How Did They Survive? 10 People That Cheated Death Against All Odds

Some people can sustain catastrophic injuries, extraordinary falls, and mystically beat terminal disease. How do they do it? Are these people fortunate, walking miracles, freaks of nature, or super-human?

Scientists, disease specialists, ER doctors, oncologists, and EMTs say there are times that they are shocked that a person can survive the most horrific accidents and injuries. The truth is, the human body is incredible and can do amazing things.

Just like a basketball player can leap from the ground and appear to be flying in the air or a sprinter seems to have superhuman speed. Others can survive the unimaginable injuries like a woman whose face was ripped off by her pet chimpanzee, or a man who lost his legs after getting them chopped off when a car hit him on the side of the road. The human body is remarkable and has unexplained ways of sustaining unimaginable injury.

ER doctors, firemen, and EMT personnel are often time presented with the worst medical emergencies imaginable. They receive patients who have sustained horrific accidents. Yet, every now and then, they come across patients who somehow manage to cheat death despite an illness or injury that should have killed them.

Below are the stories of 10 people who survived horrendous accidents, that defy logic. These people beat the odds and lived through the impossible injuries that doctors and scientists can't explain.

1.) Phineas Gage. Survived being impaled through the face with a silver rod.

On September 13, 1848, 25-year-old Phineas Gage, was working for the railroad in Vermont when he had a horrible accident. He was impaled by a 43-inch long tamping iron while trying to clear a line of rails. Gage was using the tamping iron to pack gunpowder into a hole, when the powder detonated and the force of the blast hurled the rod through his cheek, passing behind his left eye, into his brain, and out of the top of his skull.

Remarkably he not only survived but remained continuous and felt no pain as he was taken to the local doctor's office and waited for the physician to arrive. The reason Gage did not die of his injury is that the fluid that would normally build up in a person's skull after a severe brain injury, causing inflammation, infection, and hemorrhage, was in Gage's case able to drain away through the hole in his cheek, relieving the pressure.

2.) John Bienvenu. Survived Stage 4 Glioblastoma Brain Tumor

Bienvenu, defied death when he was only 28 when he was told he had a lemon-sized mass in his brain. It was a stage 4 glioblastoma brain tumor that only 5% of those diagnosed with it survived.

2.) Alcides Mareno - Survived Falling 47 Stories

Mareno was 37 at the time of his accident on Dec. 7, 2007. He and his brother, Edgar, were getting ready to clean the windows at the Solow Tower. Seconds after stepping off the roof onto the aluminum scaffold collapsed! His brother, Edgar, fell at an estimated speed of 124 mph and died instantly when he landed on top of a brick wall.

Somehow Alcides managed to hold on to the scaffold platform, riding it like a skateboard as it plunged 47 flights to the ground! It ultimately broke his fall when it crashed to the ground and tossed him into a pile of railings and cables in an alley near the building. Incredibly, he survived and was airlifted to New York Presbyterian.

After his 500-foot free-fall, Alcides needed two times his total body blood supply. He had 16 surgeries to repair 10 broken bones,19 pints of plasma, and received 24 pints of blood. The explosive impact the landing had on his body collapsed both of his lungs, damaged his kidneys, and caused blood clots in the brain, among various other injuries.

3.) Vesna Vulović. Survived A Plane Crash and Falling 33,000 feet.

Serbian flight attendant, Vesna Vulović, holds a Guinness World Record for the highest fall without a parachute. This, by the way, is not by choice. Fifty-two years ago, on January 26, 1972, she became the only person to survive falling 33,333 feet (six miles) after her plane exploded mid-flight.

She was only 23 years old when her plane crashed near Srbská Kamenice, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), killing everyone on the flight except her. An explosive was detonated in the baggage compartment ripping the aircraft into three pieces. Vulovic was up performing flight attendant duties when the bomb went off. She was also the only passenger or flight crew member not in a seatbelt.

Unbelievably her survival is attributed to her being pinned down by a food cart at the tail end of the fuselage, considered to be the aircraft’s main body. For more incredible stories of survival, check out the following videos.

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