Doctors Are Revealing Their Wildest “You Shouldn’t Be Alive” Moments From The ER, And I’m Spooked
Warning: This post contains mentions of suicide and graphic medical details.
We recently asked medical professionals of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the wildest things they’ve witnessed a patient survive, and they revealed unbelievable ER moments that genuinely made them think, “How are you alive?!” Here are the most shocking stories:
Note: Some responses were pulled from this Reddit thread by u/Jonah_Boy_03.
1.“We were the closest hospital, so they brought a civilian in (I’m a former Air Force medic). His safety gear failed, and he fell 128 feet from a communications tower. It had rained the night before, and he fell into a marshy puddle of high grass, flat on his back, with a concussion and whiplash. He had no broken bones, but the bruises that covered his body from head to heel were something to behold.”
“He spent a week in the hospital before he could move comfortably.”
JazzIRT / Getty Images
2.“We had a patient come in after mowing the lawn. The patient said something was kicked up by the lawn mower and hit him in the head. Didn’t think much of it and finished cutting the grass. A few hours later, he still had a headache, so he came to the ER. We CAT-scanned his head, and there is an entire nail embedded in his brain.”
“He had the tiniest abrasion to his forehead and no neuro deficits. He had no idea. Everyone was absolutely dumbfounded.”
3.“We once received a patient who was bitten by a rattlesnake, TWICE. He only managed to get to the emergency ward three hours after being bitten. Then, to make things worse, we only managed to get the correct antivenom flown in one hour after his arrival. He now works as an admin clerk at our hospital and is as healthy as ever.”
4.“I had a patient who was already blind from diabetes, lost some toes, and part of a foot. I checked the blood sugar, and it was 45 (this is Canada, so your normal range is 4 to 7); I rechecked it: 45. This patient had no symptoms of hyperglycemia. He just took his insulin pen, cranked it, and self-injected (home care). I had to wait a bit to see what would happen, but eventually we left, and he ended up fine.”
“Most home glucometers don’t go past 30. I was with my trainer nurse, who was dumbfounded.”
5.“Had a patient with an internal temp of 75 degrees Fahrenheit. He was drowsy, but fully alert and oriented. He was found on a river embankment in the middle of winter. He had been lying there overnight before a dog walker found him. We didn’t believe the equipment when it told us 75 degrees, so we repeated with a rectal thermometer, a different rectal thermometer, and a rectal probe attached to the bedside and Medi-Therm system. They were all consistent, and after several hours of heating measures, we got their internal temp up to 90 degrees before they went to ICU.”
Sergey Alimov / Getty Images
6.“Another ‘how the f*ck are you not dead’ patient was a person who had a blood sugar of 1,800. They weren’t in a coma. It was just a woman who walked in to complain about abdominal pain.”
7.“The guy with the crossbow bolt lodged in his head. He was initially described as having an arrow in his head, which it definitely looked like on first glance. But the angle of entry into his head made no sense. It entered under his chin and exited from the top of his head. That’s when one of the nurses surmised that he would have to be lying on the ground to have been hit with the arrow at this angle.”
“So, it must have been self-inflicted from a crossbow that the guy aimed at his chin. The fly-through on the CT was shocking; it was this perfect circle hole migrating up his head. After neurosurgery removed it, this guy walked out of the post-surgical ICU with no residual effects. And he admitted it was a suicide attempt. Luckily, the bolt only had a target point, not a hunting broadhead that would have carved up his brain.”
—Anonymous, 44, Alabama
8.“I was an intern working in a Grand Rapids ER in 1978 when a man came in, complaining of a headache that developed halfway through a local marathon. I quickly identified the cause of his headache as a .22-calibre bullet lodged in the top of his skull. He finished the marathon in three hours and nine minutes.”
“It was a national story. He was called the Bullet Man.”
—Anonymous, 73, Oregon
9.“My mom was a critical care nurse and said the freakiest thing she ever went through was having a 15-minute conversation with a little old lady who had no pulse. As I recall, she said the little old lady passed mid-sentence. Just stopped.”
Dragos Condrea / Getty Images
10.“Aside from hospice patients who have hung on for a surprisingly long time, I have a few that stick out in my mind. There was a patient in third-degree heart block with a pulse of 30 at best. Sitting up and talking like nothing was wrong. I was a new nurse at the time, and that freaked me out. Basically, the electrical system in the heart was malfunctioning, and this person was flirting with a massive cardiac event.”
