Any condition that causes painful symptoms is obviously quite frustrating, but imagine how magnified that frustration becomes when a doctor expresses that the pain is just “in your head.” Such is the case with the following 10 conditions, all of which cause painful and sometimes debilitating physical symptoms yet are believed to be completely psychological in nature.

10Exploding Head Syndrome

The condition known as EHS causes sufferers to perceive “a sense of explosion in the head, confined to the hours of sleep, which is harmless but very frightening for the sufferer.” The perception of explosion often occurs as the sufferer is falling asleep but may also cause the sufferer to violently awaken in the middle of sleep. Other symptoms include flashes of light, an intense feeling of heat, chest pain, and the feeling of an electrical sensation throughout the body.

While the condition has been around as far back as the late 1800s, there is little that a medical doctor can offer in the way of help for the physical symptoms generated by EHS. So far, doctors have found that simple reassurance is seemingly the best treatment, and one sufferer’s symptoms ceased due to his doctor’s assurance that his EHS was “nothing more than an inconvenience.” Causes for EHS are believed to include common issues such as stress and fatigue, with other sleep disorders also considered as likely playing a role.

9Fibromyalgia

There are a host of physical symptoms associated with fibromyalgia, including widespread pain throughout the body, fatigue, depression, and headaches. Despite this, there is still the belief in the medical community that the condition is all in the minds of the sufferers. According to Gerard Mesill, M.D., “People with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) suffer not only from constant, widespread pain, but they also sometimes face judgment and distrust from medical professionals who doubt if their condition is real. They are labeled as annoying and needy. In the literal sense, insult is added to injury.”

There is no lab testing available to confirm whether a patient has fibromyalgia, and while doctors used to use a “tender point exam,” all that is necessary for a diagnosis is for the patient to have “widespread pain for more than three months—with no underlying medical condition that could cause the pain.” Doctors do use blood testing to eliminate other conditions as a possible cause, and though recent estimates have indicated that five million people suffer from fibromyalgia in the US alone, there are still many doctors who express disbelief at the existence of the condition altogether.

8Somatization Disorder

Somatization disorder is particularly troubling to patients since the disorder creates an endless cycle of widespread pain due to anxiety over the condition. The physical symptoms of the disorder are far too many to list but include amnesia, diarrhea, dizziness, headaches, paralysis, and changes in vision. While the symptoms of the disorder are seemingly limitless, the absence of any identifiable physical cause has led many doctors to believe that the disorder is simply psychological, and it is therefore frequently dismissed altogether.

Because of the lack of an identifiable physical cause, it is recommended that patients suffering from the disorder undergo some form of psychotherapy and perhaps antidepressant medications as well. Some studies have theorized that this disorder and several other similar disorders may be rooted in neurocircuitry.

7Conversion Disorder

While the issues associated with conversion disorder are quite severe, the circumstances surrounding the disorder are still less bleak than in the 17th century, when many sufferers of conversion disorder—then referred to as hysteria—were thought to have been practicing witchcraft and were therefore executed by being burned at the stake. Though the ancient Greeks were far less punitive to sufferers of the disorder, they believed that it occurred as a result of the “uterus wandering into the body.”

Though many years have passed since sufferers were thought to have a “wandering uterus” or have been practicing witchcraft, the belief is still that conversion disorder is a psychological disorder that results in some very serious physical symptoms, including seizures, blindness, and paralysis. Those afflicted with conversion disorder have often experienced something traumatic, and this trauma is often repressed in some manner. The disorder is not common, as it is estimated to affect only 0.03 percent of the population.

6Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome have a great deal of difficulty getting an accurate diagnosis of their condition and therefore are often forced to deal with the very real physical symptoms without adequate treatment. The feeling that chronic fatigue syndrome—which results in serious and debilitating physical symptoms—is just a psychological disorder is so widespread that the Institute of Medicine felt it necessary to “put to rest, once and for all, the idea that this is just psychosomatic or that people were making this up, or that they were just lazy.”

According to the report issued by the Institute of Medicine, as many as 2.5 million Americans deal with symptoms caused by chronic fatigue syndrome, including “profound fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, sleep abnormalities, autonomic manifestations, pain, and other symptoms that are made worse by exertion of any sort.”

