47 Times Doctors Wanted To Ask Their Patients “How The Hell Are You Even Alive Right Now?”

When I was in trauma surgery in upstate by, got a notification about a man who was shot 3 times in the head. He comes in, literally one eye hanging out of the socket, blood everywhere, and he's slumped forward. Apparently he was shot in the temple, exited out his right eye socket, in the nose exited from the roof of the mouth, and In the cheek one with exit from the side of the head. At this point I'm thinking they just brought him in so we can pronounce him in the ER because he looked d**d. I go to examine him and tilt his head back, and he's says "yoooo be gentle!!!!" I jump back and scream like a little boy, as did everyone in the room. Literally the bullets missed his brain in every single shot.

Not a doctor. But this is what I have been told repeatedly when I was in the hospital for my open heart surgery. "How the hell are you still alive?"

Back story:

I basically was born with a congenital birth defect which has an extremely high mortality rate. Like 1 in 120,000,000 of it happening and about 95% to 99% chance of dying. Not only did I survive it for 20 years, I played lacrosse for 4 years. Now the issue was that I was missing a major blood vessel on my heart that is required to pump blood. My body compensated in such an extreme way that the blood vessel on the right side of the heart went down and around the heart and attached itself to aorta. My heart was basically circulating heart around itself and the rest of my body didn't get enough blood.

So how it was found out? Blew my nose and full on heart attack.

Surgeons repeatedly stated and asked "How was I alive" and "You played lacrosse for 4 years". Also, the main surgeon stated that anyone with this condition usually dies at birth. They only know of the condition from autopsies.

TL:DR

I blew nose. Had heart attack. Found out birth defect. All doctors are baffled. I have medical journals of my condition.

Edit: I, for the life of me, cannot remember what my condition was called. I will make a call monday to my cardiologist and find the name. So be prepared to be updated on the name.

Edit: I just got off the phone with my cardiologist nurse. It is called anomalous left anterior descending artery.

My friend's father is an Orthopedic Surgeon and he told us a story that once a boyfriend and girlfriend came in because they tried an in-home abortion. By running her pelvis over with a car... Abortion worked but I hope they actually never reproduce.

Not a doctor but I do medical research which includes chart abstractions. I was abstracting a chart on a 90+year old rancher in Montana - still an active dude without any major health issues. I was abstracting what lead up to his minor heart attack and couldn't hardly believe the ICD-9 codes so I went into the more granular notes. A storm rolled in while he was checking on the cattle so he hopped on his 4 wheeler to get home. BOOM he gets hit by lightning causing him to wreck his 4-wheeler. He must have been okay because he gets up and starts hobbling home - only to step on a rattlesnake and get bitten. Shakes that off too and manages to get home only to have a heart attack while waiting for medical services to get to his rural home. This dude had ICD-9 codes for lightning strike, motor vehicle accident, snake bite, and heart attack all on the same day. Spent like 4 days in the hospital and went home seemingly no worse for wear.

D**n I hope I'm that resilient at 90.

*Edit* There are no HIPAA identifiers here - I just did my kazillionth HIPAA training last month. Even specifying from Montana is okay. You aren't suppose to disclose age for patient's 89+ but 'such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older'. I'm not even sure the dude was over 90 - I just remember he was old-old.

I have hypoglycaemia/hyperinsulinaemia which is basically low blood sugar as a result of my pancreas over producing insulin (Think the exact opposite of T1 diabetes). Once when I was given a normal coke instead of a diet coke at Maccas I started to get symptoms and passed out in about 30 seconds before I could get to my glucagon. Paramedics arrived and tested my blood sugar level which was 10 mg/dl (0.55 mM). I ended up dying and being revived by paramedics after I received a shot of glucagon. Afterwards the paramedics told me that I had actually died and been revived I turned to him and said 'Brainzzzzzz'.We both had a laugh.

And since I am a doctor/med student, this story still fits the question.

