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stories.
Okay storytime...
Doctors of reddit.
What was your "how the fuck did you survive
that" moment?
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 neighborhood
and the Mum hadn’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’t
show up went to find her.
The child was admitted overnight mostly for
social reasons but it’s just amazing how
well kids bounce.
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.
Every time I think this question, the answer
is usually "meth."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 "got any meth?" when I offered some
pain relief.
To my understanding, he recovered without
any need for surgery.
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.
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 "that's a
real emergency, why don't we ever get those"Edit:
Location Australia Queensland
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'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't resuscitate him.I'd say Tim flatlined
about 15-ish times in total.It's at the point
that whenever Tim flatlines, nobody panics.
Not even his mom and the first three times
she fell on the floor crying.
"Hey guys, Tim's vitals are dropping."
"Again?
Wew, that kid's definitely going for a record"Tim'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 the fuck does Tim always come back.
He just does.
Frankly, I'm surprised the media hasn't done
a story about it because it's fucking metal.
Not A Doctor but Paramedic.
Once went a car wreck were a drunk drove head
first into the corner of a brick bridge at
100mph.
Took a huge wedge out of the bottom of the
bridge and left the car about 1/4 of it's
normal length.
All the impact was on the drivers side.
Turned up only 2 mins after the crash and
fully expected it to be a fatality.
Walked round to the drivers side and somehow
he was fully conscious but squeezed into the
only space left in the car.
Took almost 3hrs to get him out and on extracting
him out he had absolutely nothing wrong with
him other than being a pissed up arshole.
Still think how the fuck did he survive that.
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 « car accident ». Well, that’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 « it hurts when it rubs against my clothes »
Three band-aids later, and he was good to
go !
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'd meant to try and put it in terms I thought
redditors may understand.
Also, today i learned car tires optimal psi
rating is 30-35.It was 26 MPA. 5500m hole
with 2 7/8ths tubing, on a 6.5" cased hole,
with roughly 300-350' of 3" flowline to a
3" 10000 psi rated manifold.
It's a lot of pressure.
Not a doctor, but a friend's story:He'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 'rush' basis.The lab calls
the doctor to bitch him out.
"Why the fuck did you make us rush these tests?"
Doctor is confused.
Lab is like, "The guy is clearly dead, so
what's the fucking rush?"Doctor calls him,
tells him to NOT DRIVE but to get himself
to emergency ASAP.Guy was a type 1 diabetic,
hadn't realized it until way later in life,
and apparently his bloodwork suggested he
was a corpse rather than a living person.
He's still doing fine.
I am not a doctor but when I around 23 I was
stubborn and didn't go to the doctors for
feeling weak and numb all the time with some
blackouts.
I brushed it off until I literally couldn't
get up to walk to the bathroom.
Thinking it was just a cold or flu, when I
finally made it to the ER my blood count was
at 3, regular is around 14.
Doctor said he didn't know how I was alive
still.
Early years in medical school i saw a Surgery
of a police man who was shot in head in a
gun fight ,the bullet went through his skull
and brain ; with my experience in games and
movies i always assumed a head shot is instant
death but that man survived it and I was in
shock how this can happen.
Turns out in many cases a headshot can be
survived.
sorry for my English is not good
Patient: Not as cool as most of these, but
I was puking for 3 days straight before going
into urgent care.
I wasn'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'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.
Not a doctor, but I'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 "individual who had a car fall
on his face".
He was hotboxing in his garage while working
underneath his car that was supported by scissor
jacks.
Something to note, the car didn'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.
A doctor asked me this.I was asleep in the
back of a pickup on the way back from a rugby
tournament one night and we had a head on
with a drunk driver.
I went through the back of the cab, through
the windscreen, hit and bounced off the other
car and ended up maybe twenty metres from
the accident.
Multiple broken bones, compressed vertibrae,
internal and head injuries.
After multiple surgeries and a year in hospital
I walked out.At the first checkup, the surgeon,
who I knew really well by then, said exactly
that ‘Seriously, how the fuck did you survive
that?’.
My unvoiced response was ‘Sometimes I wish
I hadn’t...
I was the lucky one’.
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-moisturizing device
in the room (because of the tracheotomy) kept
her hydrated, because a healthy person would
generally not survive a week without fluids.
Not a doctor so sorry but ill contribute,
i will never ever forget a guy coming in to
the emergency ward with a fucking serrated
combat knife sticking directly out of the
top of his head, he was walking himself in,
to this day i cannot comprehend that.
