his mouth, in his tongue, in his hard palate, and then split the hemispheres of his brain perfectly, finally popping out the top of his skull. He recovered fully. 11. varsil&#39;s friend was considered dead in the lab. Not a doctor, but a friend&#39;s story: He&#39;d been feeling like shit for a long time, went to the doctor. Doctor ordered a bunch of blood tests, and ordered them on a &#39;rush&#39; basis.  The lab calls the doctor to bitch him out. &quot;Why the f*ck did you make us rush these tests?&quot; Doctor is confused. Lab is like, &quot;The guy is clearly dead, so what&#39;s the f*cking rush?&quot; Doctor calls him, tells him to NOT DRIVE but to get himself to emergency ASAP.  Guy was a type 1 diabetic, hadn&#39;t realized it until way later in life, and apparently his bloodwork suggested he was a corpse rather than a living person. He&#39;s still doing fine. 12. Xralius miraculously survived. Patient: Not as cool as most of these, but I was puking for 3 days straight before going into urgent care. I wasn&#39;t even going to to go in, but my family said I looked awful and I eventually relented. They said I had appendicitis. Due to a mix up I didn&#39;t get operated on for over a day later. When they went in, my appendix was gangrenous and had basically disintegrated. Turns out it had burst/ruptured days ago.  Normally, this floods your body with toxins and you die, but apparently my colon was positioned in such a way that it blocked that from happening. I was in the hospital for another week before my digestive system restarted and had to have bile pumped out of my stomach. All in all though, not a terrible experience. 13. DylanIRL&#39;s coworker broke every bone in his face. Not a doctor, but a fellow worker took a 35 lbs steel plate being propelled by 3770 psi (equivalent to 188.5 car tires) to the face.  Sent him 15 feet in the air, and 40 feet back. Broke every bone in his face. Lived and back to work 8 months later.  EDIT: My math with car tires is awful. I&#39;d meant to try and put it in terms I thought redditors may understand. Also, TIL car tires optimal psi rating is 30-35. It was 26 MPA. 5500m hole with 2 7/8ths tubing, on a 6.5&quot; cased hole, with roughly 300-350&#39; of 3&quot; flowline to a 3&quot; 10000 psi rated manifold. It&#39;s a lot of pressure. 14. rramzi had an eventful time working on a gunshot wound. Intern year doing surgery, guy gets brought in for a gunshot wound to the head. He was working at a jeweler that got robbed, his coworker was black bagged at the scene.  He gets brought into the trauma bay and it&rsquo;s pretty hectic because GSW to the head and well he&rsquo;s alive. Not only is he alive he&rsquo;s following commands but not speaking, probably from the shock.  Cops are giving us report saying he was likely shot with a .357 snub nose they recovered at the scene. So we do our primary and secondary survey and all this guy has is a single would wound to his left frontal scalp where the bullet went in.  So the team hasn&rsquo;t really seen something like this before. Sure a GSW to the head wasn&rsquo;t new but this guy was otherwise completely fine. The decision was made to get a quick frontal and late head X-ray to verify where the bullet was before proceeding to CT. Well we don&rsquo;t see any bullet on the films. There&rsquo;s no bullet on the board or bed or within the patients clothes. The man was shot in the head and the bullet bounced off his skull. CT showed no fracture even. It was wild, never seen anything like that since. e: So a common question I&rsquo;m getting is how do we know it was a GSW? He had gunpowder burns on his forehead around the wound. 15. Dr_D-R-E is traumatized, but relieved the woman and her babies lived. I hope I never f*cking see this again: Just finished a 24hr call so I&rsquo;ll paraphrase, I&rsquo;m an obgyn resident. 300lb African American female with IVF twins around 32 weeks gestation, multiple medical problems.  Chronic hypertension, being monitored inpatient. AMm rounds she looks uncomfortable, said she slept in a chair, just looked very anxious for no reason, breathing heavy. Blood pressure is very very high, we give meds  We can only get one twins heart, probably because she&rsquo;s so big. We move her to L&amp;D for closer monitoring, plus ready access to ultrasound Now she has a lot of abdominal pain, blood pressure still very high, her breathing is getting heavier Stat chest x ray shows her lungs are like, completely whited out, filling with fluid from flash pulmonary edema. At the same time her abdominal pain is worse and worse, big bright red clot falls out of her vagina. Same time, we get a ultrasound view of both fetuses, twin 2&rsquo;s heart is super slow. Patient is now having a panic attack and screaming while also having v trouble breathing.  This is all within like, 10 minutes. Stat/emergency/crash C section Get her on the table,  She starts having an eclamptic seizure. Anesthesia does rapid sequence intubation. Loud. Long. Steady. Beep. Patient goes into cardiac arrest on the table. &ldquo;Code blue, labor and delivery&rdquo; goes out overhead throughout the hospital. Phones all over the floor start blowing up, white coats and scrubs sprinting onto the floor. ICU comes running. Rapid response team comes running. General surgery comes running. A double NICU team comes running.  There&rsquo;s like 30 people in the OR. ICU. Is giving chest compressions and running the code. Surgery is putting in a central line. Rapid response is setting up to shock. Ob/Gyn is doing the c-section. I remember the attending yell: &ldquo;cut! Cut! Cut!&rdquo;  Obgyn goes skin to baby #1 in about 54 seconds. There&rsquo;s blood everywhere, compressions still going while operating. Second baby comes out very still looking, placental abruption: the high blood pressure flooded her lungs and tore the placenta off the uterus. NICU takes both babies, they eventually do just fine as far as hospital course goes. Mom achieves ROSC (return of spontaneous compressions, her heart is beating on its own now).  