1.
In 2003, Aron Ralston was climbing alone in a remote part of Utah when a boulder fell and pinned down his right arm, trapping him in a slot canyon. He had only “one liter of water, two burritos, and a few chunks of chocolate,” and there was no hope of anyone finding him, since he hadn’t told anyone where he was going. After spending five days trying and failing to move or chip away at the boulder, a dehydrated and delirious Ralston was left with one chance to free himself: by amputating his own arm with a blunt knife from his “cheap multitool kit.” Once finished with the nightmare task, he applied a tourniquet and went looking for help. Four hours later, after hiking six miles and losing 25% of his body’s blood, he was discovered and airlifted to the hospital.
2.
For her 16th birthday, Makenzie Wethington got her dream present: her first-ever skydiving trip. What she didn’t expect was for her parachute to malfunction and send her plummeting 3,500 feet to the ground — and somehow survive. Shortly after beginning her dive, the chute tangled mid-air, sending her into a violent spin. Her dad watched in horror as she crashed into a sandy field. Makenzie broke her pelvis, spine, ribs, and more…but somehow didn’t need a single surgery. “I don’t know how she survived,” one of her doctors admitted. “It’s a miracle.” The impact should’ve been fatal, but she walked out of the hospital just days later.
3.
Speaking of teenagers surviving unbelievable falls from planes, 17-year-old Dr. Juliane Diller was flying over Peru in 1971 when the LANSA plane she was a passenger in was hit by lightning and broke up in the sky. She fell for almost two miles — still strapped into her seat — before landing in the rainforest below, somehow not dying. She was the flight’s sole survivor. Upon regaining consciousness, she found she had “a broken collarbone, a sprained knee, and gashes on her right shoulder and left calf, one eye swollen shut and her field of vision in the other narrowed to a slit.” For 11 days, she walked through the Amazon looking for help. She was ultimately rescued by forest workers.
4.
Bizarrely, one month later, Vesna Vulović — a 22-year-old flight attendant — was working a flight that exploded from a terrorist’s bomb. Somehow, she fell 33,338 feet (more than six miles!) to the ground and survived. Like Diller, Vulović landed in a heavily wooded area, contributing to her survival.
5.
On Sept. 13, 1848, 25-year-old railroad foreman Phineas Gage was using a nearly 4-foot, 13-pound iron rod to pack gunpowder into a blast hole near Cavendish, Vermont. (Basically, he was preparing to blow up a rock ledge so they could put down train tracks.) When the fuse sparked prematurely, igniting the powder, the rod rocketed through his left cheek, passing behind his eye, tearing through his left frontal lobe, and then exiting the top of his skull with such force it flew another 80 feet away before hitting the ground. Somehow, Gage not only survived, but reportedly spoke within minutes, and then walked with assistance to an oxcart that took him to town where physicians cleaned the wound with 19th-century tools.
6.
In 2019, Stacey Gustafson experienced Intraoperative awareness during a hernia surgery in the worst way possible. What is intraoperative awareness, you ask? It’s when a patient becomes conscious while under general anesthesia during surgery. (Yes, writing that sentence gave me shivers.) According to Gustafson’s lawsuit, her nightmare started when she was administered an initial dose of propofol for intubation, but the IV line was disconnected, causing the anesthetic to spill onto her pillow instead of entering her bloodstream…and no one on the surgery team noticed. As a result, she remained awake but paralyzed. So while she could hear the surgical team talking and even joking — and feel every single cut they made! — she couldn’t scream or move to stop the surgeon from cutting into her.
7.
On July 28, 1945, Betty Lou Oliver was working as an elevator operator at the Empire State Building when a B‑25 bomber suddenly crashed into the building, slicing into the 79th floor and tossing her through the air amid fire and debris. That plane crash alone screams, “What are the odds?” — “But wait,” as the infomercial guys used to say, “there’s more.” First responders put Betty into another elevator to send her to the bottom of the building (and safety)…but the cables had been shredded by the crashing plane and snapped. Down she plunged — 75 stories! — straight into the basement. One would expect the worst, but somehow, she survived thanks to air pressure in the shaft and the tangled cables acting like shock absorbers. She broke her spine, pelvis, back, and neck and suffered severe burns, but earned a spot in the Guinness Book as the woman who survived the longest elevator free-fall ever.
8.
