We like to feel like we’re in control of our destinies. There’s a certain sense of safety in the illusion that we’re in charge of, well, everything. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We’re definitely responsible for our actions and how we react to what life throws at us: it’s vital to take ownership for what we do. However, many things are completely outside of our control. What family we’re born in. What our genetics are like. How people treat us. What opportunities we’re presented with every day. Whether or not we get hit by lightning. A lot depends on luck and pure chance… and how we deal with surprises, good and bad.
Internet users shared their most epic one-in-a-million experiences in a viral r/AskReddit thread, and we’re featuring their very best stories with you, Pandas. The things that happened to these people are incredibly rare, and they make for great reading. So make sure you’ve got some popcorn ready. Which of these stories about incredible coincidences impressed you the most? Has anything similar ever happened to you? Tell us all about it in the comments.
Bored Panda got in touch with health and fitness coach Anna Armagno Toussaint, and we discussed the things that we can control. We also tackled the topic of genetics, beating feelings of jealousy when we see someone who has advantages that we might not, and how to move past failure after failure if it seems like nothing ever goes our way. You'll find our full interview with her below—don't miss out, Pandas.
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For my seventh birthday we went to Disneyland.
They just happened to be having a car a day giveaway when we were there.
For my seventh birthday, Mickey Mouse gave me a pontiac firebird.
"You can control what you put into your body. You can control your water intake and the foods you choose. You can choose to exercise or be sedentary. In most cases, there are good or bad decisions you can make. And the biggest one is that you can choose your mindset about things," health and fitness coach Anna told Bored Panda. However, some things are entirely outside of our control.
"That said, as someone with an autoimmune disease that I didn't choose, there are always hereditary factors that you may need to work around. Some people won't be able to make great choices. For a year I lived off mostly potatoes because that was what I could stomach. Staying positive is what got me through that," she revealed.
The coach pointed out that feeling jealous that someone has advantages that we don't is "totally fair," however, it also doesn't help you.
I was diagnoses with leukemia i got a bacteria growth which killed the leukemia, a real 1 in 1,000,000 chance
How I met my wife.
I’m from the Netherlands, she is from the US. We met in Israel.
It was my first weekend in Israel, decided to go on a pub crawl to meet some people and have fun, as I’m buying the ticket my now wife walks up to the counter to also buy a ticket. The girl working there introduces us, we hit it off the first night but I’m leaving in 2 days to stay with friends of friends in the middle of the desert for 3 months.
2 days after I leave I lose my phone, don’t have any way to get back in touch with her. I had little money and could stay/work with the people in the desert. But I kept thinking about her so after a week I say I’m leaving. Take the next bus (goes 3 times a week, at 5am) and then a train to Tel Aviv. I had no idea how to find her, where to stay and very little money.
I email a couple hostels to find a work/stay agreement, those jobs are very popular and usually planned months in advance.
I get an email back when I arrive in Tel Aviv, I can come in for an interview because they have a spot (this is already ridiculously lucky).
Right after the interview and dropping of my belongings. I went back to the first hostel to see if they would give me information, they wouldn’t give me anything.
Now I’m at a loss, Tel Aviv is a city of more than half a million people, I don’t know anyone and have little more than the clothes on my back.
Kind of defeated I start wandering around/exploring the city. After a couple hours I get hungry and decide to treat myself to a restaurant. I’m well out of the tourist area and find a place that’s almost empty and rather cheap. I sit down, order a drink and something to eat. As I get my food I see my now wife walking past the restaurant, she sees me I see her. I’m literally dumb struck and just kind of grin and wave (remember how I lost my phone? She didn’t know that and just thought I ignored her) she waves and keeps walking. I throw like 200 shekels (way too much) in the table and sprint after her, explained and the rest is history.
"I absolutely wish I didn't have to have digestive issues that took years to figure out and go through the pain and trial and error medication, but I also knew it could have been worse," Anna said.
"I stayed positive (faith helps if you're a believer because it gives you someone to turn to) and I was grateful that I was alive. Any feelings you have are real and that's ok, but don't let yourself be taken over by them."
Meanwhile, if you feel like you're stuck in an endless loop of failure after failure, it's vital that you reach out for assistance. A helping hand can make all the difference in the world. You don't have to do everything all on your own.
"Ask for help! I struggle with this, but it is so important to talk to people and get another perspective, whether it's a therapist or loved one. Also reading empowerment books, though you need the right mindset for that to be helpful."
I have symmetric bilateral coloboma of the iris and retina! Essentially, my pupils are shaped like keyholes instead of circles. A single coloboma is pretty rare, double coloboma is even more rare, and double symmetrical... well, you get it.
i have heard that eyes are windows to the soul, but never that eyes are keyholes (pun intended)
I was kidnapped when leaving work and held for 18 months, along with two other girls. The guy who took us claimed himself to be an ineffable lower god, and used cult tactics, manipulation and control to have us be his family. I was allowed to leave to the grocery store as an errand, but knew if I didn’t come back the others would receive my punishment. I finally got away by stabbing my captor when I believed he was going to kill me.
This is my mum's story and I've posted it before but, she once called her friend (back in the day on the lan line) and another lady answered, my mum asks if her friend was there and the lady says "sure I'll get her", my mum's friend hops on the phone and asks "how she now she was here", turns out my mum got a number wrong when dialing, called a random house were someone was hosting a Tupperware party and my mum's friend just happened to be attending it!! What are the odds of that s**t?