Due to doubts regarding the very existence of chronic fatigue syndrome, the report noted that less than 33 percent of medical schools even include the condition in curricula, and the condition is not so much as mentioned in 60 percent of medical textbooks, leading sufferers of the condition to encounter “skepticism of health care providers about the serious nature of [chronic fatigue syndrome] and the misconception that it is a psychogenic illness or even a figment of the patient’s imagination.”

5Retired Husband Syndrome

This particular disorder is almost entirely localized in Japan, where wives often experience several physical symptoms that only occur following their husband’s retirement. Sufferers of retired husband syndrome, or RHS, deal with physical symptoms that may include ulcers, polyps, rashes, and headaches, and it is all caused by the increased presence of their husband at the home.

The physiological ailments that develop are caused by stress, and that stress is often due to the very strict gender roles that have existed in Japan for centuries. The effects of RHS have resulted in a divorce rate that has increased significantly. Between 1985 and 2000, the rate of divorce among couples married for longer than 20 years doubled.

Though many women in Japan are finding themselves afflicted with physical symptoms, doctors have not been able to find any other medical cause for those symptoms other than the psychological stress of the retirement of their husbands.

4Psychogenic Dystonia

Psychogenic dystonia is a movement disorder that causes the muscles to contract painfully and involuntarily without any identifiable physical cause for the issue. While many in the medical field believe this type of dystonia develops as a part of a conversion disorder and is rooted in a psychological cause, recent studies may have revealed that the cause may be neurological instead.

While some forms of dystonia are caused by a gene mutation, psychogenic dystonia sufferers have no such mutation. They do, however, have “markedly different brain activity,” as determined through a study using PET brain scans to measure levels of activity in specific regions of the brain. So while the very name of the disorder implies that there is a psychological cause (psychogenic disorders were once referred to as hysterical disorders), it appears that researchers may have identified a neurological cause in those suffering from the apparently poorly named psychogenic dystonia.

3Pseudocyesis

The physical symptoms—abdominal enlargement, the sensation of fetal movement, lactation, and even labor pains, among others—all seem to obviously point to pregnancy. Yet with this particular condition, such is not the case. Pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy, can afflict both women and men and is completely rooted in the psychological realm. The condition is listed in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and it has been found to be most common in countries in which medical care for pregnancy is not sought until the later stages of a pregnancy.

A study published in the US National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine delineated some of the common factors among those who experience pseudocyesis, noting that “pseudocyesis shares many endocrine traits with both polycystic ovarian syndrome and major depressive disorder, although the endocrine traits are more akin to polycystic ovarian syndrome than to major depressive disorder,” and that there is a tendency among those experiencing false pregnancy to have “increased sympathetic nervous system activity.”

2Chronic Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is a very treatable condition that usually requires about four weeks of treatment using antibiotics. The disease, which is caused by a tick bite, is particularly prevalent in the northeast portion of the United States but can be found in numerous other locations. Chronic Lyme disease is different, however, and though many doctors are dubious as to its existence, a recent study claimed that its effects can last “4.7–9 years” and includes symptoms such as “persistent musculoskeletal pain, neurocognitive symptoms, or dysesthesia.”

Even though the study professes to have proved that chronic Lyme disease indeed exists, other doctors remain doubtful and believe that any improvement in the symptoms patients experience is nothing more than a psychosomatic response and is simply the result of the placebo effect. While many doctors dismiss patients claiming to have chronic Lyme disease as hypochondriacs, others believe that any physical symptoms experienced by a patient may be the result of a co-infection, and that doctors treating patients for chronic Lyme disease are harming the patient by not identifying the true cause.

1Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures

This particular condition is quite often mistaken for epilepsy, resulting in frequent misdiagnoses. As the name implies, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures are not caused by the same issue that results in epileptic seizures but rather by some form of psychological distress. The main identifying factor for psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, or PNES, is through the observation of seizures in which there are “unusual features, such as type of movements, duration, triggers and frequency.”

PNES sufferers often have endured some sort of traumatic event that serves as the root cause of the disorder, and because of the fact that there are inherent difficulties in dealing with the disorder, individuals with PNES must often endure an arduous process in treatment. According to Dr. Selim R. Benbadis, the director of Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, “In addition to being common, psychogenic symptoms pose an uncomfortable and often frustrating challenge, both in diagnosis and management.” As with many conditions that doctors believe are all in the patient’s head, PNES often represents quite a significant hardship for those suffering from the syndrome.

