Accidents happen every day. Some are minor, but many are life-threatening. The same holds true for diseases. When these things happen, some people lose hope and wait for the inevitable. The people on this list, however, faced certain death after being involved in various types of accidents or being diagnosed with deadly diseases. But they all made a miraculous recovery.

10Okkhoy

A father desperately clutching his seven-year-old bleeding boy and riding on a rickshaw to the nearest hospital is not something you see every day. This is exactly what happened to a little boy only known as Okkhoy and his father in Bangladesh in 2010.

A group of four men had viciously attacked the boy just a couple of hours earlier. The men, having an obvious lack of regard for life, hit the boy over the head with a large brick after tying his hands and feet up. As if this weren’t brutal enough, the men also sliced an upside-down cross into the child’s body and finally chopped off his penis and one of his testicles.

Okkhoy was lured from his safe family home by three other kids. These children promised to give him a treat if he went along with them. Feeling uneasy after a while, Okkhoy decided to go back home. It was then that the group of men grabbed him. They tried to force Okkhoy to beg for money. The child threatened to tell his father what they were doing, and this led to the horrific attack. They left him for dead.

Okkhoy’s mother found her boy lying next to a warehouse in a pool of blood. It was here that that Okkhoy’s father found them and rushed his son to hospital using the only means of transport he could afford: a rickshaw.

Despite the horror of this day, Okkhoy made a remarkable recovery within three months in the hospital. However, two years later he still carried the physical scars of what had happened to him and he will most likely always be afraid of the dark. After his story attracted international attention, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore succeeded in reconstructing a functioning penis for him.

9Janne Kouri

In August 2006, 31-year-old Janne Kouri was playing a game of beach volleyball with his friends on a California beach. Life had been good to Janne up to that point. He was a star football player on the verge of catching the eye of bigwigs at the NFL and also the director of a social network.

On that beautiful day, Janne felt like going for a quick swim between games and he ran down to the ocean. Then tragedy struck. As Janne dove into the waves, his head struck a sandbar, damaging his spinal cord and rendering him instantly paralyzed.

After Janne was rushed to the hospital, his girlfriend and family received the devastating news that he would never walk again. He would spend the next two months in ICU and almost lose his life twice, all while battling pneumonia. His bright life and future seemed dark and hopeless.

Janne told his girlfriend, Susan, that she was free to leave him, and he didn’t expect her to take care of him. Susan stuck by him no matter what and refused to give up on him getting better. After coming across many dead ends in their research, the couple finally happened upon a doctor in Louisville. Sharing the same name as Janne’s girlfriend, it seemed that providence led the couple to this doctor who proclaimed there was a chance of recovery.

Dr. Susan Harkema was right. Janne Kouri stood up on his own without a walker five years later. It was a tough road to achieving this seemingly impossible goal and involved the constant practice of a training routine called loco-motor training. The entire experience inspired Janne and Susan to start a non-profit rehab center to ensure others in Janne’s situation could also benefit from loco-motor training.

And, while still on his road to recovery, Janne and Susan got married after realizing there was nothing they couldn’t face together.

8Randon Timmons

“Skitching” almost cost 18-year-old Randon Timmons his life in 2014. In the small town of Van Buren, Indiana, some teenagers have no fear of grabbing hold of a moving vehicle and letting the driver drag them along while balancing on a skateboard. They call this “skitching.”

Randon was doing exactly this when his skateboard hit a bump in the road, and he went flying through the air before landing head first on the pavement.

He had almost no brain activity when doctors examined him and ended up having most of his skull removed because of the extreme brain swelling. There was very little hope that Randon would make it through the night.

While Randon’s dad and the rest of his family stayed at the boy’s bedside, the citizens of Van Buren arranged a prayer vigil, concert, and walk-a-thon in support of the family.

Almost miraculously, after a few weeks his condition had improved enough to be discharged from the hospital. Randy, Randon’s father, had already suffered the loss of his own brother and father in a car crash and refused to give up on his son. He kept telling his son how much he loved him and that he couldn’t leave him. Randy believes love and prayer helped his son get through the brain trauma.