I was working as a helicopter retrieval doctor in Australia last year. Called at 2am to a car crash in the middle of nowhere.
Patient was 150kg and 5 foot tall.
So drunk you could smell the alcohol in her blood.
Had been ejected from the front passenger seat of a car through the front windscreen. Wearing no seatbelt.
Had lain undiscovered for 3 hours on the side of the road. The temperature that night was 2 degrees centigrade.
Her entire right scalp had been degloved.
Blood pressure and oxygen saturation were unrecordable at all times on transfer due to shock, hypothermia and body habitus. Carotid pulse only.
GCS 3 (completely unconscious)
Due to her ENORMOUS obesity any movement of her head from the position she happened to land in obstructed her airway.
If she had landed in any other position she would have had no way to breathe and died.
2 hours flight from nearest trauma centre.
Unable to intubate her without d***s due to muscle tone.
Scariest RSI of my life. (D***s to paralyse then intubate)
Middle of a paddock, on ambulance stretcher, under lights, patient placed in RAMP position.
With best rewarming we could do in the helicopter core temperature was 29 centigrade on arrival in ED.
We didn't carry blood on the helicopter at that time.
Survived and discharged neurologically intact.

I had this patient before medical school when I was an EMT and he still sticks with me:

20 something year old male, motorcycle vs SUV; SUV won. We arrived on scene to a man face down in a pool of blood, ~1L. We were told he was wearing a helmet, but it was nowhere to be found. He was about 30 ft from his bike and there was a clear trail of blood to the bike because he wasn't wearing leathers. We rolled him onto the board and that was the first beating heart I ever saw. His road rash was so bad it eroded his chest wall and we were staring at his heart, a collapsed lung, his great vessels, and the branches of the brachial plexus. Amazingly, they were all intact. Of course he had multiple injuries to his other extremities, mandible, zygomatic arches, etc. but we frankly didn't care at the time. We were on scene for no more than 2 min before we sped off to the trauma center. I remember transferring the patient to the chief of trauma surgery whose first words when the trauma pad was removed were "Holy s**t!" I thought for sure he died.

Fast forward 2 years when I was at my primary care physician's office for a checkup after my medical school interview and saw a collection bin for a veteran's wedding. Guess who? Yup, it was him. They had taken his left arm to reconstruct his chest since the nerves were shot and he recovered.

I am a doctor! My moment to shine.

Patient was driving a motorbike. We were informed that dispatch had been sent to pick up a motorbike vs logging truck, bike was behind the truck which had lost its load of logs at highway speeds. Trauma team is activated, we have called for blood.

Guy walked out of the ER after period of observation. When he saw the logging truck lose its load, he simply let go of his bike and fell of the back. Rolled a bit and got some bumps and bruises, but fine.

Second case off the top of my head was a 92 year old lady with urosepsis (bacterial infection in her blood from a urinary tract infection). Her initial gas had a pH of around 6.7, and a lactate of 12 (too acidic and too high for the non medical peeps - young patients would have a hard time surviving that let alone the very elderly). She was unconcious, but had received one dose of cipro (an antibiotic) by mouth from her family doctor before becoming altered.

Family agreed to a comfort (Do not resuscitate) level of care and said their goodbyes.

The next morning, the resident on call got pages asking if Mrs Blahblahblah could eat - she was awake and hungry. Guess the dose of cipro kicked in.

I'm not a doctor but I was EMS for a few years and one day we came up on an accident on the highway involving a motor cyclist and a minivan, usually that is not good, at all...it's always a mess.. We get there and find out he hit the minivan at 80 MPH while it was stopped on the side of the road and flew through the back window, through to the front and survived without a scratch on him, no broken bone no AMS (altered mental status aka blunt head trauma)... he even got himself out the van and asked if the people inside were okay. He was wearing a helmet and I think that saved his life.

Blew my mind.

One time I had a patient who was walking in the street, got hit by a car, thrown into oncoming traffic, bounced off another car, and then got pinned under a third. Or so the EMS report said. He had a dislocated shoulder and a non- displaced femur fracture.

Edit: This happened a few months ago. Not Joe Black.

Obligatory "not doctor" disclaimer.

About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine was going mountain biking. He wasn't actually on the mountain yet, just riding his bike over to a friend's house, they were going up on the mountain together. He stopped to tie his shoe and (for some reason) took off his helmet. Finished tying his shoe, pedaled 10 feet, and got hit by a car.

