My friend Chris got in a bad car accident at age 17 and spent 9 days in a coma. Doctors didn't think he would live, then he woke up. Doctors didn't think he would ever walk, and now he's been dancing for 10 years and teaching dance for 5 years. And he runs marathons. Most of his face had to be reconstructed and skin-grafted from other parts of his body, and you can hardly even tell today. And he plays the trumpet in a band. His rate of healing was miraculous.

When my dad was a kid he was hit by a van while riding his bike. To make a long story short it really messed him up. The doctors said that he won't make it and at the slight chance he does then he would be handicapped his whole life. Well, he made a full recovery with nothing more than scars to prove is happened.

When my mom was 14 she was diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer. The doctors decided to try some crazy stuff (for the 60's) and just straight removed the entire offending gland. All of the thyroid, just tossed it. Between the radiation and the cutting very important parts out of her neck they gave her long odds of making it to 18. She was also told she would definitely be sterile. Not just because of the radiation but because not having a thyroid gland meant her body couldn't control its hormone levels well enough to keep a baby alive.

My mom is 55 now and I exist.

To be fair she miscarried about six times before having me, so I guess I must have been some sort of freakishly persistent fetus. Perhaps having inherited that trait from my freakishly persistent mom? Who knows, man.

My Uncle had stomach cancer, he was going through radiation and chemotherapy. One day he went for a checkup and the tumour was gone. The Doctors cannot explain it but they're having all kinds of fun trying to figure it out, the working assumption is that he just responded really well to the treatments. I'm just happy he's cancer free.

I was actually a lifeguard when I was sixteen but had a similar experience.
From day one of our training we have cpr and all of those things drilled into our head, but no one expects to use it. The last time an ambulance had been called to our pool was about 3 years prior and that had just been because someone hit their head. This did happen that year. During a really hot and busy day a woman had a seizure in the pool and went under. The lifeguard on duty was in fast and got her onto the tube. Luckily we had practiced these procedures so often that we were well-oiled. We had her on the backboard and out of the water in a flash. They couldn't find a pulse on her so they started CPR and got the AED and BVM ready. They had the BVM (basically a big bag connected to oxygen that you squeeze to put into the person's lungs) hooked up, but in the confusion, a woman who was a regular to the pool that summer got out, claiming to be a nurse and grabbed the BVM. No one noticed for a few seconds, they had been doing CPR for a couple of minutes now. The lady puts one breath into the woman we were helping before our manager pulled the equipment away. After one breath the woman came up coughing and hacking out water. We were all so focused on her that no one bothered to keep track of the other lady, and by the time we started looking we couldn't find her. No one saw her at the pool again, and the only thing anyone remembers about her is that she was wearing a white swim dress.

Probably not a miracle, just a coincidence. But it was still incredible at the time for a bunch of 16-year-old's.

I work on the labor deck of the hospital, this mom comes in to have a standard delivery. Everything's going fine when the baby comes out the umbilical cord is wrapped around its neck twice (nucal x2) body chord x1 and true knot x2 ( that's when there is an actual knot in the umbilical chord). By all accounts this delivery should have been a demise, the doctors can't explain it. But she delivered a perfectly healthy baby, just hoping this kid doesn't turn out to be the anti-Christ.

Im not a nurse, but i was kind of on the other side of this if that's acceptable. i was hit by a car when i was 16, and when the emt's and police arrived, they looked around for a corpse. they were all flabbergasted when they were pointed in my direction.

the car was totaled, they all just assumed from the damage that whoever was hit would not have survived or would have at the very least been critically injured. i was bruised and extremely uncomfortable, but i didn't even break a bone.

I saw a little girl, 4 years old, that fell on a knitting needle. It entered her chest under her left armpit and exited thru her right armpit. It missed her ascending and descending aorta, passing just under the arch.

Had a patient suffer a massive pulmonary embolism in the hospital, requiring a STAT thrombectomy. This procedure is basically putting a catheter through the heart to the pulmonary arteries and trying like heck to break up the huge blood clot preventing her from getting circulation to and subsequently oxygen from her lungs.

Well she coded once before we even started the procedure. My attending comes in the room to start the procedure and sees me doing chest compressions. He's like what did I just miss? So an urgent case basically became... either we get this clot out soon or she will be gone. Not going to bore you with too many details about the procedure, but I will say she coded at least 8 times during a 2 hour procedure (honestly lost count after 5). She was literally purple from head to toe from oxygen deprivation.