Still bleeding. Massive transfusion protocol initiated, she eventually gets somewhere between 14-20 units of packed red blood cells plus plasma, platelets, other stuff (THANK YOU FOR GIVING BLOOD, it actually, actively saves the lives of people who wish they could know who to thank).  Conservative surgical measures don&rsquo;t stop the bleeding. Couvelaire uterus is diagnosed secondary to placental abruption In the setting of eclamptic seizure. Cesarean-hysterectomy is performed. Uterus comes out. Patient remains intubated for about 2 days. Downgraded from SICU.  Walks out of the god damn hospital after 1 week because that&rsquo;s how a solid medical team handles their shit. Now, there were a lot of red flags to indicate delivery at the beginning of this story, but she spiraled so fast, there really wasn&rsquo;t any significant wasted time. 16. pawprint76 is lucky they didn&#39;t have a stroke. Not a doctor, but a patient. My husband took me to the local hospital&#39;s ED for ongoing severe lower abdominal pain (I figured uterus?). The nurses took blood, hooked me up to an IV, and gave me a little pain medicine. A nurse I hadn&#39;t yet seen came into the ED room looking very nervous and told me I was being admitted as my platelet count was 6,000. My husband and I were like, what? The nurse was very surprised I had no symptoms like bruising, nose bleeds, and blood in urine or stool. He looked very concerned and the medical team rushed to get me into a room.  The only symptoms I had were fatigue and heavy menstrual flow - both symptoms had been my companions since I started my period at 11 years old. The next morning a hematologist came to my room and explained my diagnosis and that it was entirely idiopathic. He told me I was lucky to not have had crazy internal bleeding, bleeding into my brain or a stroke. He prescribed a regimen of 60mg of Prednisone daily, which I was on for a year and a half (not recommended - it was awful).  The idiopathic thrombocytopenia made no progress. It was FINALLY decided to proceed with a splenectomy. Recovery was brutal. Having a huge incision down the length of your abdomen makes everyday tasks very difficult and painful. Almost five years later, my platelet count is normal. My period can go to hell in a hand basket, though. 17. FifthEllyment found out it&#39;s better to get hit in the face than I&#39;m a researcher rather than a doctor, but during my undergrad my anatomy tutor told us of an interesting case study. A woman in the same department had been in a car accident going a considerable speed. The seat belt failed to lock and her face flew into the steering wheel. Her mouth, nose, cheekbones and forehead were shattered, yet she suffered no brain damage.  Apparently, the front of her face acted as a crumple zone and the fact her skull shattered meant the cranial swelling didn&#39;t cause any damage because the brain had more space to swell in to. She needed significant reconstructive surgery, but a year later she and my tutor teamed up in a research project.  They used her case as the basis for looking into new ways to treat severe head injuries and developed new treatment protocols depending on where the skull had taken damage. They basically found out that, if you&#39;re going to have a head injury, try and get hit in the face and not the temples because you&#39;re much more likely to survive. 18. bfahns58 is glad the farmer survived. Farmer was driving a tractor with one of those huge rolls of hay on the back. The hay was not secured correctly so when he stopped it rolled forward over him and bent him in half. All he had was 2 compression fractures in his lumbar region. 19. KamahlYrgybly was amazed this woman survived without fluids. An elderly lady had a massive brain hemorrhage, was transferred to terminal care to the health center in-patient ward I was working at as the doctor. Her prognosis was that she would die at any moment. There was no treatment, she was comatose, but breathing spontaneously through a tracheotomy tube.  A week passed, with no medications, no food, no fluids, still alive. Then she began to stir, came conscious. Delirious, but conscious. So we started i.v. fluids, appropriate medications, and eventually physiotherapy. After a few months she moved into the local nursing home, lived for a few years. She had profound dementia, but was able to move.  I wonder if the air-moisturising device in the room (because of the tracheotomy) kept her hydrated, because a healthy person would generally not survive a week without fluids. 20. TatsumaruTheTwofaced is constantly astounded by Tim. Not a doctor. My dad who is one told me this story once. He has this 12 year old patient (lets call him Tim) and everyone in the hospital firmly believes he&#39;s immortal.  Tim was born with a bad heart and is constantly in an out of the ICU. By in and out of the ICU, he goes in almost once or twice a month. 9 out of 10 admissions, Tim flatlines. Strangely, Tim always comes back, even if you don&#39;t resuscitate him.  I&#39;d say Tim flatlined about 15-ish times in total. It&#39;s at the point that whenever Tim flatlines, nobody panicks. Not even his mom and the first three times she fell on the floor crying. &quot;Hey guys, Tim&#39;s vitals are dropping.&quot; &quot;Again? Wew, that kid&#39;s definately going for a record&quot;  Tim&#39;s pretty chill about it too. He talks about his ICU trips like how a normal kid talks about a mildly eventful day at school. Nobody knows how tf does Tim always come back. He just does. Frankly, I&#39;m surprised the media hasn&#39;t done a story about it bc it&#39;s fucking metal.         