As paradoxical as it might seem—rare events happen all the time. Think of it as a math problem. There are countless things happening on Planet Earth every single day. It’s only a matter of time until something that we consider to be ‘rare’ occurs. Like someone getting struck by lightning and just walking it off. Someone surviving a plane crash. Someone winning the lottery. Or someone being born on a date that some would say bodes significance.
In other words, one-in-a-million events are at the same time extremely rare and very commonplace. This is something that one of the moderators at the r/nevertellmetheodds subreddit explained to Bored Panda earlier. You’ve got to keep an eye on probabilities and recognize the fact that many people believe in things like numerology magic.
"If you shuffle a deck of 52 playing cards, the arrangement you get is one in about 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. So it's super improbable if you look at it that way. But it's also kind of trivial, which is why we would remove a post that's just 'I shuffled this deck of cards and the result I got will never, ever happen again,'” they told Bored Panda.
No sure about the odds on this one, but I survived a “non-survivable” plane crash. I was on an old po-2 (famous for being very safe and uncrushable) on a tour of the desert in western China when I was like 7, my father’s friend who hosted me and piloted the plane didn’t survive but somehow I got out with a concussion and apparently passed out for almost a day In the middle of the dessert, in the wreckage of the crash, 50 km from the town/airport, on the edge of the desert. The people who found me were some tree planters (they plant greens in the desert to protect towns from sandstorm, a lot of people live in these desert towns in China do this) found me on there way picking up a shipment, and the only reason they looked was bc they were making a bet on how fast the egg would cook in the sand and went off the road to test.
So, according to my dads, the theory that I might have lived was because the plane was mostly made out of fabrics and wood. So when the plane crashed, the front half collapsed and took the majority of the impact. Though I got knocked out, I was probably covered under the wreckage and in the shades, it cooled me off enough to survive for a day or so!
I was struck by lightning while talking on a landline. This was in the early 90s. Lightning struck the telephone line and traveled through the handset to my ear.
My parents drove me to the ER. I couldn't talk very well. My brain knew what I wanted to say, but my mouth didn't want to say it. I had a terrible stutter.
My doctor told me that I had had a 'dose of good, old fashioned electro-shock therapy'. My speech was normal the next day, but I get a terrible headache whenever a thunderstorm comes through.
I am a 19 year old male. In August of last year, I was driving with my sister, when suddenly her face turned cold. “Gavin your eyes are yellow”, I remember her saying. I quickly pulled down the passengers mirror, and to my horror, two yellow eyes radiated back at me.
Fast forward, I spent a month being sick, the initial diagnosis was Hepatitis A.
Went back to the doctor, nothing was better(things were worse in fact). Was sent to the ER, then to the liver transplant unit at UCSF. By this point my eyes had turned muddy orange, and my pee was the color of... a mahogany tree.
Anyways, the team of liver doctors at UCSF managed to save my liver. I was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. Oh, and my eyes are white again :)
"That's obviously a trivial example, but think of things like, 'Yesterday I ate one egg for breakfast, found two pennies on the floor, passed three ambulances on my way to work, got four phone calls before lunch, and got five texts during lunch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!' It sounds like numerology magic but really that person just ignored the nine socks in their drawer and the eleven emails they got in the afternoon because those didn't contribute to the 'miracle.’ Wild coincidences are one thing. Genuinely interesting ones that aren't trivial like the deck of cards or reverse-engineered like the 1-2-3-4-5 day at work are different and special,” the mod explained to us.
The people affected by these rare events, however, tend to think that they’ve been either incredibly lucky or have bad luck. Professor Suzanne Degges-White, from Northern Illinois University, explained to Bored Panda during a previous interview that believing in fate and luck are interwoven into our history as human beings.
"As long as there have been humans, there has been a desire to imagine that somewhere some thing or some being or some force is helping direct us along our paths to a positive destination. Many people want to believe in luck because that gives us hope that one day maybe it will be 'our turn' to win the lottery, find true love, be at the right place at the right moment."
One upside of believing in luck is that it helps people handle the disappointments that they’re faced in life. What’s more, it can keep our hope alive that a better future awaits us! However, at the same time, someone might use this as an excuse to take responsibility for their actions: they might say that they’re a victim of bad luck and _totally_ aren’t dealing with the consequences of their actions. So believing in luck becomes a double-edged sword if you give up on the idea that you have any control over anything.
Technically only 1 in 530,000 but I won $75,000 from a scratchie. Gave half to my friend who was with me at the time.
Idk if this counts but i have died. One night around 11 pm i was trying to fall asleep but was just too hungry. I had just taken sleeping meds so i tried to cook some food fast before they kicked in. Unfortunately when I went to eat I accidentally aspirated a bunch of it and passed out. Everyone in my house was asleep but amazingly my sister just so happened to go to the bathroom at 3am and saw my light on underneath my door so she decided to investigate. She found me on the ground in full code and blue as a blueberry. She called 911 and they walked her through CPR. When the first responders arrived I was still in full code for another 2 and a half minutes but eventually was brought back. I spent 3 days in a coma and like 10 days in the ICU. If she wouldnt have gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night i wouldnt be typing this.
I slept wrong one night and pinched a nerve in my neck so severely I lost the right side of my body, it just went silent like it wasn’t there for months. I woke up in the worst pain I’ve ever experienced and couldn’t talk, move or do anything. The ER doctor thought I was having a stroke.
My doctor had never seen a case as severe as mine and it was purely a freak accident. Recovery took months but I have use of my leg and hand again, with some numbness. Other than pain and spasms I’m mostly back to normal.
Furthermore, the professor pointed out that “life has a funny way of confirming our self-biases.”