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.
In a really rough city in the US, a young
kid comes in as GSW to the head.
Head and torso is completely covered with
blood but he is still semi conscious after
pre-arrival for trauma code (dead).
Skin and hair are all macerated.
Ace wrapped skull and sent to CT.
No brain injury!!!!
Graze to the scalp!!!!
Left AMA (against medical advice) from the
hospital the next day after 4 units of blood.........he
came back 2 weeks later with brain abscess
due to him not taking antibiotics.
He lived, needed a long course of iv antibiotics
——-
I had another guy who had a bad dream where
he woke up and said some guys were standing
over him that said “take him out” before
his dream ended.
He kept on repeating himself, “ I think
I was shot in the head” when he arrived.I
am chomping at the bit to examine him but
the nursing staff have to trauma triage him
to be a trauma before I can examine him.
I don’t understand that to this day, but
anyway.
Long story short, they called him a trauma
because he was repeating himself.……he
had bullet that was sitting off of his petrous
ridge that entered via ear canal.
No external bleeding.
(he didn't live tho...he lasted 16 hours)
Obligatory not a dr, ex nurse though.This
happened to my gran in law.
She was in her early 80s, on blood thinners
and took a nasty fall and hit her head.
Quite a common injury unfortunately and she
was admitted to hospital.The amazing part
is that for 3 days her condition worsened
and the signs that she had a brain haemorrhage
went unnoticed.
That is until she became unresponsive.
Then we had all the bells and whistles, she
was airlifted to a larger hospital and I spent
the day preparing my family for the worst.
The bleeding had gone unchecked for a long
time and if she did survive prepare for her
to be different.That wonder woman woke up
a few hours after surgery with zero impairment,
memory intact right up to hospital admission.
It was an amazing recovery that we're all
very grateful for.
I'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'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're going
to have a head injury, try and get hit in
the face and not the temples because you're
much more likely to survive.
(Emergency physician) I had a patient that
was shot nine times, three bullets to the
head.
He didn't call an ambulance, he brought himself
to the emergency department.
And by that I mean he DROVE himself to the
emergency department.
The three bullets in his head somehow didn't
enter the cranium so his brain was just fine.
One of them entered his cheek and went underneath
the skin to swing all the way around to the
back of his head.
He was discharged the same day.
Not a doctor, a family friend.
As a teen, my friend's son had all sorts of
bladder and kidney infections.
The doctors could not figure out what was
causing them.
Finally they did a scan of his whole abdomen
to try to see what was going on, if there
was an obstruction or something else going
on.
Turns out he inserted a long wire up his penis
(he said it felt good).
He lost his grip on the wire when it was almost
all the way in and he couldn't figure out
how to remove it.
He didn't tell a doctor or anyone because
he was embarrassed and thought he would get
yelled at.
He did a LOT of damage up there, mostly due
to infections.
Not a doctor, this is a story about my dad's
best friend, or as he's more commonly known,
the human kebab.So this guy decides to take
his dogs out on a walk on a particularly cold
Scotland morning and on his way out slips
on some ice.
Unfortunately he landed on a metal pole that
was being used to hold up flowers or something,
anyway this pole goes in through his side
just under the ribcage I believe and exits
through his neck.After being rushed to the
hospital and had x-rays and whatever done
the doctors concluded that the pole had missed
all vital organs veins and arteries and they
basically just had to pull it out.This all
happened many years before I was born but
it still absolutely blows my mind.
Not the doctor but had one once say that I
was lucky to have survived.
Albeit not a really exciting or dramatic story.In
gym class back in high school we were playing
in door field hockey.
Were supposed to have been using foam or soft
plastic equipment for safety.
Someone grabbed the regulation grade field
hockey ball by mistake.
Regular balls are solid plastic, maybe with
a cork/rubber center.
I ended up taking a slap shot to the side
of my head behind my eye but in front of my
temple at maybe a meter away TOPS from a kid
that played ice hockey at just under national
level.
My glasses exploded into many pieces.
Leg fell off, frames snapped at different
spots, lens shattered, and a mild concussion
(not really sure how, just going by the note
I had to turn into my school preventing me
from participating for 3 weeks).
Doctor said if I wasn't wearing glasses and
took that full force it would've shattered
my eye socket and if not killing me by hitting
my temple.