While there is some permanent damage, such as mild amnesia and subtle parts of Randon’s personality that have changed, doctors believe that he will continue to lead a normal life. He does, however, have to wear a helmet while doing certain activities especially considering that he was not wearing one the day of the accident.

7Alcides Moreno

Alcides Moreno’s wife wasn’t too upset when he reached out his hand and attempted to stroke another woman’s face. Even though it was their special thing. After all, he was in a hospital bed and no one believed he would survive much less be able to stretch out his hand and speak.

Alcides and his brother Edgar were washing windows on the 47th story of a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City when the platform they were standing on suddenly became loose and dropped out of the sky. The two men landed in an alleyway. Sadly, Edgar was killed on impact. Alcides was conscious and sitting up when rescuers and firefighters got to the scene.

By the time he reached the hospital, he was on the border of unconsciousness and tests revealed the catastrophic nature of his injuries. On top of serious brain injuries, Alcides also suffered spinal injuries, a broken arm, cracked ribs, and two broken legs, among other injuries. After an initial emergency operation, Alcides underwent nine more operations.

Doctors were stunned when Alcides Moreno spoke up after the trauma he’d been through. Rosario, his wife, wasn’t in his room on Christmas Day in 2007 when Alcides attempted to stroke a nurse’s face thinking it was his wife’s. She was there, however, when he spoke his first words since the accident took place. He simply asked, “What did I do?”

The doctors at the time predicted that Alcides would be fully recovered in just one year. They also believed that he would recover his ability to walk. Rosario only had one final thing to say to those interviewing her about her husband’s miraculous recovery: He was not going back to his old job.

6Elijah Belden

An early birthday party for nine-year-old Elijah Belden, held in October 2014, almost turned fatal when a freak accident happened. Elijah was posing for a picture with one of his friends when he came into contact with a metal support structure on the patio of his home. Outdoor lighting supported by the pole had somehow caused the pole to be electrified and the boy to be electrocuted.

Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma. After 10 days of uncertainty and despair, Elijah woke from his coma. When asked by medical personnel what his name was he was able to respond correctly. His rapid recovery after this was called a miracle by his doctors and his father agreed.

Within two weeks of waking from his coma, Elijah started rehab and was able to take a walk outside. After this, he would be tested on a treadmill and doctors believed they would be able to send him home just a week after. Getting back to baseball practice is the next focus for Elijah and his family.

5Rachel Lozano

Rachel Lozano was diagnosed with an Askin’s tumor during high school and would fight a courageous battle against this rare form of cancer throughout the rest of her high school years.

The cancer went into remission twice. In order to achieve this, doctors performed multiple surgeries on Rachel including a bone marrow transplant. Rachel never lost hope and took the small victories and disappointing losses in stride. Even when her hair started falling out from chemo sessions, she allowed her bald head to be used as a canvas. She simply took everything as it came.

Then, the devastating news came. The cancer was back for a third time. Doctors told Rachel the tumor would claim her life within a couple of weeks, all depending on the organ it would take out first.

It was agreed that Rachel would undergo one last surgery as a last-ditch effort to remove the tumor. During the surgery, however, doctors were mystified and perplexed at the complete lack of a tumor. In fact, they could not find any cancerous tissue anywhere in the girl’s body and eventually closed her up without doing anything.

The hospital had no explanation for this incident and doctors would later testify that they had no medical explanation for not being able to find a tumor in Rachel’s body or even why she was still alive.

During an interview in 2013, Rachel, who had at that point been cancer-free for nine years, stated that her recovery from cancer was nothing less than a miracle. She also confirmed that she attended an honor ceremony for Father William Chaminade in 2000 and visited his grave. It was here that she prayed to the deceased clergyman for healing.

Rachel’s healing was proclaimed a miracle by the St. Louis Archdiocese and could become the second miracle attributed to Chaminade, making him a saint.

4Sam Schmid

In October 2011, Sam Schmid, a junior at the University of Arizona, never thought his life would change as drastically as it did when he got caught up in a horrific car accident involving five cars. The Jeep he was traveling in struck a light pole and flipped sideways. He was airlifted to the hospital in critical condition with two broken legs, a broken left hand, and severe brain injuries.