"If we believe we're going to fail at something, we've already set ourselves up for failure. Believing that we carry bad luck around like a cloud gives us a reason not to do our best, not to try our hardest, and to make it 'okay' to fail. While we'd think that a strong belief in good luck would work totally in our favor, there are drawbacks to this belief, too," she explained how this sort of thinking works.
"When we don't take ownership of our good choices, our effective actions, or our hard work, we are selling ourselves short. It's true that sometimes circumstances can 'work in our favor,' or we can meet the right person at the right time, but we still need to recognize our own part in taking advantage of positive circumstances or setting things up so that we can succeed." Taking ownership of good and bad decisions allows us to move past the idea that we’re ‘victims’ of life or luck.
"Research suggests that the people who have 'good luck' are just being more aware of their surroundings, making smart decisions based on current conditions, and actually 'believe' that good things will happen for them. That's a positive bias in our favor—we look for the good, so we're more likely to see it."
I am allergic to the cold. like literally. i get intense hives, swelling, i pass out, and throw up. Doesn’t even have to be freezing. Below 45 degrees without a jacket and I can’t do it. I have to carry an epi pen with me in the event that I drink something too cold or have a severe reaction.
I had 8 wisdom teeth, the dentist had never seen anything like it and called the whole office in to marvel at my teeth.
you must be really wise because you carried a lot of wisdom (pun intended)
A bird got into my room through a tiny hole in the ceiling and took a s**t on me.
I have the rarest type of synesthesia, lexical-gustatory. It means I taste words.
And I really hope you dont taste other people’s words either 😵💫
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Back around when papyrus was being invented I had a schoolfriend who's mother perceived certain words as smells. The odd thing with these types of synesthesia is that the smells or tastes tend to have no logical connection to the meaning of the words. So for my friend's mother, the word 'car' would smell of oranges, 'flower' was gloss paint, and 'television' (but not 'tv' or 'telly') was the smell of wet dog.
I've often thought about this. Wouldn't it be awful if the sound of your loved ones name made you taste sometime horrible
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I have color-taste synesthesia, which is significantly more rare than lexical-gustatory synesthesia (probably about one in one billion people). “Color-taste” means I can taste colors (some colors) when I see them. The more pure of a hue a color is, the more likely I can taste it. Hue: “a color that corresponds to a single wavelength of light in the color spectrum”. You could think of a hue as being a very specific color. There are 401 hues in the visible spectrum of light. There are millions of other colors that are some mix of hues. By the way, I’m really good at identifying colors and doing color matching. That helped when I worked for a printing company where we did very high-quality print jobs.
I've always wanted to ask someone synesthesia if it's overwhelming? Or is it fun /interesting /amusing? Or is it just normal to you? When I heard of this years ago I found it really cool, but I'm afraid it might be insensitive of me if it's a pain to live with.
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whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat ... which tastes the worst/best? do you tell people to stop talking when you eat? I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS :D
is there a word that tastes like icecream so whenever you want to eat it, you just say that word and kaboom your stomach's full???????
This is the most crazy and fascinating thing I ever read! I‘ve read about it before, but it still amazes me. I would love to experiance it…. I think
As a compulsive reader I wonder if that works only when they say them or if it's as the words are read
This person would be absolutely diseased during a trump rally. They would need days to recover
WAIT I HAVE THAT TOO?!?!? TIL I have lexical-gustatory synesthesia and also the kind hat smells/tastes concepts.
i have mirror-touch and tactile-auditory synesthesia, i feel other people touch or tickles and i hear what i touch and even my own body, i have an extra tooth, some vestigial body parts are fully developed e.g. in my eyes and heart, my sense of smell,taste,hearing and memory is better than average, I have all polymorphism genes for bitter, i can taste salt in freshwater, i smell whatever it is that people secrete when they are stressed or on heat, i could hear between 6ish and 27000ish hz when i was a teenager but now only 30ish to 19000ish due to my job and age, i can remember most of the events of when i was a kid and some events of when i was an infant, I once suffered of hematohidrosis, i have a weird blood type so i reject every type of blood unless it is chemically washed, i can move one vein and i do control some weird muscles like the dilator nasi muscle or some of my feet fingers independently. And do you also feel pain when an object is close to your glabella?
Wow, you sound like out of a movie! I can't relate, only to the last. Objects close to my glabella tickle and it feels like magnetic pulling. Helpful though, I never run my face into anything when it's dark.
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Do they taste like what they are? For example, does "coffee" taste like coffee?
Nope! Not always, not even most of the time. I have grapheme-colour synesthesia (letters & numbers have colour and texture) but for me the word “coffee” is pink, because the letter C is pink. Someone who can taste words might find certain consonants or vowels or even pronounciations taste different depending on the sounds or syllables or a multitude of other factors :) it’s just “crossed wires” in the brain, it can be pretty random! :)
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I can taste colours. I've gad some fun explanations to people when I've said "it tastes like blue."
I definitely don’t have synesthesia, but I love associating smells with colors. Like how people’s natural scents are hard to describe, colors are hard to describe. Example of how it works- I give my friend a hug and say “hmm, you smell like a deep red” that’s a good smell, it’s like a rustic, warm but not light smell.
Can you imagine the feast of tastes you could come up with? Also, the dieting implications!
I was on Tinder and was talking to this guy. He was supposed to meet me for dinner ,I texted him and no answer . Then I texted him on Tinder. Said that he couldn’t make it . However, I got a text back from the number . It wasn’t the guy that I thought I texted. It was the actor Gerard Butler. I thought he was lying until he FaceTimed me. Nice guy.
I didn’t go on a date with him instead. He lives on the west coast and I live on the east coast. I didn’t keep his number because I respect his privacy. When he FaceTimed me he was super casual and asked me why I was using Tinder and he wished me luck on it.
