5 Self-Destructive Ways People Accidentally Cured Themselves
Sometimes people do things that are less than brilliant. For every Joseph Lister developing important advances in sterile surgery, there is a Randy Quaid sticking lit firecrackers into his own urethra.
Not to mention jamming airplanes into the massive space urethras of alien invaders.
But every now and then the fates grant those who flagrantly disregard their own well-being with a second chance.
Suicide Cures Depression
Meet The Major, a 55-year-old British army veteran and known asshole who, after returning to civilian life, became "bad-tempered and depressed" (which seems to indicate that he was probably Irish). He began drinking excessively and slid further and further into debt until one morning he got out of bed, dressed himself sharply, combed his hair neatly and shot himself through the brain with a .38 revolver.
HOO-AH!
Then he cooked breakfast.
His wife found him later that morning (either he used a silencer or she is totally deaf) eating calmly with blood leaking out of both sides of his head. She called a doctor, but there wasn't a whole lot more he could do other than swab out the bullet holes and try to keep the Major's brain from sliding out like a Go-Gurt stick.
To help you fully visualize that horrifying analogy.
The Major was kept at the hospital as an inpatient for five months, during which time he recovered nicely but was a bit disoriented, which is to be expected after a piece of metal rockets through your skull at the speed of sound.
Once he was released, the Major no longer suffered from his previous symptoms of depression, moodiness and delusions. He didn't even remember shooting himself and denied it had ever happened.
In a twist that you would call bullshit on if you saw it in a movie, his attempt at suicide had apparently cured his mental disorder and he lived happily ever after. Seriously, what are the odds?
Well, now that you mention it...
Whatever they are, they're not high enough to prevent it from happening a second time. A 45-year-old widow living by herself in Maine with a severe case of depression laid her chin on the end of a shotgun one day and pulled the trigger, removing her tongue, nose and part of her brain. After somehow managing to not die from this, her doctors remodeled her face and her depression completely vanished.
Furthermore, her doctor went on record to say, "Today, the patient is practically as good as new physically. Mentally, she is much better." That's right--the woman shot herself in the face with a shotgun and a fucking medical professional said it was an improvement.
Boob Job Saves Life
Elena Marinova is a girl who believes in the old Mae West adage that "too much of a good thing is wonderful," and since we're talking about too much boobs right now we tend to agree with her.
Elena had breast augmentation surgery to a heroic 40-DD, giving her a chest so large that her shoulders actually have cleavage. Anyone with a basic knowledge of gravity and weight distribution would come to the conclusion that unless Elena is a Brachiosaurus, trying to walk with implants that size without them snapping her back in half would be just about impossible without the help of a dark wizard and/or the power loader from Aliens.
Or both.
Eastern Bloc nations aren't exactly known for their scrupulous plastic surgeons, so it's doubtful anyone told her this might be a dangerous idea (we certainly wouldn't have). As it turns out, that borderline-criminal negligence actually wound up saving her life.
While driving in the Northern Bulgarian city of Rousse, Elena was involved in a head-on collision with another vehicle, presumably because she couldn't see the road over her prehistoric tits.
Both cars were totaled and the other driver was taken to the hospital with severe injuries, but Elena managed to walk away from the accident. Why? Because of her cartoonishly oversized breasts, of course.
Police believe they cushioned her from the impact in exactly the same manner as an airbag (something cars in Bulgaria evidently lack). Unfortunately, the force of the impact that threw her against the steering column was so great that the silicone in her chest fucking exploded.
Despite that, um, setback, Elena was relatively unscathed, her boobs having gallantly defended her internal organs from damage. Meanwhile, Cracked is hard at work trying to figure out how to replace the airbags in our 1997 Ford Aspires with a set of giant deployable breasts.
Obesity Crushes Virus
Clair Robinson, a 23-year-old woman from Victoria, Australia, had the self-inflicted, life threatening condition of being morbidly obese (clinically defined as "Doritoverdose"). It is one of the leading preventable causes of death worldwide, so naturally Clair wanted to take action by going into the hospital to have a completely unrelated surgery to remove some ovarian cysts.