The news didn’t get any better at the hospital, and the young man was placed on life support. Doctors tactfully began to prepare Schmid’s family for the worst after surgery that was performed on him for a brain aneurysm resulted in a stroke.

Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler, who operated on Schmid, was dumbfounded with his patient’s lack of response after surgery because his scans did not indicate fatal injury. Going according to his own instinct, Spetzler decided to keep Sam on life support for a while longer.

Just a few hours before the hospital could act on the decision for Sam to be removed from life support machines, Spetzler requested a new MRI scan. Against all odds, the scan showed positive improvements on the patient’s part. The same day, Sam started responding to what was happening around him. He was also able to follow instruction from the doctors.

By December 2011, Sam could walk with the help of a walker and was able to speak almost normally again. He doesn’t remember anything about the accident that almost claimed his life.

3Lesley Bunning

Over 300 people in California alone succumbed to the H1N1 virus in 2014. When 61-year-old Lesley Bunning was diagnosed with the virus in January 2014, she was rushed to the emergency room by her family as soon as they saw her condition deteriorating.

At the hospital things further deteriorated and, to her family’s utter shock, Lesley was placed on life support and also in a medically induced coma. She spent 10 weeks this way, with doctors doing everything they could to help her, and her family praying for a miracle.

After the medical experts did everything to their medical knowledge to help Lesley, even consulting other doctors for additional measures, she still couldn’t breathe on her own. However, as they prepared the family for her inevitable death, Lesley suddenly breathed on her own. Doctors were flabbergasted.

They were able to remove her from the ventilator which was no longer necessary. They inserted a feeding tube to help her get stronger and gave her family the extraordinary news. One of the doctors went as far as to call her recovery a miracle.

Lesley Bunning has confirmed that she will never again skip her flu shot. She refused to take the shot before she contracted the virus. Now, she is determined to get it whenever necessary and also make sure the rest of her family takes theirs as well.

2Nicole Graham

By the time Nicole Graham’s junior prom rolled around, she had not only beat cancer but survived two strokes as well. When she should have only been thinking of homework and boys at the beginning of her junior year of high school, Nicole had to come to terms with the fact that she had leukemia. So, instead of hanging out with her friends and gossiping about the latest celebrity meltdown, Nicole had to start chemo sessions.

The 16-year-old’s journey since her diagnosis has been difficult considering that between the diagnosis and her eventual recovery she had major setbacks including the above-mentioned strokes, organ failure, sepsis, and even paralysis on one occasion.

However, her recovery happened in record time. Once she started rehab, it only took her two months to recover fully from all that had happened to her. When she entered the process of rehabilitation she couldn’t even sit up. After the two months were done she could literally run around. Throughout this time she was supported not only by her family and friends but also her boyfriend.

Soon after leaving the hospital, Nicole rejoined her lacrosse team and became the team’s captain. Pupils in her school also voted for her to become homecoming queen for a night to celebrate her recovery.

1Luke Burgie

Four-year-old Luke Burgie’s recovery from a mystery illness was proclaimed a miracle by Pope Francis himself. In 1998, the little boy suddenly fell ill. Everything he ingested came out in bouts of diarrhea and, if that weren’t enough, he would experience intense pain after eating a meal. His parents took him to specialists at a Denver hospital but even they had no idea what could possibly be ailing the boy.

By January the next year, it seemed that little Luke’s condition was grave. He was losing weight rapidly and no amount of treatment seemed to make a dent in his condition. Out of sheer desperation, his parents enlisted two nuns to pray for their child. The nuns in turn prayed to Mother Maria Theresia Bonzel who founded the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration back in 1863 and has been dead for more than 100 years. The prayer session lasted nine days.

The doctors meanwhile came up with a theory that poor Luke might have a tumor somewhere in his little body and scheduled a colonoscopy for him. However, when his parents brought him to the hospital for the test, Luke wasn’t sick anymore. His mother told the doctors that her son has simply jumped up from the couch he’d been lying on one afternoon and announced that the pain in his tummy was gone.