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer and a noted dreamer of dreams. He aspires to one day live in a cave high in the mountains where he can write poetry no one will ever see.

Snakes, spiders and bugs, oh my! Many things in nature have evolved—as a way to protect themselves or to hunt—that nasty, evil fluid we call venom.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Animals You didn’t know were Venomous

Be it in their mouths, their butts, or their claws, so many creatures from invertebrates right up to things that may or may not be a mammal have developed the ability to inject us with venom that can do anything from rot our skin to liquefy our organs with a single dose!

Those unlucky enough to receive a bite or a sting from venomous creatures can suffer anything from a little swelling to death, and every extravagant, showy horror in between. None of us are truly safe from the hollow fangs of natures wrath, and since the only options for coping with this knowledge are endless terrified screaming or developing a definitely healthy and not at all concerning fascination with nature’s most morbid aspects, I vote we do the latter, and jump right into learning about the 10 most horrific, painful venoms nature has in store for the unsuspecting.

10 Brown Recluse Spider Venom

There’s a tale I heard when I was a child about the Brown Recluse spider that goes something like this: a little girl has her hair done up at the salon in intricate, looping braids. One day she starts complaining of headaches, which get so bad that she can’t stop crying, so her mother takes her to the emergency room to get her something for the pain and find the cause of her headaches.

The doctors begin to undo her braids to see if there is a physical cause, and, according to the legend, her whole scalp come off in their hands! The doctor, shocked and horrified, drops the scalp and hair on the floor, and a colony of Brown Recluse spiders pour out of the braids, having been living in her hair the whole time and biting her scalp, causing it to rot away.

While this story is nothing more than an urban legend, the effects of the Brown Recluse spider’s bite are quite real.

Their venom contain’s a protein that cause your tissue to turn against itself and rot from the inside out, starting at the area around the bite. Once the rot has started (2-3 days after the bite) the only option is to cut out the rotted area, sterilize the wound, and get a skin graft.^[1]

9 Cobra Venom

Cobras are funny looking little snakes. What’s not funny or adorable, however, is what their venom can do to you. Firstly, the Cobra doesn’t even have to bite you in order to envenom your poor, mortal body. A Cobra in good health and a bad mood can instead spit their venom into your eyes from up to 6 and a half feet away! The venom doesn’t just blind you when it hits your eyes, it also hurts!

Even worse, if it gets into your bloodstream (either from the spitting or through a traditional bite), you have maybe 30 minutes to get help or you’ll die of suffocation. Cobra venom, it turns out, has a novel method of killing the poor unfortunate soul stricken with it: the venom binds itself to the receptors in charge of moving your diaphragm (the muscle that moves your lungs), basically preventing it from receiving orders from your brain to move. If as little as 1/3rd of the receptors are compromised, you stop breathing…and die choking.^[2]

8 Stonefish Venom

Did you know that there are fish that can kill you, painfully? Not sharks or anything with teeth, I’m talking about a simple, lowly, kind of ugly fish that creeps along the ocean floor known simply as the Stonefish because it, well, looks like a stone.

Mistaking it for a rock is exactly what this crime against nature wants you to do, of course, so that it can sting you to death with its horrible spines. Should you, by chance, step on one of these, you’re in for an excruciating death out there in the deep blue sea.

Stonefish venom, through a mechanism scientists apparently don’t fully understand yet, releases a protein into your blood stream that is similar to Cobra venom. However, the Stonefish not only suffocates you by shutting down your lungs, it also causes intense pain, seizures, extreme muscle spasms, heart damage, and then paralysis.^[3]

7 Lionfish Venom

Although not as deadly as the Stonefish, the Lionfish will still attempt to wring a few gallons of tears out of its victims. Depending on how many spines they stab into you, these beautiful but oh-so-mean fish will leave you in pain, sweating heavily, struggling to breathe and, if you’re really unlucky . . . suffering temporary paralysis.

