Stories of incredible survivals have never failed to amaze humans. Throughout history, there has been reports time and again of people defying all types of medical boundaries, pulling through alive all sorts of otherwise surely fatal incidents.

Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a retired forest ranger from Waynesboro, Virginia was known as the Human Lightning Rod because he had been struck by lightning seven times in his career, and survived.

The first strike, in 1942, caused the loss of a big toenail. Twenty-seven years later a second bolt of lightning burned his eyebrows off. The following year, in 1970, a third bolt seared his left shoulder.

After Sullivan’s hair was set afire by a fourth strike in 1972, he began hauling a bucket of water around with him in his car. He was driving on August 7, 1973, as a bolt came out of a small, low-lying cloud, hit him on the head through his hat, set his hair on fire again, knocked him ten feet out of his car, went through both legs and knocked his shoe off. Sullivan poured the bucket of water over his head to cool off.

He was struck for the sixth time on June 5, 1976, hurting his ankle. The seventh blow from above hit him on June 25, 1977, while he was fishing. He required hospitalisation for stomach and chest burns on that occasion.

Though he was never able to explain his peculiar attraction for lightning, Sullivan once said that he could actually see the bolts as they headed for him.

In September 1983, Sullivan took his own life with a bullet. Two of his Ranger hats, burned through the crown by lightning blasts, now reside in Guinness World Exhibit Halls.

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The winter of 1984-1985 set numerous cold-wave records across the continental United States from Michigan to Texas. It also saw one of the most remarkable survivals in the annals of modern medicine.

By the morning of January 19, 1985, the temperature in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had dropped to a bone-numbing sixty degrees below zero. While his parents slept, two year old Michael Troche, dressed in light pyjamas, wandered outside into the snow.

Found by his frantic father several hours later, Michael had quite literally frozen stiff. He had stopped breathing; ice crystals had formed both on and beneath his skin; and his limbs were rigid as sticks.

Rushed to the hospital, Michael was treated by doctors and nurses, and Dr. Kevin Kelly, a specialist in hypothermia pronounced him as "dead, extremely dead." His inner core temperature had fallen to sixteen degrees Centigrade; a precipice from which no one had ever returned alive.

The team set to work immediately, hooking Michael up to a heart-lung machine to warm his blood, injecting drugs to prevent his brain from swelling, thawing his body, and making incisions along his limbs as tissue filled with water from frozen cells and threatened to burst.

For three days the boy lay in a semiconscious state, hovering between life and death. Then, miraculously, Michael recovered almost as quickly as he had been frozen. He suffered some minor muscle damage to one hand, and had to undergo several skin grafts to patch the long incisions made in his arms and legs, but other than that was remarkably unaffected by his ordeal. He also failed to display any evidence of the feared brain damage that would have turned him into a vegetable.

Doctors said he probably survived because he was so young and small, and had been literally flash-frozen by the wind-chill factor. His tiny brain and reduced metabolism required little oxygen to operate.

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According to British Admiralty records, in February 1891, James Bartley, a seaman on board the whaler Star of the East, left the ship as part as a longboat crew during a whale hunt. The sea was rough, and the ship went under and all the sailors were picked up except Bartley. The whale which they had been harpooning then died and its body floated. It was cut and sectioned and a shoe attached to a foot and leg appeared from the flensing. Then Bartley was pulled out from the whale’s stomach, alive but unconscious. He remembered little except for the opening of enormous jaws and sliding down a long tube on the way to the whale’s stomach.

Bartley’s sight was affected by his experience and his skin was bleached. He spent his remaining years on land.

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On September 11, 1874, Phineas P. Gage, twenty-five, was using an iron tamping rod three feet seven inches long to pack explosives in holes prior to their denotation. For some reason, one of the loads exploded prematurely, blasting the rod back in Gage’s face. The thirteen-pound tamping tool, one and a quarter inches in diameter, penetrated his left cheek just above the jaw line. The force of the explosion drove the rod completely through and out his brain, dislodging a large frontal chunk of his skull in the process.

A few hours after the accident, Gage was said to have asked about his work! For the next several days he spat out bits of bone and brain through his mouth. Then he fell into a delirium and eventually lost sight in his left eye. After that, Gage recovered physically, though acquaintances said he had deteriorated into an untrustworthy brute.

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