Think you're having a rough day? Take a look at these seven people who survived "fatal" experiences, including...
- Falling Six Miles in a Wrecked Plane
- Skull Punctured by a Proton Beam
- The Unfreezable Man
- Spike Through the Skull
- Surfing Scaffolding Forty-Seven Floors
- Dragged Into a CD-Width Hole
- The Inflated Man
 |
| Not where you want to hear a boom... (bulletrain743) |
Falling Six Miles in a Wrecked Plane
Falling even a few floors can prove fatal, but Vesna Vulović lived through an exploding plane and fall of over six miles.
In 1972 a bomb hidden aboard JAT Flight 367 broke the plane apart above Czechoslovakia. Vulović was the sole survivor, found screaming in the wreck by an ex-military medic.
Vulović retained no memory of the crash. Experts believe that she survived thanks to being pinned beneath a food cart - this kept her trapped in the fuselage while everyone else on board was sucked out of the exploding plane. The wreckage crashed into thick snow at a fairly forgiving angle, though it probably still would have been fatal if Vulović hadn't passed out - her physicians suspect that her "relaxed" state prevented her heart rupturing on impact.
Despite a fractured skull, temporary paralysis, two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, broken ribs and a fractured pelvis, Vulović survived, recovered and now holds a Guinness World Record for the longest fall survived without a parachute!
Skull Punctured by a Proton Beam
Particle accelerators blast charged particles at massive speeds - they're usually to test theories at the boundaries of physics. Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski unwittingly expanded that remit to biology and medicine when his head got in the path of the beam.To be clear, this wasn't some act of carelessness. The particle physicist was inspecting a malfunctioning device in the soviet U-70 synchrotron... when a series of safety mechanism failures allowed a beam of protons to be fired through the back of his head.
Though it didn't hurt, a blazing burst of light clued Bugorski in on what had just happened. He'd just taken between twenty and thirty thousand rads to the skull - and a dose of five hundred is usually fatal. Skin peeled away from the exit and entry points of the beam overnight, revealing that a path had been burned right through his skull.
Amazingly, Bugorski survived the accident - though it left him with tinnitus in the left ear, paralysed the left side of his face (coincidentally acting like a botox injection) and put him at risk of seizures. It seems that the tightly focused beam may have "threaded the needle" and only damaged a small, non-essential area of the brain.
 |
| Not good odds... (Emma Francis) |
It may seem counterintuitive, but the seawater was warmer than the biting wind. The immediate danger would have been cold shock from dropping into the water - Friðþórsson's companions probably couldn't stop themselves from gasping and inhaling water.
In contrast, the fisherman managed to control his breathing while his size and bulk (over six foot and nearly twenty stone) helped insulate him against the cold. Combined with the heat generated from vigorous swimming, it kept the fisherman warm enough to survive the six-hour swim.
Friðþórsson made it to a local fishing village and was transported to a hospital... where it was found that he had only suffered cuts, bruises and dehydration from an ordeal that killed his compatriots in a matter of minutes.
Spike Through the Skull
If you've ever been interested in psychology, you've probably heard of Phineas Gage - a man who survived having a one-and-a-quarter inch wide tamping iron punched through his brain.In 1848 Gage was leading a railroad construction gang as they blasted a through a rocky outcrop. They drilled holes, filled them with gunpowder, packed them with sand and tamped them down firmly with the iron for a focused blast. Something distracted Gage that day though - he began vigorously tamping before the sand was added. The iron struck rock, producing a spark that detonated the powder... and launching the iron through the skull of Gage - it landed around twenty-five yards behind him.
The stricken man was brought back to town on an ox-cart, where he managed to get down unaided. He apparently greeted Edward Williams with "Doctor, here is business enough for you." Treatment by Williams and Dr John Harlow stopped the bleeding, while Harlow managed to keep Gage alive despite a fungal infection that grew on the exposed brain.
Gage went on to live for more than eleven years, though his personality was altered by his injury. Harlow reported that "the balance between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed." Gage seemingly overcame this, as he became a long-haul stage coach driver to Chile - not a simple task.
 |
| Imaging falling from one of those... (andychoinski) |
It's thought that the window cleaner only survived thanks to "surfing" the scaffolding as it collapsed under him. He arrived at the hospital with two broken legs and multiple breaks in his right arm and wrist, injuries to the chest, abdomen and spine, topped off with internal bleeding throughout the brain and body.
He was given twenty-four units of blood (more than twice the blood in a human body) and received surgery before being taken to an operating theatre - his doctors believed that even a mild jostle in transit would have killed him.
Despite all this, he survived and (even with a shattered vertebra) seems to have avoided paralysis. For context, a fall of three floors is fatal around 50% of the time.
Dragged Into a CD-Width Hole
Industrial settings can turn nasty fast, as Matthew Lowe experienced when his clothing became caught in factory machinery. The unfortunate twenty-five year old was snagged by a conveyer... and his body was dragged through a hole the size of a CD, suffering a broken back, pelvis, hips and ribs. His soft tissues fared little better, with both the stomach and bowels being ruptured in the process.Despite the damage, Lowe survived his mechanical ordeal - in fact, the only obvious lingering injury is a weak right arm. X-rays tell a different story, clearly showing the metal pins holding his bones together.
The Inflated Man
Slipping in the rigging between your truck and trailer would be bad enough, but when Steven McCormack fell he probably didn't expect to be turned into a body-horror version of Looney-Tunes.The forty-eight year old landed on a valve connecting the truck air brakes, with the nozzle puncturing his left buttock. Pressurized air rushed into his body, inflating his skin like a balloon and approximately doubling his size. The pressure compressed his organs and separated fat from muscle and skin - when medics attempted to insert a morphine drip, it was simply blown back out.
Fortunately for McCormack his co-workers were able to switch off the air before he literally exploded. Doctors drained the fluid from his injuries and McCormack slowly deflated his way back to health!
Thanks for reading - perhaps you'd like...