And then you drown!^[4]

6 Crown Of Thorns Seastar Venom

If you were to find yourself stuck by the many terrible and sharp spikes of the Crown Of Thorns (which have been recorded as being able to puncture diving suits and gloves) you will experience immediate debilitating pain, followed by significant bleeding and swelling.

While normally the symptoms resolve themselves in anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours, if you’re unlucky enough to get a heavy dose of the venom you could be in for numbness, throwing up, a severe headache and, in very rare cases paralysis.^[5]

5 Arizona Bark Scorpion Venom

Caught somewhere between a crab and a spider, with just enough snake thrown in to keep things fresh, Scorpions scuttled right out of man’s nightmares and into the waking world to terrorize us.

The Arizona Bark Scorpion is the worst of the worst, both in looks and in venom. While most scorpions are harmless to humans besides causing a little bit of pain and a welt, the Arizona Bark Scorpion, should it decide to use its venom on you, can do you a great deal more damage.

The venom of an Arizona Bark Scorpion can cause severe pain, swelling, numbness, frothing at the mouth, and difficulty breathing, as well as convulsions, twitching, and sometimes suffocation.^[6]

4 Gila Monster Venom

Although Gila Monster venom is comparatively mild, the way it’s delivered is horrific. Unlike the common venomous snake, Gila Monsters don’t posses hypodermic teeth. Instead, the venom drips through grooves in their terrible little lizard fangs.

In order to really get that toxic spit into your system, the Gila Monster not only bites, it chews on whatever part of you it latches onto, often flopping back and forth to tear the wound so it can really smear the venom around. The venom itself is also incredibly painful, and there’s no known antidote for it.

It has never caused a fatality in a human, but you’re definitely going to suffer.^[7]

3 Black Widow Venom

Surprisingly enough, the Black Widow spider is actually very docile, for a horrid little murder bug. In order to get a bite from this strangely pretty creature, you have to really provoke it. When you do, however, you’re in for a very, very bad time.

The Black Widow has some of the most potent venom in the arachnid world, in concentrations high enough to kill a healthy adult human with a single bite, and the way it kills is positively horrifying.

The bite releases a toxin into the blood, and from there the nervous system, that completely hijacks your nerves. Within minutes of a bite, you no longer have control of your body, and you get to experience first hand what rigor mortis is like as your muscles repeatedly clamp down in painful, seemingly never-ending waves of full body cramps that can last up to 24 hours even with treatment,

You can recover, of course, if you get medical help in a timely manner, but those unlucky few who don’t: die a horrible, horrible death.^[8]

2 Tarantula Hawk Venom

The Tarantula Hawk is a frightening hulking beast of a bug. It was given its name because it hunts and eats (and lays eggs in) tarantulas.

The real terror, however, comes not from what they can do to other bugs, but from what they can do to you. While their venom isn’t deadly, it is so painful that a single sting can incapacitate a man. According to Justin Schmidt, the worlds foremost expert on painful bug bites and stings (he allowed himself to be stung or bit by just about everything and recorded the results) the only thing you can do if one of these stings you is lay on the ground and scream until its over.^[9]

1 Platypus Venom

What on God’s green earth is the Platypus doing with its biology? It has hair, but also a beak. It lays eggs but also produces milk (despite having no nipples). And if all of that wasn’t enough, these Frankenstein animals have half-inch spurs on their tiny little feet that produce venom.

Not just any old venom, either, but the most long lasting and painful venom in the animal kingdom!

According to people who have been spurred by an angry platypus, the pain is immediate, completely devastating, and unending. Worse yet, no painkiller can be used against it. Not even morphine can stop the pain, nothing works to stop it except the complete deadening of the affected area.

The muscles in the area will wither away, and you’ll find yourself shivering, sweating, and throwing up from the pain and the venom. Worst of all is that this excruciating pain lasts for up to 3 months. You’ll suffer, vomit, and be crippled by pain every day for 90 long, long days.

You won’t die…but you’re going to wish you had.^[10]

About The Author: Deana is, as of writing this list, trembling in sheer terror of the horrific things nature is capable of producing to hurt us.

Lightning strikes, bee stings, snake bites… some people are exceptionally unlucky, others just a glutton for punishment. Still, the ability of a select few to endure overwhelming pain is as impressive as it is cringe-worthy.