Obesity isn't funny.
The surgery went as planned and she was released from the hospital with a clean bill of health, a term which here means "the cysts are gone, but you're still fat and now you have a flesh eating virus."
It seems that sometime during the procedure, she contracted necrotizing fasciitis, better known as that shit from Cabin Fever and Outbreak that eats your goddamn skin off. She was airlifted to the hospital, presumably by the same helicopter rig that took dinosaurs off of Site B in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and underwent immediate emergency medical treatment.
Artist's rendering.
She was kept in a hyperbaric chamber while surgeons removed infected pieces of skin from her body every three days. Normally the virus is insanely fatal, killing more than half of its victims within the first 24 hours of infection, but her tremendous mass was keeping the virus at bay.
That's right--she was too freaking fat for the virus to eat.
Separated from death by nothing more than two decades of eating peanut M&Ms, Clair was able to survive one of the deadliest infections in history because it was unable to reach any of her vital organs. She made a full recovery after the doctors finally assessed that the virus just "gave up."
"Fuck this, I quit."
The next time a physician tells you to bring your weight down, go get a second opinion from Totino's Pizza Rolls and a stick of butter.
Fistfight Corrects Vision
Not every bad behavior is completely self inflicted. Sometimes you need a partner, which is exactly what a young boy in 1970s Russia thought when he got into a boxing match with another kid while neglecting to first remove his prescription eyeglasses.
Nerd fight!
Predictably he got rocked right in the damn face, embedding the glass from his soviet spectacles into his eye and causing a corneal laceration. While it seemed the fates had just kicked him in the balls twice by first making his vision suck and then punching glass into it, it turns out they had something far grander in store for him (sadly it was not to become a communist pirate).
In order to remove the glass, a layer of the kid's eye had to be shaved off, presumably with an ice cream scoop. The combined result of the injury and the treatment was a flatter cornea which allowed the eye to focus light more effectively. After a short recovery, the boy's eyesight not only came back, but in fact was better than it was prior to taking an eye-slashing Dragon Punch.
The doctor who had attended him observed the phenomenon and determined that if a couple of retards in a fight could accidentally repair a person's vision, a surgeon should be able to do it on purpose. Hence, the birth of corrective eye surgery.
Except now we use lasers because it's the future.
Lightning Fixes Everything
In 1980, 62-year-old Edwin Robinson of Falmouth, Maine had been deaf and blind for nine years as a result of a head injury he received in a collision with a tractor trailer. One day he was wandering around looking for his pet chicken "Took Took" when he suddenly found himself caught outside in a lightning storm, presumably because God felt he hadn't been punished enough.
"Eat that, you sightless bastard."
Rather than return to his house, he began swinging his aluminum cane around to try to find his way to shelter underneath the biggest tree in his backyard, which is the precise decision a person with a severe head injury would make. Meanwhile, we here at Cracked wonder how a blind, deaf man ever expected to find a goddamn chicken, let alone how he managed to determine that it was missing in the first place.
"I said I'm in the kitchen, Edwin! Get your silly ass back inside!"
At any rate, Edwin's metal cane and giant tree shelter proved too tempting for the storm and he was inevitably struck by lightning, blowing out his hearing aid, blackening the grass around him and knocking him out for a good 20 minutes. When he regained consciousness he crawled back into the house and went to sleep, because getting hit with the fury of Zeus tends to wear you out.
When Edwin finally woke up, he found that he could see straight ahead (no peripheral vision) and he that could hear perfectly. Not only that, but his hair even grew back after 35 years of baldness. Like any recipient of a bonafide miracle, Edwin hit the talk show circuit, inspiring a generation of bald, deaf, blind people to try and get themselves struck by lightning.
Have an idea for an article? Think you're funny? Just go here and sign up. No experience necessary.
To see the happy endings of world tragedies, check out 5 Great Things You Didn't Know Came from Horrific Tragedies. Or read about some not so happy celebrity endings, in 5 Movie Martial Artists That Lost a Deathmatch to Dignity.
Stop by our Top Picks to see the improbable happy ending of the Internet.
And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get dick jokes in your news feed.