11.“There was a lady with a hemoglobin of 4. It should be at least 12. She was whiter than the bed sheets. It was really unsettling to see a living human that color.”
12.“I was a surgery resident on nights. Critical trauma page came in. I rushed down to the trauma bay in the ER, and a man in his 20s came in with a gunshot wound to the head. Specifically, the guy was running from the cops, and instead of going to jail, he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The exit wound was perfectly in the middle of the top of his head.”
“As we were intubating him, his brain was getting suctioned out. I called neurosurgery for help, and they said, ‘Nothing to do; he’ll be dead soon.’ The guy left a month later and waved goodbye to me.“
—Anonymous
13.“While I was a student, I did a clinical placement at a major trauma hospital where they kept a collection of X-rays you never usually see because the injury would typically kill the patient instantly. The most interesting one was a smashed pelvis from a jockey in a horse racing accident. That kind of injury would usually also result in rupture of femoral arteries, which means you bleed to death very quickly, but somehow, this guy survived and made it to the hospital and lived long enough to get X-rayed. I don’t know if he recovered, though.”
andresr / Getty Images
14.“Not me, but my mom was an ER nurse right after college. A family got in a car crash, and there weren’t any serious injuries; they were just taken to the ER to be assessed. They had a baby, and my mom asked them about its health, etc. When asked what the baby was being fed, the mom said, ‘Juice.’ Just juice. She had heard that at 6 months, you can start feeding the baby juice. Not realizing it was juice, in addition to baby food or milk. This woman had been feeding her baby ONLY JUICE for months.”
“This was something someone said to my mom in the mid-’90s. I have zero idea of what happened to those people.”
15.“Back in my surgical days, I was a resident on my trauma rotation. A really nice young guy comes in via EMS. He’d been working on a factory site doing work high up on a tower (think 80 to 100 feet, kind of deal). He was climbing his way down, about halfway, when he heard commotion overhead and someone shouting, ‘Watch out!’ He’s on the ladder, so he can’t do much but bow his head to cover it. Feels something strike the back of his neck. Manages to stay calm, reaches around, and realizes a large piece of metal is embedded in him. His medic training kicks in, he calmly climbs down the rest of the ladder, sits down, and asks someone to call an ambulance.”
“Wish I could upload the photos I have. It’s a wrench 36 centimeters/14 inches long, but the non-wrench end is a pointed pick axe type tool — and that’s what’s embedded in him. Nestled nicely against C3/C4 (middle of the neck). All we can get are X-rays — too much metal artifact for a decent CT. The rock star of a spinal surgeon just decides to yeet it out. Gave a few stitches, soft collar for a week, and the guy’s back to normal.”
16.“I’m a sleep tech, and I had a middle-aged patient whose oxygen fell all the way down to the 40s and was having central apneas for over a minute… He spent more time not breathing while asleep. No wonder he complains he feels dead every single day. I couldn’t believe it, so I tried a bunch of other oximeters and different hands/fingers, and they were all incredibly low while he was asleep.”
“And I’ve seen worse since then. I recently had a patient not breathe for two minutes, take a breath or two, and not breathe again, with their oxygen dropping to 30-something percent. That was another emergency split to CPAP.”
And finally…
17.“A young woman, in her 30s, had a stroke. She clotted off the basilar artery, the big artery in the base of the brain that supplies all of the ‘primitive’ functions, like breathing and awareness. I found out about her a day after the event. This, by the book, is a hopeless case. She was literally already dead. But, because she was young, they prevailed upon me to do something. I poked a catheter (a long, skinny plastic tube) into her groin artery, then snaked it up to the blocked artery in the base of her brain. I infused a clot-busting drug into the artery for about 12 hours (tPA, tissue plasminogen activator). I rechecked, and the clot was gone. She woke up the next day. After a month, she walked out of the hospital.”
“She sent me a nice card a month or so later. It bothered me that her handwriting was better than mine, even after her stroke, but I was pretty happy.”
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
WOW. Fellow doctors and other medical professionals, what’s the wildest thing you’ve ever seen a patient survive? Tell us in the comments, or use this anonymous form below:
Dial 988 in the United States to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