Following are folks with excruciating records. Most are uninvited and unfortunate; a few are intentional and, well, insane. Regardless, as Dodgeball’s Pepper Brooks so eloquently put it: “Ouchtown, population you, bro.”

Related: Top 10 Peculiar Facts About Pain

10 Fang You Very Much

Tim Friede, a mid-50s former truck mechanic from Wisconsin, puts a new meaning to the phrase “draining the snake.” In his role with California-based vaccination research firm Centivax, Friede has been intentionally bitten by venomous snakes more than 200 times.

Friede’s lengthy list of potentially lethal injections includes bites from cobras, mambas, vipers, taipans, rattlers, and kraits. Centivax’s goal is to develop a universal antivenom, replacing the current snake-specific approach prone to misidentifications and stock shortages.

Friede is among the few capable of performing his dangerous duties. As an adolescent, he kept a collection of venomous snakes and began milking their venom, realizing it was in his best interest to develop some sort of immunity should something go sideways. He then diluted the poison and injected himself with it to build tolerance.

This was, Friede admits, an imperfect process. In 2001, he was milking his Egyptian cobra when it bit his finger. The semi-immune Friede would have been fine, but just an hour later, his monocled cobra tagged him on the bicep. “Two cobra bites, back to back, within one hour,” he remembers. “I basically flat-lined and died.”

He was in a coma for four days. But luckily for both himself and science, Friede lived to bite another day. He describes his gainful yet painful employment as something akin to “a bee sting times a hundred.” Videos of him purposefully getting bitten have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.^[1]

9 To Be or Two Thousand Bees

On January 28, 1962, Johannes Relleke was working at the Kamativi Tin Mine near the Gwaii River in Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe). There, he was stung by a bee.

Then he got stung by 2,442 more.

Several incredible things happened next. First and foremost, Relleke survived, which invites one to wonder just how many bee stings a human being can suffer without dying. According to the U.S. Agricultural Research Service, a non-allergic human can be expected to survive 10 stings per pound, meaning a 200-pound person would be expected to survive upwards of 2,000 stings. So Relleke rode that educated estimation right up to the edge of lethality. Well played, sir.

Still, the feat also leaves one asking how 2,443 separate bees found distinct places on Relleke’s body to sting—so distinct, in fact, that in the hospital, each stinger was removed and counted, making Relleke the confirmed Guinness World Record holder for Most Bee Stings Survived. Details about the incident are sparse, but assumedly Relleke was working in the mine—a confined space where a quick retreat is difficult—and disturbed a honeybee hive. The sheer number of stings likely wouldn’t have happened in the open air.

In Zimbabwe, the event has earned the tongue-in-cheek nickname “The Relleke Massacre” because the spot where he was found was littered with thousands of dead bees.^[2]

8 Mama-Rama

Ah, childbirth. As a proud father, I know from experience that it’s wonderfully, beautifully…

… awful. It’s a screaming, swearing, sweating mess that no woman should have to endure. Worse, the pain is often downplayed on medical sites because, if it weren’t, people would probably stop having kids—a dubious-at-best decision even without excruciating agony. For example, Healthline reassures would-be moms that “pain is subjective… This means that you may have a very different pain experience from even your mother or sister.” Read as: Disregard their brutal honesty about how intolerable it was. The site goes on to suggest pain alleviation methods such as massage (which seems useless when your crotch is aflame) and visualization (which seems useless, period).

In any event, Valentina Vassilyeva had no such cyber-reassurances because she was born in 1707. She and her hubby Feodor were from Shuya, Russia. And there must have been very little to do in Shuya because ol’ VV got knocked up 27 times between 1725 and 1765.

That’s not even the most shocking part because those 27 pregnancies resulted in… wait for it… sixty-nine babies, including 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. All but two babies—one of the sets of twins—survived, another surprising feat in an era of high infant mortality.

Feodor wasn’t finished. He remarried upon Valentina’s passing and had 18 more children with his second wife. They didn’t call him Feisty Feodor for nothing.^[3]

7 Ice Breaker

Hockey hurts. It’s a sport with thrashing wooden sticks, sharp skate blades, vicious crosschecks, and of course, semi-legal fisticuffs. It’s the only major sport where teams frequently employ a so-called “enforcer,” whose job is to basically beat the crap out of the opposing side, penalties be damned.