His mother was convinced of a miracle. While many remained skeptical, with some even indirectly accusing Luke’s parents of deliberately making their son ill “for the attention,” Pope Francis agreed with Jan Burgie. Fourteen years after Luke Burgie’s miraculous recovery, the Pope officially proclaimed the incident a miracle.

Estelle lives in Gauteng, JHB. She loves happy endings like the ones on this list.

Keep calm, carry on, and maybe wash your hands a little more often. That’s the gist of the advice given to the general public in the event of a deadly epidemic: less panic, less pandemic. But behind the scenes, epidemiologists are in a frantic race against time to track the spread of disease back to its origins and, hopefully, find some answers on how to stop it.

Like an earthquake, every deadly epidemic has an epicenter, a central point where the disaster is set in motion. In the case of an epidemic, a central point is a person, and that person is known as patient zero. Here are 10 of the most famous patient zeros in history.

10 Typhoid Mary

We begin with the most famous patient zero of them all, “Typhoid Mary,” whose real name was Mary Mallon. Mary was just 15 when she emigrated from Ireland to the US in 1884 and found work as a maid.

By 1906, Mary had risen to the position of cook for the wealthy Warren family, who spent their summers at Oyster Bay, Long Island. None of Mary’s employers had had any problems with her culinary offerings, but it was a bit of a coincidence that the people Mary cooked for had a habit of becoming seriously ill.

Of the eight families Mary had worked for before the Warrens, seven of them had experienced cases of typhoid. Mary was found to be a carrier of typhoid fever, but as she was not sick herself, she refused to be quarantined. In 1907, New York was at the center of a typhoid epidemic that affected around 3,000 people, and Mary was thought to be its patient zero.

After two years of forced confinement on North Brother Island, Mary was finally released and took a job (under a false name) as a cook in a maternity hospital. Another typhoid outbreak ensued, at which point Mary was permanently incarcerated on Pest Island in the East River.^[1] She died in isolation on November 11, 1938. Her obituary officially named her as the cause of 51 cases of typhoid and three deaths.

9 Frances Lewis

Cholera was a serious threat to public health in Victorian London. In 1854, over the course of just 10 days, 500 people dropped dead within a few blocks of central London. Symptoms of cholera included vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, and extreme thirst, and a patient who began feeling queasy could be dead that day.

By the end of the cholera epidemic, over 10,000 people were underground, and scientists were desperate to determine where this lethal epidemic originated. Ground zero, they found, was in the diaper of a tiny, five-month-old baby named Frances Lewis.

Local physician John Snow plotted on a map the exact locations where cholera victims had died. Known later as the ghost map, Snow’s map showed that most victims lived close to a water pump on Broad Street. It seems that Frances Lewis’s mother was washing her baby’s soiled diapers in pails of water that she then emptied into the cesspool in front of her house on Broad Street.^[2]

Victorian London was not known for its cleanliness, and the cesspool leaked directly into the local water source, poisoning thousands of the area’s residents. Soon after the pump was condemned, the cholera epidemic came to an end.

8 Mabalo Lokela

Ebola is considered one of the most alarming diseases of the 21st century. Ebola kills by causing its victims to suffer massive internal bleeding. It is a disease for which, even now, we have no cure, no vaccine, and no real idea why it keeps coming back.

The world’s first recorded victim of Ebola was a teacher named Mabalo Lokela. Mabalo lived in the town of Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of Congo and returned from a trip north in August 1976 with a high fever. Initially, medics diagnosed Mabalo with malaria. But after two weeks of dreadful symptoms—uncontrollable vomiting; trouble breathing; and bleeding eyes, nose, and mouth—he died.