Someone, we suspect it was the driver, called in an anonymous tip to the hospital. They found my friend with a broken skull on the side of the road. Hospitalized him, then discovered that he had a bleed in the membrane between his skull and brain, it was pushing on brain tissue. I believe it was something like a 20% chance of survival. The trauma team drained his skull, stapled it back together, sewed his head up, and two days later he woke up extremely concussed and confused, but otherwise fine.

Scared the hell out of us and his family, but all is well except he occasionally feels the weather and gets a few more headaches than usual. Bright side to all of this is that he found his calling- once he was back in the work force, he immediately became a paramedic, and is currently getting his certification to work as a fire rescue paramedic. Now he saves other people's lives. Full circle.

We have a homeless patient right now with active endocarditis, end stage renal disease on dialysis, HIV, and a carcinoid tumor. Totally noncompliant with antibiotics even though he has a PICC line and shows up for dialysis once a week maximum. Never got chemo or surgery for the cancer.
Constantly shows up to the ED looking for pain meds or in hypertensive emergency. After treatment he just walks out again.
Gomers don't d*e.

I work with a dude that has a family history of heart disease. Not many males in his immediate family branch reach pass the age of 60. This man only has one vice. Food. I've seen him in action. At one point his caloric intake was over 10,000 calories a day. It's almost obscene of how many burger meals and giant tubs of soda he puts away in a day. I don't know the count but when he does need to see a doctor, they always marvel of how he is upright and not d**d with his blood pressure so high. He's been told more than once that he should be d**d.

Edit: Even more surprising, he is not obese. He's pudgy and has that dad belly, but not enormous. He's certainly a wonder.

Nurse here, but I have some good stories coming from level 1 trauma center.

I had a pedestrian vs train once. He was stumbling home drunk and passed out on the train tracks. He was hit straight by the front of thevtrain, bounced to the side, got hung on the side of the train, and then dragged 100 yards while the train stopped. He wound up in a coma for a week and paralyzed from the waist down, but he lived with no major nerological deficits (other than the whole not able to move his legs thing).

Had a patient once with throat cancer and his tumor ate through his carotid artery. Due to the cancer and a previous surgery he had a fistula (a hole) in his neck. He and his wife were at home... he was dozing in the sun room. Wife goes to the kitchen and comes back to see him covered in blood and bloody handprints on the glass door where he tried to open it and get help. He had perfed his carotid artery and the blood was pouring (spurting?) out of his fistula. This tiny little old lady pulled the drapes from the window, jumped on his neck, and pushed her life alert button. Somehow she held pressure enough to keep him from bleeding out, and we actually save the man with very little neuro defiict. People perf carotids in the ICU and don't survive the run to surgery... and he survived until EMSA got to him and got him to the hosptial, all because his wife thought quick and was remarkably strong.

Not doc story.. military sea story:
I worked on Ejection Seats (job is called AME). There was a legend in my trade of a guy at Norfolk Naval Air Base that was working on a Martin Baker ejection seat that didn't have a properly disarmed drogue gun (see diagram, drogue gun at 2oclock position http://www.aereo.jor.br/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/MB-MK-1-ejector-seat.jpg). Since the drogue gun wasn't properly disarmed, when he went through the timer checks the component fired. Unfortunately his head was hovering above the large heavy piece of steel that fires from the drogue gun to pull the drogue chute out (see huge steel bar in diagram). Apparently it went through his chin and out of the top of his head. It cleanly pulled 20 feet of cord through his head, then the drogue chute. The chute went half way into his head then got stuck. It was so firmly planted in the 2" diameter hole going through his grape that it stopped any bleeding. They cut him out of the cables and took him to the hospital for surgery. Other than the 2" hole in his chin and the top of his head he was completely fine and was back to work two weeks later.

tl;dr - don't use ejection seats against zombies.. won't work.

We have a patient we see at our hospital monthly. Young guy, early 20's, absolute t**d to take care off. He has diabetes and essentially refuses to take his insulin. He comes in every time with diabetic ketoacidosis, which is essentially your body going into a coma like state due to your blood pH becoming acidotic and very elevated sugars.
The impressive part isn't that he survives this, most people do. Its that this is a recurring event EVERY month and each time someone manages to find him/get him to the hospital. If he was ever alone when this occurred and no one found him in a timely fashion, he'd be toast. Been seeing him regularly at the hospital for the last 18 months Ive been here.