Unsurprisingly, jack-o’-lantern smiles are a regular thing in hockey. Players who enjoy an entire career with their teeth intact are considered fortunate. But in 2010, one player, Duncan Keith of the Chicago Blackhawks, was decidedly unlucky. Midway through the second period of a playoff game, Patrick Marleau of the San Jose Sharks was attempting to clear the puck from his team’s zone. He slapped the puck fast and high… right into Keith’s mouth.

“I just knew right away,” Keith said later. “I took one breath, and it felt like my whole mouth was missing, so I knew there were some teeth gone.”

Broken chicklets came careening out of his mouth, with one sticking in the back of his throat. Keith lost an ungodly seven teeth on one shot—three on the top and four on the bottom (the dentist ultimately replaced ten, though). And while no firm stat exists for “most teeth lost on a single shot,” it’s believed that Keith is the NHL’s dental record holder.

Amazingly, Keith actually returned later that same game, albeit a few ounces lighter. His terrible luck and terrific grit earned him the nickname “Duncan Teeth.”^[4]

6 Choking Hazard

Sports can scar the soul as well as the body, lifting hopes before cruelly crushing them. On the field, the other shoe—or cleat—always seems ready to drop.

In 2004, the New York Yankees were winning a best-of-seven series by three games to none. They were one out away in the final inning with the game’s best reliever pitching. They blew the series in what remains the greatest collapse in baseball history. Notably, the 2022 Yankees had a 15½-game lead that has evaporated. If they don’t win their division, they’ll hold unenviable records for choke artistry in both the playoffs and regular season.

In American football, the greatest postseason gag job belongs to the 1992 Houston Oilers, who led the Buffalo Bills 35-3 in the third quarter. They lost, 41-38. Ironically, the Bills were in the middle of a historic horror show of their own, losing four straight Super Bowls from 1990-93.

Individual chokes are an equally fascinating trip down the psychological rabbit hole. Golf, a silly game played by serious people, is a prime example, as even the most talented golfers sometimes snatch defeat from victory: At the 1966 U.S. Open, Arnold Palmer blew a five-stroke lead with four holes to play.

But the worst golf gag belongs to Frenchman Jean van de Velde at the 1999 British Open, who needed a six—a double-bogey—or better on the final hole to win. In what remains golf’s most tragicomic sequence, he shot… a seven.^[5]

5 Lucky Shot

In America, it’s really easy to get shot. Like, really easy. After all, for every 100 Americans, there are 120 guns. So 20% more guns than people… with a population of 330 million… that’s… let’s see… carry the 1…

… just shy of 400 million guns. For the record, the country with the second-highest firearm-per-person ratio is the liberal beacon of Yemen (53 guns per person), followed by the pacific enclave of Syria (39 guns per person). USA! USA!

Anyway, so yeah, it’s pretty easy to get shot and get dead in the U.S. Nearly 50,000 Americans perished by guns in 2021. Given such generous gunplay, it’s unsurprising that the person credited with surviving the most gunshots is an American.

In August 2010, 23-year-old Angel Alvarez was leaving a party in New York City when another man, Luis Soto, confronted him. One of them (it’s unclear who) had a gun, and the two scuffled. When several police officers attempted to break it up, the gun went off. The officers thought the shots were intended for them and returned fire… a total of 46 times.

One officer mistakenly shot another officer. Soto was struck several times and died. Alvarez lived despite being shot twenty-three times. He was cleared of any wrongdoing, save for a weapons charge.^[6]

4 Feel the Burn

A Google search for “worst burn survivor” brings one name to the forefront. In 1999, 20-year-old Jacqueline Saburido was a passenger in her friend’s car in Caracas, Venezuela, when a drunk driver slammed into their vehicle with his SUV. The driver in the car carrying Saburido died, as did a fellow passenger.

The car caught fire, trapping Saburido. She suffered second- and third-degree burns on 60% of her body. Doctors didn’t expect her to live, but she did despite being gruesomely disfigured. Commendably, Saburido used her horrific predicament and permanently mangled appearance to draw attention to the dangers of drunk driving.

