How These People Survived The Impossible

If you spend any time at all watching the news, it would be easy conclude it doesn't take much to lose your life: the universe just decides that it's your time, and poof, no more you. It doesn't matter whether you're fat or fit, tall or short, smart or dumb, when your time is up, it's up ... unless you're like these people, who clearly didn't get the memo:

Like Harrison Okene, Coolidge Winesett was also stuck in a toilet for three days. Unlike Okene, there was 100 feet of water overhead, but in some ways, Winesett's experience was even worse. It was certainly stinkier.

At the time of the accident, Winesett was a 75-year-old retired janitor, who lived in the home he grew up in in Southwest Virginia. Unfortunately, the property hadn't changed much over the years, and there was no indoor bathroom — just an old outhouse Winesett built himself in 1950. One afternoon in August 2000, he visited it for the last time. After five decades of abuse, the rotting floor boards finally failed, dumping the WWII veteran into the pit. Luckily for him, the remains of the floorboards landed on a sub floor, keeping him from actually landing in the night soil. Unluckily for him, he had been partially paralyzed by a stroke and was missing part of one leg, leaving him physically incapable of climbing back out.

Coolidge lived alone in the old house, and pretty much his only regular visitor was the mailman. It nevertheless took him three days to notice the mail was piling up, at which point he didn't just shrug his shoulders and walk away as many might, but instead decided to investigate. At this point, Coolidge had been stuck in the pit for 69 hours, and although there was no risk of drowning down there, it did come with a good supply of visitors, like spiders, snakes, maggots, and a rat that he actually had a fun, delusional chat with. After being discovered by the mailman, neighbors and the fire department were able to rescue him. Mr Winesett was obviously something of a religious man, because he admitted after being rescued, he spent a lot of time in the pit wondering what he had done to deserve the suffering ... other than not install an indoor toilet, obviously.

There are members of the animal kingdom, like earthworms and geckos, that can lose a major portion of their bodies and shrug it off like a boss, but until now, that list hasn't included humans. Enter one Truman Duncan, railway worker in Texas, who was riding on the front of a train car when he suddenly lost his grip. Despite a futile attempt to run backwards away from the onrushing train, he fell on the tracks, and was dragged under the wheels.

At this point, the news report usually lists the grieving next of kin, but not this time. Despite being almost literally cut in two, he made the decision not to die. He decided to keep himself awake, keep himself talking, and because he's clearly the nearest thing a human can be to the Terminator, he called his own ambulance too. It worked: an hour after the accident, he finally made it to a hospital, where surgeons began work on the first of 23 surgeries to make the biggest piece they could of the parts they had to work with.

Now, despite being minus large parts of his walking mechanism, he is alive, back at work at the railyard (in an office though, no longer chasing trains), and with a story he can only tell in the company of Pinocchio, lest people think he's making the whole thing up on the spot.

In 1972, Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant aboard an airliner that exploded over Czechoslovakia at 33,000 feet. The plane was totally destroyed, leaving Vulovic and the other passengers and crew with a really great and unobstructed view of the ground ... plus the time it takes to fall 6 miles to appreciate it.

After gravity had it's say, Vulavic was the only one left alive. When she was found, she was partially buried under debris and bodies, had broken both legs, crushed three vertebrae, and suffered a severe head injury. When they arrived at the hospital, her parents were even told that there was no hope and she would most likely die ... but she didn't. In fact, she eventually awoke from her coma and, after asking for a cigarette, went to work learning to walk again, which she did.

Her amazing survival came down to how she didn't face the fall alone, but instead took the plunge attached to a piece of the aircraft, wedged between another crewmember and a food cart. When this collection of parts hit the ground, it was fortunate to hit a snow-covered slope and slide some distance before coming to a rest. This all helped to cushion and distribute the force of an otherwise-unsurvivable freefall. So next time you travel by air ... just don't think about bombs and falling 30,000 feet — it probably won't happen, and it'll only ruin your movie.

If a person's heart isn't beating, they're not breathing, and their body temperature is 40 degrees below normal, you would probably go ahead and call them dead. And before Anna Bågenholm fell into a frozen stream while skiing in Norway in 1999, most doctors would have agreed ... afterwards, not so much.

After she fell through the ice, and her friends were unable to immediately pull her back out, she was lucky to find an air-pocket that allowed her to keep breathing for around 40 minutes. Unfortunately, despite the air supply, the water was still ice-cold, and before too long she stopped moving. By the time she was finally freed, she had been under the water for 80 minutes, and gave every impression of being dead.

Fortunately for her, her friends weren't quite ready to give up, and so they performed CPR on her anyway. Nearly three hours after her day got memorable she finally arrived at a hospital, with her body temperature at an insane 56.7 degrees Fahrenheit (it should be 99.5), and the electrocardiogram she was hooked up to had nothing at all to say. But the doctor decided that, since she had received continuous CPR since she was recovered, it was worth waiting until she warmed up a bit before declaring her stone-cold dead. So they warmed her up slowly by circulating her blood out of her body, heating it slightly, then pumping it right back in. Nothing happened for almost a full day, but then at 4 PM the following day, her heart started beating on its own — twelve days after that she woke up, on course for a full and totally miraculous recovery.

Bågenholm's survival was down to how she froze before she drowned. This meant her metabolism had a chance to slow down, reducing the amount of oxygen the brain needed to survive until her friends could start CPR. As a result of this event, when presented with someone who appears to have frozen to death, it's now common practice to continue CPR, and warm the patient up thoroughly before covering them with a sheet.

Salvadore Alvarenga was a fisherman working in Mexico in November 2012, when he decided to head out to sea and catch some fish. Taking with him a novice deckhand named Ezequiel Córdoba, Alvarenga headed out to sea in his open-top boat, loaded down with fishing gear. Everything was going fine, until a storm hit that was so wild, they had to cut loose their fishing lines to avoid sinking. They tried to sail the 75 miles back to land ... and they almost made it. With just 15 miles left the engine cut out and wouldn't restart, and the boat was blown back, away from land, and out into the wide and empty Pacific Ocean. Alvarez wouldn't be seen again for 438 days — Córdoba just won't be seen again.

Although at first they were able to collect rainwater, for large parts of the journey they were sustained by drinking raw blood and meat from sea turtles and seabirds — while Alvarenga was able to keep this up, the definitely-not-for-the-squeamish diet soon took take its toll on Córdoba, who ate less and less until eventually, he died. Alvarenga continued on, hunting birds and catching fish, watching the sunrise, and getting a change of scenery by going for "relaxing" shark-infested swims. He also thought about his estranged daughter, and what he would do with his life if he ever survived his ordeal.

Then on January 30 2014, alerted by seabirds and floating coconuts—because sometimes stereotypes actually happen—Alvarenga realized he was approaching an island. Half a day later, after a journey of 5000 miles, he washed ashore on one of the most remote islands in the Pacific, the last spot of land for another 3000 miles. It's a story of incredible bad luck, and simultaneously of incredible good luck ... plus, the wisdom of carrying a spare engine always.