Things were going nowhere. I scrubbed out and had to talk to the husband and tell him everything that happened, we were trying our best, but she was not probably not going to make it. Even if she did, the brain just can't tolerate 2 hours of oxygen deprivation and her heart stopping 8 times. He was crushed, but he made the agonizing decision to let her go if her heart stopped again. At that point I did something I've never done before or since, I brought him into our operating suite to say goodbye. It was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen in my career.

I escorted him back to the waiting room and we continue our procedure. Miraculously we manage to open up one segment of the pulmonary artery and she turns pink, her O2 sats go up to 90%+, and she doesn't code again. We get her back up to the ICU to be stabilized. Next day I go see her and her husband and she is completely normal without any residual cognitive deficits. She even remembers me explaining the procedure to her prior to everything happening. They were extremely thankful that we didn't give up on her. To this day I don't have a good explanation for what happened, but it's the reason I do what I do.

**TL;DR Massive pulmonary embolism, heart stops 8x, husband says final goodbyes. Survives with ZERO deficits, only explained by a miracle.**.

Doctor here. I’ve seen a good handful of miraculous turnarounds, but the one that stuck with me is a little different.

I was a medical student, and an elderly gentleman had come in with a worsening of his heart disease. Neither the patient or the cardiac surgeons were thrilled with the idea of surgery. So we were treating him medically the best we could, but he wasn’t making much progress. While talking with him one afternoon, I discovered that his wife was also very sick, and also hospitalized. Because hers was an autoimmune problem, and his was a cardiac problem, they were kept apart in two different hospital units. So, we asked around and got approval to transfer his wife up to the cardiac unit into a shared room with her sweetheart. They were both so ill that they couldn’t get out of bed, so we pushed them together. After they all got set up, everybody left to do their paperwork, but I stuck around and talked to them for a bit. They shared with me that they had been married for nearly 70 years, and bragged about each other, and how grateful they were to have shared their lives with each other. They held hands across their hospital beds and expressed a profound contentment with their time on earth.

The following day, I went to check on them on early morning pre-rounds, but the room was empty. The overnight nurse explained that they had fallen asleep holding hands, and both had passed away in the night.

I had a spinal epidural, woke up and was in serious pain. The nurses kept saying it's ok to be in pain and knew they were wrong . They discharged me after giving me a percocet by I knew I was in trouble. I went home grabbed my wife and headed to the ER. Everyone who goes I to the ER is in pain so you know how long I sat. I got up to go to the bathroom and my legs failed. I was in serious trouble. A brilliant surgeon named murray came in after 2 shots of delauded an told me I was trouble. I was taken to surgery and 10 hours later they had pulled a 10 inch blood clot out of my spine . I had a 16 inch incision 6 level laminectomy , muscle tissue moved to the opposite side of mine spine , pain was the least of my problems. My legs failed due to the clot being above C3 , he told me he had to pull it down from C3. Survival for a spinal hematoma is 5 to 50 percent. I was very lucky. Doctor M was amazing. He saved my life, I was on the way out
I will be forever grateful.

Nurse here. But, as a student nurse I did a placement on a Nero floor. Had a guy who had had a sever stroke. Aphasia (jumbled words) and 3 x assist with a hoist. Late one evening dude walked past the nurses station like nothing had happened, my preceptor carefully followed him and asked what he was doing. He said “oh just going for a walk” like it was no problem. We followed him around the ward for a bit and then he went back to bed.

The next day he was back to being a full assist. The guys wife said he would go for a walk every evening before the stroke. The doctors think it must of been muscle memory or some other part of the brain driving him (I’m not sure maybe a Neuro person could explain, I’m a cardiac nurse now! Haha).

Nurse here. When I was a new grad there was this young woman who had a severe brain bleed to the point that we removed two skull flaps to relieve pressure. She had a really bad prognosis. Her husband always was at her side and kissed her every day even though she was unresponsive. One day she kissed him back. I happened to be in the room hanging a med when it happened. It was her first purposeful movement after her stroke. She ended up making a pretty great recovery last I heard. Walking and talking. Came back to visit us with her husband. Will never forget it.