Saburido’s notoriety is likely the reason for her top search engine billing. However, recently another burn survivor likely surpassed Saburido’s sizable injuries. In May 2017, Colorado couple Jamie and Troy Ketchum were driving with Jamie’s parents when a dump truck blew a tire and smashed headfirst into their SUV. Jamie’s father died instantly. The other three were injured—but none as bad as Jamie, who suffered burns over an unbelievable 95% of her body.

Both of her legs and one arm required amputation. Jamie spent more than a year in the hospital burn unit—425 days, to be exact. But she pulled through and has plans to walk again after being fitted with prosthetic legs.^[7]

3 Miracle Miles

In June 2017, a 14-year-old girl survived a 25-foot (7.6-meter) fall at an amusement park when bystanders braced her fall. The incident was recorded and broadcast on news stations. The girl dangled before falling, giving good samaritans time to gather underneath her. Would she have survived otherwise?

“The probability of surviving a 25-foot fall… is influenced by many factors, including your speed,” Dr. Robert Glatter of NYC’s Lenox Hill Hospital said. He added that falls from heights exceeding 30 feet (9.1 meters) typically inflict serious injuries involving the spleen, liver, and lungs, along with blunt chest trauma and rib fractures.

The median lethal distance for falls is 48 feet (14.6 meters)—about four stories. This means that 50% of people who fall from that height will not survive. The chance of death increases to 90% as heights approach seven stories.

So the highest survived fall on record would probably be… twelve stories? Fifteen? Maybe a miracle drop of 25 stories into two feet of powdery snow?

Nope… try more than two-thousand stories. In 1972, a Serbian flight attendant named Vesna Vulović was on board JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 when a bomb exploded in the luggage compartment, an apparent terrorist attack. When the device went off, the plane was at cruising altitude—just over 33,000 feet. Everyone died… except Vulović, who fell over six miles (77 kilometers) with no parachute—a Guinness record. Despite a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis, she eventually made a near-total recovery.^[8]

2 Testicle Fortitude

Amandeep Singh is a bona fide tough guy. The 40-year-old stuntman can break beer bottles with his bare hands and lift two motorcycles at once—one dangling from each side of a weight bar. He can lift two people, weighing a combined 330 pounds… with his teeth.

In his homeland of Punjab, Singh has earned the fitting (albeit unoriginal) nickname of “India’s Steel Man.” Just this past July, he set an international bodybuilding record with his 28th competitive medal.

But a series of stunts Singh performed back in 2016 truly set him apart—if not as the world’s strongest or toughest man, then perhaps the craziest. For starters, he broke 53 beer bottles with his bare hands and used a series of ropes to stop 20 running motorcycles in their tracks. He allowed cars to run over his abdomen, a commercial truck to roll over his lower back, and full-grown men to jump off ladders and land by stomping on his chest.

But one stunt, in particular, left onlookers both amazed and grimacing. Amandeep Singh became the first known person to be hit in the balls with a sledgehammer… brace for it… ten times. To prove the hammer made solid scrotal contact, Singh even placed a brick over his privates and let the sledgehammer break it in two. That is, literally, nuts.^[9]

1 Unlucky Seven

Born in 1912 in Greene County, Virginia, Roy Sullivan came of age during the Great Depression. He fell in love with the national park system, which underwent a series of improvements under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s public works programs. In 1936, he became a park ranger at Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. A brawny, rugged man who bore a resemblance to actor Gene Hackman, Sullivan seemed right out of central casting.

In April 1942, Sullivan sought shelter from a thunderstorm in a newly built fire tower. The tower caught fire after being struck by lightning, forcing him to flee. He got just a few yards from the exit when he was also struck. The bolt singed a portion of his leg and toe and burned a hole in his shoe. Sullivan survived.

Everything was fine for… oh, about 27 years. Then, in 1969, Sullivan was struck by lightning again. And then again, and again. In fact, he was struck by lightning six times in just eight years—seven in total—and survived them all.

The ways these strikes unfolded are just plain odd. One occurred in his truck—whose metal exterior and rubber tires should have been a safe haven. He was struck in his own front yard. He was struck standing inside his ranger station—an incident that set his hair on fire.

By the fourth strike, Sullivan became convinced that storm clouds were following him. Many concurred, refusing to go near him at the slightest hint of inclement weather.^[1]