Anesthesiologist here.

I once had a 20-something year old Jehovah's Witness as a patient who kept bleeding and bleeding after childbirth. Because of her religion she refused blood transfusions. After other measures failed, we finally took her to the operating room for an emergency hysterectomy that saved her life. In a pregnant woman, the normal hemoglobin (the protein in your blood that carries oxygen) count is between 9.5-15 g/dL. When we took her to the OR, her hemoglobin was 3.1 g/dL. In the ICU after, it was down to 2.6 g/dL.

I remember talking to her before going to the OR, and all she could do was lie flat in bed. If she did so much as lift her head, her heart rate would jump from about 130 to 180 and she started having chest pain. I also had to tell her A) that I didn't know if she would live through the surgery, and B) that I wasn't sure how much of an anesthetic I would be able to give her, so there was the possibility she might remember some of the procedure. Fortunately she did survive, and didn't have any recall. If she wasn't otherwise young and healthy, I'm sure she would have died.

Do I need to say not a doctor at this point? I feel like it's a given. When I was in 9th grade a friend of mine got into a car wreck. It was a car full of teens in the middle of the day. There were no injuries, but one of the parents insisted that all of them go to the doctor and get x-rays. Mind you, these are lower class people in a podunk town in the podunk state of Kansas, so the fact that someone felt strongly about this is and they all took it seriously is a miracle in itself. After hours of waiting around and taking turns, my friend goes in for her x-ray. When they look at the x-ray, they realize her neck is broken. It's called a "hangman's break" because that is how your neck breaks at the gallows. Her spine is entirely broken, just sitting on top of itself. All she had to do at any point was tilt her head up, sneeze, whatever, and she would have instantly died. It's just insane thinking about. They put her in a halo (think Gretchen Weiners) and she healed and was fine.

EDIT: OK, REGINA GEORGE. No idea so many people are so passionate about Mean Girls, but my bad.

I got sick when I was 19, soon after I had returned from hiking the PCT. Sick enough to be hospitalized, sick enough that all of my family flew out to talk to me, sick enough that my doctor told me, "You're going to d*e soon. This is a reality. We do not know what it wrong with you, and if you live it will be under a power greater than me and my colleagues can muster... (At this point he got super uneasy.) I'm keeping you in my prayers."

So it was at that point, while enduring multiple organ failure, that I tried to make peace with my very small and short time on this earth. For a week I was as ill as anyone who was dying in the ICU with me. I spent 80ish of those hours in a coma and the rest in a partially waking/resting state that was painful and awful. On the eighth day I could feed myself... Although it was difficult because during the previous seven and a half days my body destroyed about 30% of it's muscle mass in chunks in various places (My right leg on my thigh, both of my biceps, my lumbar on the left side, the top of my abdominal muscles, and the muscles in my right hand.

While I was making the attempt at feeding myself the doctor poked his head in and said, "You might be getting better. Whatever you're doing, keep it up. How's the pain?"

Well, the pain was bad, but I wanted to live. Withing a week I was standing and six months later you wouldn't have known I was ever sick (except for a light limp that remains to this day many years later).

The attending physician while I was in the hospital who said these things to me and talked to me saw in his office about three months into the recovery process. He said almost those exact words, "I do not know how you lived." The doctor then told me that he had told my family to make arrangements for my d***h right after that initial conversation and that when I had slipped into a coma he was pretty sure that was the end of it.

That's my story of medical trauma.

Edit: Apparently I didn't make it clear but they never figured out what made me sick. As a stop gap to secondary infections I was put on antibiotics and fluids, but they never found out.

My dad had a massive heart attack a few years ago. He proceeded to drive around for several hours disoriented and confused to where the hospital was. He went to a closed fire station and drove around the city for who knows how long.

He had a complete 100% blockage in his Left Anterior Descending Artery. They call it the Widow Maker. Blessed to still have my old man around to say the least.

Not a Medical Doctor but I am (almost) 1/8 of my way through Optometry School.