When I was 13, a friend and I got into a BB gun war. He put 2 BBs in the chamber and pumped it a bunch of times (breaking the traditional rules of warfare). He shot me in the face and both BBs hit an eyebrow (one per side) and ricocheted off my orbital bones into my eye sockets...again, one in each eye. I could feel them rubbing against the back of my eyes and went through 2 hours of surgery to have them removed. To this day, I’ve maintained perfect eyesight.
Navy SEAL sniper couldn’t make that shot twice. So believe them when they say “you’ll shoot your eye out”...sometimes both of them.
Not me, my wife.
We lived in Jacksonville, Florida. She rarely gets sick, but has mild insomnia. Around Wednesday, she had a low fever, and complained of aches and sweats at night and trouble sleeping. That weekend she wanted to see the Doctor... I told her she probably had the flu, just wasn't used the aches, and she always has trouble sleeping, but if she was still feeling bad Sunday we'd go to a clinic.
Saturday night she couldn't sleep so we made an appointment for Sunday afternoon. But on our way there, sure enough she's feeling better. Doctor checks her out, she's feeling fine now, no fever, he says she probably had menangitis but is recovering. I'm due to go on a business trip to California the next day (Monday) and ask him if he thinks it's fine I go. He says, yeah, no problem. That evening, wife is eating and laughing and all is good.
Monday morning I leave early. That afternoon, my neighbor calls, and lets me know my wife was wandering in the street in a delirium. My wife didn't know where she was, so the neighbor drove her to the ER. I book a flight home that night.
The hospital checks her out. She has a fever, her blood cell count is in the basement, and she is completely out of it mentally. They're not sure what's wrong, and a bunch of specialists start descending on her. I have to fill out a bunch of paperwork on her medical history, where we've been, etc. They think maybe it's some weird auto-immune disorder. Not good. She gets a bunch of transfusions and put on a cocktail of meds while they figure it out.
Third day in the hospital, the infectious disease guy comes in. Blood parasite. Maybe tick born, she'd been to the mid-West recently, coulda caught it if she went walking in the woods or a park. Next day he comes in. Figured out the parasite.
"Why didn't you tell me she left the country?" Huh? She hasn't... "Well, she has malaria." Malaria? I thought you couldn't get that in the U.S. "You can't, you need to go home and bring me her passport." What the hell?
I retrieve her passport... CDC comes, does a whole case study on her (which they wouldn't release to us). Mosquito traps setup around the neighborhood, mysterious vans start driving by spewing clouds of stuff.
My wife stays in the ICU for a week, but recovers just fine. If you look at the 2010 CDC Infectious Disease report you'll see a discussion of malaria, and how the XX number of cases all are related to people recently returned from endemic areas, except for one woman in Duval County, Florida who received it from a cryptic vector...
Found a CDC Malaria Surveillance report from that year:
**Case 2.** In November 2010, a woman aged 31 years sought treatment at a hospital emergency department for fever, severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, and malaise. She was admitted to the ICU for severe hyponatremia, thrombocytopenia, tachycardia, borderline splenomegaly, and epistaxis. Both the hospital and CDC confirmed a *P. falciparum* severe malaria infection with approximately 10% parasitemia. She was treated with oral quinine, clindamycin, and oral doxycycline, and recovered successfully. Probable routes of transmission were investigated. The patient stated that she had not traveled outside of the United States during the preceding 2 years and had no history of malaria. In 2008, she traveled to Nicaragua and stated that she had received malaria chemoprophylaxis at the time of her trip. She reported no history of blood transfusion or IV drug use. Mosquito trappings conducted around her home in Florida revealed no *Plasmodium*-infected mosquitoes, and no additional malaria cases in close contacts or persons residing in the area near her home. The origin of the infection remains undetermined.
Malaria is bad, especially the cerebral kind, gives you a life expectancy of 24 hours
When I was 14 years old, I woke up one day with heavy stomach cramps. We called the hospital and they told us that i probably have a stomach flu and should go to the doctor next morning.
After one of the worst nights ever, vomiting and sleeping next to the toilet we went to the doctor. I had a fever of 40 °C and was aching a lot. The doctor told me I had to to go to ER and have it checked out because she thought my appendix was inflamed and causing the pain.
We went to the ER and I stayed in the hospital for about 2 weeks, but they couldn't find anything. They treated me with broad range antibiotics and after 2 weeks I was feeling a bit better and they told me to go home and recover.
The night i got back from the hospital I went to bed and started hallucinating that I lived in a retirement home and that pirates were coming to steal our food. So I was flailing around trying to fend of pirates when my mother came in and asked what all the fuss was about. I told her what was going on and she looked at me like I had summoned a devil. She took my temperature and she instantly took me to the ER again (I had a 41°C fever).
When we went back to the hospital I got treated immediately for inflammation and they did a wide range of test again. They saw that something in my body was inflamed but they couldn't find it. I stayed in the hospital for about 2 more weeks when they finally found what was going on. My appendix was inflamed and burst the night I was having the hallucinations but on all the scans they couldn't see my appendix. The doctor told me that if I came in 2 days later I would have died because of the puss flowing in my body. Apparently there is a 1% chance of all the appendix cases that the appendix is so stretched out that they couldn't see it on the scans or that the area was so inflamed they didn't see it.
So after staying on antibiotics for about 2 more weeks they finally removed my appendix and all the pain was gone. I stayed in the hospital for over 4 weeks just because of my appendix and my bad luck on being that 1%.