In June 2021, 56‑year‑old lobster diver Michael Packard jumped off his boat into the Atlantic near Cape Cod, then “felt this huge bump” and found himself in utter darkness. He initially thought a shark had attacked him, but the reality was even scarier (and a whole lot rarer). He was inside the mouth of a whale! He told WBZ-TV, “I felt around, and I realized there was no teeth. And then I realized, ‘Oh my God I’m in a whale’s mouth…and he’s trying to swallow me.'” Packard was convinced death was imminent, but then the whale surfaced, shook him out, and he splashed back to freedom, alive, somehow. His whale of a story was told in the documentary In the Whale: The Greatest Fish Story Ever Told.
9.
In November 2012, José Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, set sail off Mexico’s coast for what was supposed to be a quick fishing trip…until a brutal storm hit and knocked him miles off course. He and his crewmate, Ezequiel, were left adrift in the vast Pacific on their small 25-foot boat. As weeks turned into months, Alvarenga survived on raw fish, seabirds, turtles, even sharks — plus rainwater and, yes, his own urine when water ran out. Ezequiel, meanwhile, fell ill, refused food, and tragically died a few months in. Alone, Salvador battled extreme loneliness, hallucinations, and even talked to his dead friend before giving him a sea burial. Fast-forward 438 days later: He finally washed ashore on tiny Ebon Atoll in the Marshall Islands…6,700 miles from where he began. Emaciated, bearded, and barely able to walk, he’d beaten incredible odds to survive.
10.
An engineer for Mitsubishi named Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived being in the blast zones for both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in 1945. Yamaguchi was doing a three-month job in Hiroshima when he headed to work late that fateful day (delayed by forgetting his ID). The blast knocked him unconscious and covered much of his body with radiation burns. Upon reaching the Mitsubishi office, he found it in rubble. He decided to return to his hometown of Nagasaki…and arrived just in time for the blast there. He survived that one, too, and lived to be 93 years old.
11.
A woman named Violet Jessop survived the sinking of both the RMS Titanic and its sister ship, the Britannic. Jessop was a 24-year-old stewardess aboard the RMS Titanic when it hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912. She quickly got out of bed, dressed, and helped women and children into the lifeboats before she was given a baby and told to get into a lifeboat herself.
12.
On July 13, 1978, physicist Anatoli Bugorski leaned into a faulty detector and had a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator enter the back of his head and exit near his left nostril. (If you’re keeping score at home, a high-energy proton beam like this is around 40 times more powerful than the proton beams used in medical procedures.) Bugorski later said he saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns,” but felt no pain. Over the following days his face swelled and peeled along the beam’s track, he permanently lost hearing in his left ear, and the left side of his face became partially paralyzed. But — though doctors expected him to die from the radiation — he recovered enough to finish his PhD and continue working. In fact, it appears from clicking around the web that today he is 83 years old and still alive!
13.
When his tugboat capsized off Nigeria in 2013, cook Harrison Okene was pitched into pitch blackness as the vessel came to rest upside-down on the seabed — about 100 feet down. He clawed his way through flooded corridors until his hand broke the surface of a room-sized air pocket. The bubble kept him breathing, but only barely: oxygen levels soon fell while carbon dioxide climbed. Okene found a makeshift perch and rationed his breath and movement. For about 60 hours, he listened to sharks and the creaking hull, reciting psalms and thinking about his family to stay calm. He said, “I tried to kill the fear in front of me. Because one thing that can kill you fast is fear. That panic that comes at you, it kills you before your real death comes. Because the moment you start panicking, you use too much oxygen.” Eventually, divers arrived expecting a body recovery; instead, they found Okene alive!
14.
Lastly, in what one doctor called “the most bizarre sequence of events that I have heard of in a cardiologic practice” and “one fiasco following another,” a surgeon somehow blundered his way into performing open heart surgery on the wrong patient! (Imagine thinking you’re being wheeled back for, like, a knee replacement and ending up having your chest cut open!) It happened in 1988 at the University of Florida where a woman underwent a test where a cardiologist threads a probe through a blood vessel to the heart, injects dye, and then watches a monitor to see how the heart reacts. If trouble is found, surgery is scheduled. No trouble was discovered with this patient, but later that day, a DIFFERENT doctor reviewed the video of the test and dictated notes to be typed up by someone else (that feels like a game of telephone, doesn’t it?).
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