Unfortunately, the Ebola virus did not die with him, and many of the people who came into contact with Mabalo during his sickness contracted the disease. As a result, around 90 percent of the people in Mabalo’s village died, and the world reeled as brave epidemiologists tried to work out how to stop this killer virus from spreading.^[3]

The most devastating outbreak of Ebola the world has ever seen happened in 2014 and claimed the lives of over 5,000 people in one year. As of the end of the outbreak in June 2016, more than 11,000 people had died from the disease, five times more than all other Ebola outbreaks combined. The West Africa Ebola outbreak of 2014 was traced to a two-year-old boy living in a remote village deep in the Guinean forest region.^[4] Emile Ouamouno’s death was quickly followed by his three-year-old sister, Philomene, their pregnant mother, their grandmother, and many other people from his village. But it would be months before Ebola got the worldwide attention it badly needed.

7 Dr. Liu Jianlin

Over the course of nine months, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crept steadily around the globe, taking a total of 774 lives across 37 countries and leaving many gravely ill. First diagnosed in the Guangdong province of China in November 2002, SARS was initially described as “atypical pneumonia.” Flu-like at first, the vicious virus quickly developed into full-on pneumonia and eventually respiratory failure.

As is often the case, we had no idea what we were dealing with until it was too late. By the time the world started to notice this contagious disease, a certain Dr. Liu Jianlin, a medical doctor from Guangdong province, had checked into Hong Kong’s Metropole Hotel.

Described later as hyper infectious, Dr. Liu is believed to have infected around 12 people at the Metropole before dying of respiratory failure. One of those 12 people was a lady named Sui-Chu Kwan, a resident of Scarborough, Ontario, who—feeling right as rain—boarded a plane for Canada two days after bumping into Dr. Liu.^[5]

6 Edgar Enrique Hernandez

“Kid Zero” may sound like the name of a superhero sidekick, but it was actually the nickname of the first human infected with swine flu. Four-year-old Edgar Enrique Hernandez from Mexico tested positive for H1N1 swine flu in March 2009. Soon, photos of his smiling face were on the front page of every newspaper.

In Edgar’s hometown, the rural town of La Gloria, several hundred people fell ill in a matter of weeks, and two children died. According to the World Health Organization, H1N1 has caused or contributed to the deaths of over 18,000 people as of January 2016. However, the CDC reports that the death count worldwide may actually be between 150,000 and 575,000.

Many residents of La Gloria blame nearby industrial hog farms for the outbreak, but the jury is still out on whether H1N1 originated in the pigpens. Also unconfirmed is whether little Edgar was actually the first human to contract the H1N1 swine flu.^[6] Regardless, the local authorities of La Gloria recently erected a bronze statue of Edgar in an interesting attempt to bring tourists to the town famous for swine flu.

5 Patient Zero MERS

The MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic in South Korea was officially declared over in July 2015. Also known as “camel flu,” this deadly respiratory disease was first detected in Saudi Arabia and is thought to be derived from bats. No one knows the identity of the first victim of MERS in Saudi Arabia. But when the virus hit South Korea, causing a serious epidemic that killed 36 people, it was easy to trace the source to one man.

Patient zero in the South Korean MERS outbreak first sought medical attention for a nasty cough and high fever on May 11, 2015. At a clinic in his hometown of Asan, south of Seoul, doctors examined the patient over the course of four days but were at a loss as to the cause of his ill health.

On May 20th, the patient sought help at the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul and revealed that he had recently returned from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Finally, he was correctly diagnosed with the highly contagious virus. By then, patient zero had infected the two men who shared his hospital room, his doctor, some people sharing his hospital ward, and their visiting relatives.^[7]

There were 186 confirmed cases of MERS in South Korea. Thousands of people were quarantined to stop the spread of the virus, a precaution that brought chaos to the city of Seoul.

4 Gaetan Dugas

The most infamous patient zero on our list is a man named Gaetan Dugas. He was an Air Canada flight attendant and was identified by scientists in the late 1970s as the first person to bring the HIV/AIDS epidemic to the US.

Journalist Randy Shilts publicly named Dugas in his 1987 book And The Band Played On. Upon the book’s release, the New York Post covered the story with the headline, “The Man Who Gave Us AIDS,” forever linking the name Gaetan Dugas with the devastation of the HIV/AIDs epidemic.^[8]

However, scientists have now learned that it is doubtful that patient zero in the HIV/AIDS epidemic was Gaetan Dugas. A recent genetic study using blood samples taken in the late 1970s has concluded that the virus probably came to New York City in 1970 and was linked to existing viruses then present in Haiti and other Caribbean countries.