I was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia on my 12th birthday. It turned out that my sister was almost an identical match for the bone marrow transplant I needed (99.7%) and she is 14 years older than me. From what I was told this type of match can only be found with identical twins. A year later after remission I developed a disease (GVHD) because of the bone marrow transplant I received . The same thing that saved my life also made the rest of it extremely difficult.......but I'm still here.
I'm allergic to potatoes. Never met someone else who is so I guess it's one in a million. Never eaten chips or fries
Got a rare but potentially deadly rash from a medication. I laughed when I first saw the bottle with the warning, and said knowing my luck I’d get it.
I did. Ended up in a burn unit with my skin sloughing off :( not a fun week.
I lived in Florida for the first 18 years of my life and spent most of my free time outdoors, fishing, camping, what have you. The summer before my junior year of high school I found myself out hiking nearby by my home with a buddy. We were stomping around in some clay deposits inside of a little ravine (even minimal geographic relief is dramatic in a place as flat as the gulf coast) when it started to Florida rain (for those of you who can’t relate, imagine a torrential downpour). Our minds immediately jumped to the exciting possibility of a flash flood raging through the crevasses we were exploring. In an effort to make our day more exciting and not take any chances, we began to climb vertically out of the canyons versus take the lengthy path out of it horizontally. We got to the top, put our feet on the ground, and did pull up. As I stood up I felt the ground underneath me squirm. I had stepped on a snake.
I screamed and kicked the snake that was latched onto my foot off me by reflex. As an Eagle Scout, I immediately recognized the red on yellow pattern as the snake slithered away and knew it was a coral snake.
We rushed home, drove to the hospital, and was seen. The doctors informed my parents the nearest antivenin was a 3 hour helicopter ride away. The first symptom, lung failure, would occur after 2 hours. My parents called my friends and family and we all spent time together without me knowing my fate. My friends and family arrived and subsequently left together. My parents turned off the lights and we prayed together. Around 2 hours after being bitten, a nurse came in to our dark room with gurney to collect my dead body. I asked the nurse “has there been any developments?” to her surprise. The doctors came in, shocked I was alive, told me it was a dry bite, and that I should remain whatever religion I practiced.
Had two 11cm benign tumours growing in my spine, resulting in gradual paralysis from my chest down. They had no idea how the tumours formed. Surgery took 11 hours when they thought it would take 4 because the tumours were so complexly woven throughout my spine. I now have pretty much half a spine and chronic pain but I’d take that over losing my life from paralysis and being unable to breathe.
I was diagnosed with a rare cancer, that happens in males more often than females, usually happens to patients between 45 and 60, and happens in the abdomen or legs. I was a 34 year old female, and it happened in my right arm.
For the record im in remission, but I couldn't believe I defied everything about the stupid f****r.
A bullet was deflected away from my heart by a novelty dog tag I wore. Skipped sideways through my chest instead, missing every vital organ, bone or artery. Exited my chest and lodged in my arm. Was in the hospital for a couple hours and released with bandages and pieces of the bullet still inside me.
I once guessed a 6 digit random combination on the first try. It was the only try I planned to give, as a kind of scratchpad whatever moment.
I was in 2 separate car crashes in 2 separate cars in less than 45 minutes apart.
I wasn't the driver for either crash.
First car was hit from the side. Friend came and picked us up, car lost traction and we slid off the road and hit a pole.
Neither was that bad, just poor timing.
I was so freakishly allergic to ant and bee venom as a child that a single sting from a single little common black ant put me into anaphalactic shock. When my allergist was preparing to start immunotherapy for me, he found that the in-office lab equipment wasn't sensitive enough to measure the infinitesimally small amount of allergen with which to start my titration, so he had to send a sample of my blood to Johns Hopkins so that *their* lab could determine how much to give me. I did immunotherapy for several *years* to reach an immune response level at which it would be safe for me to basically exist in a nonfrozen climate.
Good news, though: I'm good now. I've had a few run-ins with ants and wasps since my immunotherapy and my body didn't freak out and shut down, and research indicates that if it hasn't done that after this long, I'm *probably* safe for...maybe forever? I don't have Epi-Pens and I'm not overly afraid of ants or bees.
Nice! As much as immunotherapy sucks, it really is life-saving. I became severely allergic to cats in my early 20s.When I stayed with my sister who had 3 cats, I ended up having a severe reaction (was later told I should've gone to the hospital). I did immunotherapy for 3 years and now my sister and I live together with 4 cats and a dog. Literally changed my life.
I have completely unexplained hearing loss in my left ear. I had a cyst in it when I was 6, and the surgery to remove it and fix the ear was successful. When I was about 12, I woke up one morning with a killer headache and ear ringing, and after 3 days it went away and so did my hearing. Doctors did multiple examinations and an MRI and they said it should be totally functional, it just isn't. 1 in a million case.
Keep trying! It took a year to figure out what was wrong with my hearing. A pseudo tympanic membrane that escaped detection. Surgery to fix it scheduled for Monday to fix it once and for all.( hopefully).
Bought three dollars worth of pong balls at one of those games at the state fair. I think it was 10 balls, and the grand prize is in the middle and you have to land it in a small glass container. I was having fun and just decided to throw it by flicking my wrist in a weird way. It bounced around for awhile and landed right in the red glass container, which was the grand prize. Even the worker was surprised that I got it! Had to walk around the state fair with a giant charmander plush toy after that.
The first one I don't know about the exact odds, but I was born on 7/7/77 and weighed 7 pounds & 7 ounces. Sadly though I clocked in at 6:50 A.M.
