Survival Sometimes, the strangest of accidents happen to us. I had an accident where I was standing on a small ladder putting up blinds. The ladder was between the couch and the window. Suddenly the blind came loose in my hand and I fell backwards. My back hit the back of the couch and I did a complete flip in the air and hit the floor which was thickly carpeted. I was fine but I couldn’t believe the flip I did. When I was a kid I was playing on the monkey bars in a playground and in those days there was just cement on the ground. I was very young and thought it would be a good idea to get to the top and stand on the highest bars and wave my arms. Please don’t ask me why. I somehow fell through the center head first. I placed my arm over my forehead on the way down and hit the cement. I didn’t even have a scratch. God was really looking out for me that day. There is a true story which has been all over the internet for years. It concerns a railway worker who was about 25 years old. He was setting an explosive when it went off sending a 3 1/2 inch rod weighing 13 pounds through his jaw up into his brain. I need not tell you this guy could not survive this, and neither could anyone else, but guess what, he lived for 13 more years. He did have a lot of problems however, including cognitive problems along with physical ones. I guess it is a matter of opinion, but many believe the most dangerous accident is a head-on collision. I think I would have to rate falling from a height with that and maybe a few others. I remember a case where a military plane went on fire and something happened where the parachutes were either damaged or lost. One man didn’t want to die by being burned and thought it better to jump out of the plane without a chute. He was a trained parachutist. As he fell from thousands of feet and neared the ground he did what he was taught when landing with a chute which was rolling when he hit. Incredibly, he survived and considering what happened had only two broken ankles. Talk about an incredible survival story. A woman was just driving along a street as most of us do. This particular street was in California. She felt a strange rumbling coming from under her car. Before she could give it much of a thought, a giant sinkhole opened up under the car and she and her vehicle fell into it. The fire department came quickly and rescued her. Heavy rains were blamed for soil erosion. There is a woman who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the longest fall without a chute. She fell 33,000 feet when her plane fell out of the sky. Someone had planted explosives on the plane. Many passengers were sucked out of the plane or died on impact, but this woman was wedged in by the food cart. She had a lot of injuries from the crash but survived the crash. She had been a flight attendant on the plane and after she recovered, she applied for her old job. The airline said they were worried about her health and declined. She continued to fly. I always thought one of the strangest accidents occurred in the old Soviet Union. A researcher worked at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Russia. For some crazy reason he decided he could repair the particle accelerator while it was running. He put his head between the proton beam and defective part and began to work on it but must have moved his head because he was struck in the head by the beam. All the people working there thought he would surely die, but he fooled them. This beam was about 300 times more powerful than those used for cancer therapy. Instead of dying he contracted epilepsy and suffered seizures and one side of his face is paralyzed. I read about a case where a man had a car accident and his lung deflated. Somehow his heart moved to another location in his body at the time. I never heard about something like this before. Fortunately for him during his recovery process, his lung reinflated sending his heart back to its original position and he made a full recovery. There is a story about a man who decided to participate in the Marathon des Sables which entails 4 days in the Sahara Desert. You just don’t want to get lost there, but unfortunately for this guy, he did. He got lost in a sandstorm. He made his way to a shrine. It was abandoned. He had no water and sucked on wet wipes. He was finally forced to catch bats and drink their blood. He then tried to commit suicide and failed and started to look for help again. He found a trail of goat droppings and followed them to a camp where the people took him to a hospital and he survived. Wow, one has to be pretty desperate to drink bat blood. A skier fell through a hole in the ice in Norway. She was under the ice for almost 1.5 hours. Her body temperature dropped to 57 degrees. She was clinically dead. Doctors hooked her up to a special machine which pumped her blood through it and back into her body warming it up. She needed therapy for several months, but made an almost perfect recovery except for tingling in her hands. In World War 2, there were a lot of ships sunk, among them was a British merchant ship named the Benlomond. It was torpedoed while far out to sea and sunk. All the crew died but one man jumped off. He found a raft and got into it. In the wreckage he was able to find a tank of water and some cans of food. He made use of fishing tackle from what he found and hoped for rescue. It was a long time in coming. His journey turned out to take 133 days. When he was found he was badly sunburned and had lost 30 pounds and had a stomach problem. It was thought to have been caused by all the raw fish he ate. The world is full of incredible survival stories which we would have thought were not possible, but some people have survived incredible things, while many more others died.
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