AIDS is not the cause of death of those infected, but it plays a contributing factor. Most people die from another condition that becomes worse with their weakened immune systems. As of February 2020, about 30 million people worldwide have died from AIDS-related illnesses.

3 Patient Zero SARS-Cov-2

By December 2019, the first cases of SARS-Cov-2, or COVID-19, had appeared in China. The coronavirus, which caused the global pandemic, likely originated at a Chinese wet market. However, there is still so much to be discovered about the virus and its origins.

According to the Chinese government, patient zero may have been identified as a 55-year-old Chinese man from Hubei province. In late 2019, rumors about a strange new flu were beginning to circulate in Wuhan. On China’s social media platform WeChat, users had been discussing their coughs and colds for weeks with words like “SARS” and “shortness of breath” spiking from mid-November.

By early December, a so-called “pneumonia of unknown origin” had been identified, and patients—many of them workers or customers of a well-known market—were finding their way to the hospitals in Wuhan for treatment.^[9] While most people have no or few symptoms, some get very ill and can even die. What begins as a cough can lead to shortness of breath. In more severe cases, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) may occur after about 10 days after initial symptoms begin. At this point, hospitalization for breathing treatments and intubation may be required.

The physical and mental effects of the virus are still being studied, and it may be years before we truly understand the virus. As of May 2021, there have been more than 150 million confirmed cases and more than three million deaths worldwide due to COVID-19.

2 Private Albert Gitchell

Several nasty viruses spring to mind when pondering deadly pandemics—the bubonic plague, cholera, Ebola, and typhoid. But what about the benign-sounding Spanish flu? The Spanish flu is one of the most devastating pandemics the world has ever seen and is thought to have killed between 20 and 40 million people.

Yes, you read that right. Million. In the year 1918, with much of the world overwhelmed by World War I, the Spanish flu spread silently from person to person, eventually infecting up to one-third of the world’s population.

It all began on Monday, March 11, 1918, with a cough. A nasty cough coming from Private Albert Gitchell, a cook at the U.S. Army Base in Fort Riley, Kansas. Military medics knew how quickly a virus could spread in camp conditions and had Gitchell immediately quarantined. But it was too little too late.

Gitchell had cooked dinner for hundreds of soldiers stationed at the camp the night before, and by midday, over 100 soldiers were sick. Almost half of the soldiers died from their symptoms, and the flu spread like wildfire throughout the U.S. and Europe, across enemy lines, and into the rest of the world.^[10]

1 Goodwoman Phillips

Goodwoman Phillips was not the first person to die of the bubonic plague, and she certainly wasn’t the last. In fact, the bubonic plague8 Fascinating Facts About Plague Doctors is still present today. Annually, there are hundreds of cases and deaths, but it does not become the pandemic of previous centuries—like the Black Death in the 14th century—as it can be treated with modern antibiotics. Between 2000 and 2010, there were 21,725 people affected, with 1,612 deaths worldwide.

Goodwoman Phillips earned her inclusion on our list of patient zeros as she was the first person to officially die of “plague” during the Great Plague of London in 1665–66. Thanks to the work of John Graunt, a London draper with an eye for statistics, deaths from the bubonic plague were meticulously recorded. All told, more than 68,000 deaths from the plague were recorded in a city of around 450,000 people, over 15 percent of the population.^[11]

According to the people of London, the plague that befell the city was the result of two specific occurrences: the appearance of a comet in the skies over London and the coronation of King Charles II. The comet was seen as a bad omen that would bring about the end of days, while the plague was rumored to follow a coronation as a sign that the new king did not have God’s favor.

We know now that the Great Plague of London was actually the result of squalid living conditions that put people near plague-infected rats that were covered in plague-infected fleas.

Toni Marie Ford is a freelance writer, cinema lover, and slow travel enthusiast from the UK who has been enjoying a nomadic lifestyle since early 2014. Visit her blog, www.worldandshe.com, or follow her on Twitter or Instagram.