The other is that around the age of 14 I started to notice the outsides of both of my feet starting to get much wider. After a couple of years of buying expensive custom made shoes they decided to perform surgery on my feet. Turned out I had extra muscle growth along with something else I don't recall at the moment. My podiatrist told me he submitted a scholarly article on it. May also have been genetic as when my Dad was 3, he developed an extra toe growing out of each one of his big toes.
No idea on the actual numbers, but I was born with 12 fingers. Identical extra digits on each hand
I've got the middle toes on both feet webbed.
So did Stalin.
Note: this post originally had 49 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
My husband is literally one in a mmillion ----- his cancer is so rare that only 5-10 people in North America will be diagnosed with it in any given year. Could've done with him being a bit less special this once...
I am so sorry! Wishing you two the very best - I hope, that at least it isn't a particulary aggressive cancer
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My husband had an operation on his sinus below the right eye in 1997. This month, he went to the dentist and he took and all round xray of his teeth. He saw a "unknown round thing" in the sinus on the left side. So he asked my husband if he maybe stuck a marble in his nose when he was a kid? I don't understand why this wasn't seen during the 1997 operation. They must have taken xrays too then. On both sides. So he has been walking around with a marble in his head for 50 odd years.
that's um... let's just say that your husband is special. (I mean no disrespect to your husband)
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I've been struck by lightening. Electrocuted due to bad wiring. Been run over by a car. Have a broken neck. Extra teeth. Color blind in one eye. It only sees black and white so I have trouble driving at night or dusk and dawn unless I tell my other eye to see the colors. I have degenerative osteoarthritis. And sever nerve damage. I should be walking or talking but I do and am still ticking.
I got 1st rank in a Hindi competition and got a gold medal without even understanding the instructions
2 years ago my 80 yr old dad had a tumor discovered on his heart. seems he was being scanned for another issue & the scan caught it. had it removed & is now a "hero" in onocology dept due to the composition of the tumor. seems that there were 2 kinds of cancer. golf ball sized, the center was a very fast growing kind but the outer portion was made up of another type of cancer which was overtaking the center. also, they cracked his chest on monday but released him on wed because he had healed as if it was over a week. he's survived 3 major devastating issues so i tell him when he goes it's going to be by something stupid like a banana peel.
Had something stuck in my eye. Doctor couldn’t do anything and sent me to eyedoctor. Turned out that 1:1,000,000 the flu gets in the eyes instead of body. I’d gotten that. Took almost a year to recover from that.
I have a weird gold ring around my pupils which I guess is rare? IDK, I haven’t seen a lot of people with it
Three unrelated genetic conditions, two are rare 🤦♀️ Although the heterochromia is the one I like, green with brown
i have this disorder called the jumping frenchman of maine. look it up. it’s super annoying.
I have curly hair - other than two identical straight pieces on either side of my head. My barber was perplexed. Also have a sprinkle of wavy hair.
My hair was curly as a toddler, then poker straight as an older child. My mum did a home perm when I was 11 and now it's curly again, except for the bottom layer, which is straight. It's totally normal for people with curly hair to have different curl patterns over their head, I assumed it is quite normal for them to sometimes have straight sections too (though I might be wrong)
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I don’t think I’ve had a one-in-a-million event. What are the odds?!
I have an orangeish ring around both my pupils, I think it's central heterochromia. Not that rare but pretty cool.
When I was seven, I won a summer reading contest. Chances weren’t one in a million though, around one in twenty thousand. It was still pretty cool though because they gave me cupcakes and punch.
Not sure if its one in a million. Had a couple of knots in both of my breasts. Had to take 2 biopsies on two of the biggest ones just to be cautious and they were fibroadenomas. Now since they were about 5-6cm and hurt due to their position, i decided to have surgery to remove these two but keep the rest. They examined the benign tumors at the laboratory after the surgery and one fibroadenoma had a DCID INSIDE a fibroadenoma, which was so small that the biopsy didn't even catch it. It was literally an surprise egg. Glad i got it out. Also have to monitor the other benign ones twice a year in case something like that happens again.
I was waiting at a busy 4 way roundabout in peak hour and it was a free for all trying to get a pass. I was about to enter the roundabout in front of a decent sized truck before I sensed it was going too fast. In super slow motion I saw it tilt and then it was falling- almost on top of my car. It fell with a tremendous boom and my car was knocked backwards, the roof of the truck resting less than 1 inch from my front bumper. People were running over telling me that they were sure they were about to witness a fatality. The truck driver was ok too, he'd been speeding though. Strawberry milk was all over the road as it was a milk truck.
My brother and his son share the same birthday , the 25 th , my sister the 26th , and mine the 27th . All in March . 1966,1967,1968.
My buddy was pronounced clinically dead after an overdose. He left the ER against doctor's orders, but was back within 24 hours because he'd managed to accidentally kill himself a second time. He survived both deaths just fine, walking out of the ER irritated that they'd "killed his high." Amazingly, this was before Naloxone/Narcan was available outside of hospitals in our state.
I can wiggle both my ears, together and by themselves. Same with my eyebrows and scrunching up each side of my nose. Not sure how rare it is precisely.
i can do the ear things. i have never met anyone else that can. can do only one eyebrow and nothing with the nose except able to flare my nostrils
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When I was in grad school, I was deeply unhappy and burned out. My relationships were superficial, my schedule was insane, and I struggled to be noticed. I developed Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which is a rare form of chronic migraine. It's not well studied but when I went to the neurology department at the nearby research hospital, the world's top expert of the condition happened to be there (for the week.) I took a medical leave absence, left the state and never returned to school. As predicted, it basically ended the moment I left that emotionally toxic environment. Lewis Carroll also had this type of migraine which is why he could so vividly describe Alice's adventures.
