Escaping Death We tend to think our lives on earth have certain rules, such as if you step into a busy roadway you might get killed or if you fall out of a high window you might get killed or if you get shot in the head you might get killed. What I said seems to be an irrevocable fact, but how come there are always some people which this doesn’t seem to apply to? Take the case of the World War II bomber crew member who was on a bombing run when his plane was shot down in flames. He had no parachute, but knew how to parachute from a plane. He didn’t want to burn to death so he jumped out of the plane without a chute. The plane was at an altitude somewhere around 15,000 feet when he went out the door. He decided to go through the motions a parachutist would, including landing in the manner they are taught to do. When he hit the ground, he landed on his feet and rolled. The airman suffered two broken ankles, but aside from that as incredible as it sounds, he survived. A five-year-old boy was leaning on a mailbox in front of his house. Around the mailbox was an ornate iron picket fence. The pickets looked somewhat like spearheads. Somehow the boy slipped off the mailbox causing his body to get impaled on the fence. To be exact, a picket went through his throat. The penetration stopped just short of his brain and somehow missed the carotid artery, windpipe and any major nerves. Doctors who later examined him said the fall on to the picket could easily have killed him. It didn’t and the boy pulled himself off or the picket and called his mother. She called for help and paramedics gave her instructions and then she took her son to the hospital for emergency surgery. It was a miracle the boy survived. A man was doing construction work on the roof of a house. One thing I can tell you from experience is you have to be careful not to fall. When you do this type of work all the time you seem to get a little careless. I am not saying this is what happened, but I am saying the poor guy fell off the roof, but the fall was only the small part of the problem. He had a nail gun in his hand and as he was falling nails were shooting into his head. Half a dozen nails 3.5 inches long to be exact. Anyone one of the nail should have killed him, but somehow even when these nails in his head he survived and is nail free today. It is said the only reason he is alive today is the fact the nails missed his brain stem and spinal cord. Talk about being lucky, this guy should have run out and bought a lottery ticket. A nurse on the Titanic named Violet Constance Jessop was onboard the doomed ship when it sunk. We know most of the passengers and crew died, but Jessop survived the ordeal. Most people having survived a nightmare of this magnitude would never have gotten on another ship, but Jessop was made of sterner stuff and signed up to work on the Titanic’s sister ship the HMHS Britannic. She was on the RMS Olympic when it collided with a British warship. In 1916 she was working on the Britannic which had been converted to a hospital ship. There was an explosion. The ship was thought to have either been torpedoed or hit a mine. She had to jump to land in a lifeboat and severely injured her head, but survived. After all this Jessop returned to the White Star Line the owners of these ships in 1920. It was 1972 and a commercial passenger jet was departing from Copenhagen and heading to Belgrade. The plane was a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9. It had 28 passengers and crew onboard. When the plane reached the altitude of 33,000 feet a bomb which was hidden in the cargo section of the plane exploded. The bomb had been put on the plane by a Croatian separatist group. The plane was disintegrating as it plummeted and finally crashed into the mountains. The stewardess somehow survived the crash while sitting in the tail of the plane. There had been a mix-up in assignments and it was a different lady with the same first name who was supposed to be on the plane. Vesna Vulovic the stewardess is now in the Guinness Book of Records for surviving the longest fall without a parachute. A woman decided to go on a ski trip. She was happily skiing down a slope when the unthinkable happened. She tumbled head first into a hole in the frozen ice which covered a raging icy stream. Her feet were sticking out and there was a tiny air pocket for her to breathe. Her friends couldn’t pull her out due to the fact the icy water was raging all around her. They had to get help and it would take over 80 minutes to get her out. The problem was her air supply would run out over 40 minutes before that. When the rescue team got there, they were able to extract her from the water. She wasn’t breathing and they tried everything in their power to revive her, but to no avail. She was dead. When her body arrived at the hospital doctors decided to try and warm her and also put her on a heart-lung machine. It took three hours, but the persistence of the doctors paid off, she began to breathe. Sometimes when situations seem hopeless it seems as if divine intervention takes over. While most people would have died in the situations I have talked about there will always be some who seem to be able to escape the most hopeless of situations. I remember meeting a man who had a large indentation in the middle of his forehead. He had been shot in the brain and lived. No one can explain why people survive things like this, but we can’t deny they do. There are quite a few people who have escaped death at one time or another. |