Our family took a day trip to a lake and while exploring I scooped up a pile of worms. It turned out they were baby copperheads. Luckily, I wasn't bit!
Not sure if this is one in a million but I was off work with depression when I started feeling nauseous. After a few days I started vomiting every time I swallowed anything, including water. I went to my GP who said I had a virus and it would go. A few days later I went back to my GP as the symptoms got worse. He decided to do a blood test. Less than 24 hours later I had a phone call from the GP surgery saying I needed to present myself to my local A & E as the test results indicated something wrong with my kidneys. I went to the hospital and they told me I had to have dialysis as I was in renal failure. My potassium levels were 7.9, if it got to 8 I was minutes from going into cardiac arrest. Blue lighted up to the bigger hospital and was put on dialysis for 2 weeks. I was told I had severe inflammation in my kidneys which stopped them working. I was on steroids for months afterwards and I have full kidney function. However 5 months after that I started having pain in my
eyes which I was eventually told was severe inflammation and I would go blind if I didn't get treatment. I then found out what had caused the renal failure and eye issues. It's a rare syndrome called TINU. Tubulointerstitial Nephritis With Uveitis. It's fairly rare and under recognised in patients. I had doctors who didn't know what it was. Luckily all I'm left with is quite a few floaters permanently in my eyes.
Load More Replies...
My story isn't as cool and thrilling as the others but I used to have two extra bones. Now I only have one more. I was born with to extra bones, each in one of my thumbs. The one on my right got removed when I was a baby because it would have gotten to big and I wouldn't have been able to bend my thumb. The one on my left is still there. It's rather small so I can move my fingers perfectly. But both of my thumbs are bent inwards and not straight. This is pretty cool. I love putting them next to each other to scare people who don't know about this.
When I was 40, I fell down some stairs carrying a laundry basket and injured my ribs. I thought I could have cracked a couple so I went to the doctor a couple of days later to get checked out. I had a 13 cm tumor on the left side of my ribcage between my heart and left lung. After a 9-hour surgery, they removed 4 ribs, part of my sternum, and part of my diaphragm. I was diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare form of cancer originating in the rib cartilage. If I hadn't fallen down those stairs, who knows what would have happened?
I had severe abdominal pain, which my doctor thought was a urine infection because of the location of the pain. I was put on antibiotics for two weeks. By this time I still didn't heal and it felt like it was getting worse, so I got a second opinion. He sent me straight to the hospital. Long story short turns out I have Heterotaxy syndrome and I was born with my appendix in the middle of my abdomen. My appendix had been burst for two weeks and I'm very lucky to still be alive.
Wow, these kind of coincidences. I would like to have kind of explanation, but seems impossible for me, chills
I would like to that show being continued because give us education although is heartbreaking, a dilemma :-!
I had an optic nerve pit on my retina, leaking brain fluid into my eye. It was so rare that I had a dozen doctors come through my room to have a look at it. I was the first child to have laser eye surgery on my eye.
My husband is literally one in a mmillion ----- his cancer is so rare that only 5-10 people in North America will be diagnosed with it in any given year. Could've done with him being a bit less special this once...
I am so sorry! Wishing you two the very best - I hope, that at least it isn't a particulary aggressive cancer
Load More Replies... My husband had an operation on his sinus below the right eye in 1997. This month, he went to the dentist and he took and all round xray of his teeth. He saw a "unknown round thing" in the sinus on the left side. So he asked my husband if he maybe stuck a marble in his nose when he was a kid? I don't understand why this wasn't seen during the 1997 operation. They must have taken xrays too then. On both sides. So he has been walking around with a marble in his head for 50 odd years.
that's um... let's just say that your husband is special. (I mean no disrespect to your husband)
Load More Replies... I've been struck by lightening. Electrocuted due to bad wiring. Been run over by a car. Have a broken neck. Extra teeth. Color blind in one eye. It only sees black and white so I have trouble driving at night or dusk and dawn unless I tell my other eye to see the colors. I have degenerative osteoarthritis. And sever nerve damage. I should be walking or talking but I do and am still ticking.
I got 1st rank in a Hindi competition and got a gold medal without even understanding the instructions
2 years ago my 80 yr old dad had a tumor discovered on his heart. seems he was being scanned for another issue & the scan caught it. had it removed & is now a "hero" in onocology dept due to the composition of the tumor. seems that there were 2 kinds of cancer. golf ball sized, the center was a very fast growing kind but the outer portion was made up of another type of cancer which was overtaking the center. also, they cracked his chest on monday but released him on wed because he had healed as if it was over a week. he's survived 3 major devastating issues so i tell him when he goes it's going to be by something stupid like a banana peel.
Had something stuck in my eye. Doctor couldn’t do anything and sent me to eyedoctor. Turned out that 1:1,000,000 the flu gets in the eyes instead of body. I’d gotten that. Took almost a year to recover from that.
I have a weird gold ring around my pupils which I guess is rare? IDK, I haven’t seen a lot of people with it
Three unrelated genetic conditions, two are rare 🤦♀️ Although the heterochromia is the one I like, green with brown
i have this disorder called the jumping frenchman of maine. look it up. it’s super annoying.
I have curly hair - other than two identical straight pieces on either side of my head. My barber was perplexed. Also have a sprinkle of wavy hair.
My hair was curly as a toddler, then poker straight as an older child. My mum did a home perm when I was 11 and now it's curly again, except for the bottom layer, which is straight. It's totally normal for people with curly hair to have different curl patterns over their head, I assumed it is quite normal for them to sometimes have straight sections too (though I might be wrong)
Load More Replies... I don’t think I’ve had a one-in-a-million event. What are the odds?!
I have an orangeish ring around both my pupils, I think it's central heterochromia. Not that rare but pretty cool.
When I was seven, I won a summer reading contest. Chances weren’t one in a million though, around one in twenty thousand. It was still pretty cool though because they gave me cupcakes and punch.
Not sure if its one in a million. Had a couple of knots in both of my breasts. Had to take 2 biopsies on two of the biggest ones just to be cautious and they were fibroadenomas. Now since they were about 5-6cm and hurt due to their position, i decided to have surgery to remove these two but keep the rest. They examined the benign tumors at the laboratory after the surgery and one fibroadenoma had a DCID INSIDE a fibroadenoma, which was so small that the biopsy didn't even catch it. It was literally an surprise egg. Glad i got it out. Also have to monitor the other benign ones twice a year in case something like that happens again.
I was waiting at a busy 4 way roundabout in peak hour and it was a free for all trying to get a pass. I was about to enter the roundabout in front of a decent sized truck before I sensed it was going too fast. In super slow motion I saw it tilt and then it was falling- almost on top of my car. It fell with a tremendous boom and my car was knocked backwards, the roof of the truck resting less than 1 inch from my front bumper. People were running over telling me that they were sure they were about to witness a fatality. The truck driver was ok too, he'd been speeding though. Strawberry milk was all over the road as it was a milk truck.
My brother and his son share the same birthday , the 25 th , my sister the 26th , and mine the 27th . All in March . 1966,1967,1968.
My buddy was pronounced clinically dead after an overdose. He left the ER against doctor's orders, but was back within 24 hours because he'd managed to accidentally kill himself a second time. He survived both deaths just fine, walking out of the ER irritated that they'd "killed his high." Amazingly, this was before Naloxone/Narcan was available outside of hospitals in our state.
I can wiggle both my ears, together and by themselves. Same with my eyebrows and scrunching up each side of my nose. Not sure how rare it is precisely.
i can do the ear things. i have never met anyone else that can. can do only one eyebrow and nothing with the nose except able to flare my nostrils
Load More Replies... When I was in grad school, I was deeply unhappy and burned out. My relationships were superficial, my schedule was insane, and I struggled to be noticed. I developed Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which is a rare form of chronic migraine. It's not well studied but when I went to the neurology department at the nearby research hospital, the world's top expert of the condition happened to be there (for the week.) I took a medical leave absence, left the state and never returned to school. As predicted, it basically ended the moment I left that emotionally toxic environment. Lewis Carroll also had this type of migraine which is why he could so vividly describe Alice's adventures.
Our family took a day trip to a lake and while exploring I scooped up a pile of worms. It turned out they were baby copperheads. Luckily, I wasn't bit!
Not sure if this is one in a million but I was off work with depression when I started feeling nauseous. After a few days I started vomiting every time I swallowed anything, including water. I went to my GP who said I had a virus and it would go. A few days later I went back to my GP as the symptoms got worse. He decided to do a blood test. Less than 24 hours later I had a phone call from the GP surgery saying I needed to present myself to my local A & E as the test results indicated something wrong with my kidneys. I went to the hospital and they told me I had to have dialysis as I was in renal failure. My potassium levels were 7.9, if it got to 8 I was minutes from going into cardiac arrest. Blue lighted up to the bigger hospital and was put on dialysis for 2 weeks. I was told I had severe inflammation in my kidneys which stopped them working. I was on steroids for months afterwards and I have full kidney function. However 5 months after that I started having pain in my
eyes which I was eventually told was severe inflammation and I would go blind if I didn't get treatment. I then found out what had caused the renal failure and eye issues. It's a rare syndrome called TINU. Tubulointerstitial Nephritis With Uveitis. It's fairly rare and under recognised in patients. I had doctors who didn't know what it was. Luckily all I'm left with is quite a few floaters permanently in my eyes.
Load More Replies... My story isn't as cool and thrilling as the others but I used to have two extra bones. Now I only have one more. I was born with to extra bones, each in one of my thumbs. The one on my right got removed when I was a baby because it would have gotten to big and I wouldn't have been able to bend my thumb. The one on my left is still there. It's rather small so I can move my fingers perfectly. But both of my thumbs are bent inwards and not straight. This is pretty cool. I love putting them next to each other to scare people who don't know about this.
When I was 40, I fell down some stairs carrying a laundry basket and injured my ribs. I thought I could have cracked a couple so I went to the doctor a couple of days later to get checked out. I had a 13 cm tumor on the left side of my ribcage between my heart and left lung. After a 9-hour surgery, they removed 4 ribs, part of my sternum, and part of my diaphragm. I was diagnosed with chondrosarcoma, a rare form of cancer originating in the rib cartilage. If I hadn't fallen down those stairs, who knows what would have happened?
I had severe abdominal pain, which my doctor thought was a urine infection because of the location of the pain. I was put on antibiotics for two weeks. By this time I still didn't heal and it felt like it was getting worse, so I got a second opinion. He sent me straight to the hospital. Long story short turns out I have Heterotaxy syndrome and I was born with my appendix in the middle of my abdomen. My appendix had been burst for two weeks and I'm very lucky to still be alive.
Wow, these kind of coincidences. I would like to have kind of explanation, but seems impossible for me, chills
I would like to that show being continued because give us education although is heartbreaking, a dilemma :-!
I had an optic nerve pit on my retina, leaking brain fluid into my eye. It was so rare that I had a dozen doctors come through my room to have a look at it. I was the first child to have laser eye surgery on my eye.
