Today’s the day.
You’ve left planet Earth behind with its dwindling resources, mounting conflicts, and
Justin Bieber noise that some call music.
You’re one of the chosen few sent to colonize Mars, a molten colored planet that now looms
out in front of the spaceship’s main window.
You find yourself cheering with the others in excitement as you get closer and closer
still.
All are mesmerized by its beckoning fiery glow.
And in an instant, you realize you’re now too close and you haven’t slowed down.
No one has time to scream.
There’s a loud deafening crash and a blinding red glare and then endless, meaningless black.
You have collided with Mars, and now your battered and broken body needs some serious
medical attention.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Infographics Show- today we’re taking a
look at what would happen if you broke every bone in your body.
The last thing you remember was a series of pops and snaps.
Those were the sounds of your skeleton breaking into pieces.
Bones break, or fracture, when subjected to a large amount of force.
While you’ve dutifully drunk your milk and snacked on cheese and so your bones are nice,
strong and calcium-rich, even they cannot absorb the impact of a collision with a planet.
You have all kinds of fractures going on, simple and compound and closed and comminuted
with bones hidden and protruding and cracked and shattered.
You have many injuries, and since you’ve broken every bone, you have a minimum of 206
of them, which is the average number of bones in the adult human body.
Of course, this does vary.
For example, you may have as many as 20 small accessory bones that help with pressure distribution
while others don’t have any.
You may even have 14 ribs on each side instead of 12.
That would be potentially an additional 24 bones and therefore an additional 24 injuries.
In your current circumstances, let’s be optimistic, if you can call it that, and assume
you have fewer ribs and no accessories so your situation isn’t quite as bad.
Though, let’s be serious, your situation is very, very bad.
You’d be dead like the rest aboard the craft if you hadn’t been seated in the very furthest
spot from impact.
Fortunately, those who landed safely on Mars the month before were watching.
They found you among the wreckage and rescued you.
They would have medically induced a coma if you weren’t in one already due to the extent
of the trauma.
Eventually, one day you open your eyes.
It takes them a while to focus.
You are not sure how long you’ve been unconscious, but it must have been awhile since you see
just fine though, according to the doctor rattling on excitedly by your bed, you had
even broken your eye sockets.
The doctor went all out with treatment, which from his face, he enjoyed doing.
You can’t move your head, or actually you can’t really move anything, but from your
reflection up above and from the corner of your eye not an inch of your skin beyond your
face is showing.
It isn’t pretty.
At least they put you on morphine, so you’re feeling kind of good, despite your appearance.
You are covered in bandages, slings, and casts and after numerous surgeries are filled with
screws, pins, plates, and wires.
A probe is now resting in your skull to monitor the pressure in your head as you had bleeding
in your brain.
A chunk of your ribs came detached which would have led to breathing problems if you weren’t
paralyzed from the neck down already due to damage to your vertebrae.
While shattering one is enough to break your neck, remember, you have broken each and every
one.
In other words, you are hooked up to a ventilator machine and a catheter to help with the voiding
of urine.
While you feel pins and needles you cannot detect the aches of your body’s broken bones
or bruised and punctured tissues.
Hopefully your paralysis is temporary, but the doctor notes, that your situation is unprecedented
so literally anything could happen.
In fact, the doctor eagerly shares, you and the medical facility have reached some sort
of an all-time record for the most bones broken and treated at a single time.
That’s great, you think, as your phone rings.
The doctor puts it up to your ear and some woman excitedly tells you that you are now
in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Are you kidding me, you think, as you can’t actually move your mouth to say anything.
Now, we know mass travel to Mars is something of the future and our story thus far has obviously
been somewhat science fiction.
But you may be surprised to know that there have been real-life disasters that happened
right here on Earth that were almost as devastating.
Both men and women all around the world have had accidents that have left them bruised
and battered and with an alarming number of bones broken.
There’s actually a man who holds quite an impressive distinction and made the Guinness
Book of World Records in 1975 for most broken bones in a lifetime.
Born Robert Knievel, he became known as Evel Knievel, the famous motorcycle stuntman who
was clad top to bottom in bodysuits of leather.
In 1965, Knievel came up with the idea of a daredevil show in efforts to earn money
to support his family.
His very first performance was taking his 350cc Honda airborne over a twenty-foot long
container of rattlesnakes.
He ended up hitting the box, but somehow emerged unscathed.
Undeterred by this scrape with deadly fangs he went on to jump over some mountain lions
next.
The following year he successfully jumped 45 feet (14.5 meters) over two trucks and
in 1975 he made it over an amazing fourteen Greyhound buses.
However, he didn’t earn a record for breaking bones without a reason.
In 1967 he cleared a large fountain outside the Las Vegas Ceasar’s Palace, however he
hit the safety ramp on the opposite end at an awkward angle.
This sent him hurtling across the cement and resulted in a twenty-nine-day hospitalization
due to a crushed femur and pelvis in addition to hip, wrist, and ankle fractures, not to
mention a concussion.
He didn’t exactly learn his lesson.
Four months after his discharge, he jumped over thirteen cars.
Then in 1975 he fractured his pelvis and broke his hand attempting to hurdle over ten buses,
or 120 feet (36.6 meters).
This and his other crazy exploits had earned him 433 fractures by the time he entered Guinness
history.
However, even after this he went on to break both arms and suffer a concussion while trying
to jump over tanks of sharks at an amphitheater the next year.
Because a bystander and the cameraman were also injured, this brought about the end of
major stunts for the rest of his career.
While Evel Knievel didn’t sustain his fractures all at once, he did have several accidents
that resulted in quite a bit of serious damage each time.
It was a 22-year-old father in England who set himself apart by breaking almost all of
his bones at one time and miraculously surviving.
He plunged 100 feet from his flat to unforgiving concrete after consuming sleeping pills while
depressed about his relationship and unemployment.
He shattered his heels, ankles, pelvis, arms, and jaw just days after Christmas.
Rods were needed to keep everything in place and his jaw required a cage.
While he fought for his life, he underwent eight operations and pins were inserted in
each and every one of his limbs.
To heal required intensive physiotherapy in addition to several rounds of antibiotics
to ensure he didn’t die from blood poisoning or an infection.
When he first arrived at the hospital no one thought he was going to live.
Three months later he was walking around with support and ready to leave.
Though, wisely, home is now a flat on the ground floor.
Considering the extent of these injuries, it is hard to imagine that there’s a woman
who fell over 33,000 feet or 10,000 meters from the sky and lived.
This earned her the rather awkward Guinness Book record of Highest Fall Survived Without
a Parachute.
It was an involuntary feat that took place in the Czech Republic in January of 1972.
Vesna Vulovic was working as an airline hostess at the time when an explosion from a briefcase
bomb ripped the DC-9 apart, mid-flight.
No one else on the plane made it.
She was discovered amid the aircraft debris, screaming and without shoes.
She was lucky that Bruno Honke, who first found her, had been a World War II medic.
She had broken both legs, three of her vertebrae, and some ribs as well as fractured her skull
and pelvis.
Fortunately, chronic low blood pressure stopped her heart from bursting upon impact.
Due to her head injuries she had a brain haemorrhage and complete amnesia regarding what had happened.
Yet, somehow, she quickly recovered.
Her doctors had expected her to be permanently paralyzed; however, she was not.
In fact, when she woke from her 27-day coma she casually requested a cigarette.
10 months later she was walking, and not long after that, she was flying on another plane.
As these true stories show, the seemingly impossible is actually possible and people
have gone on to survive the unsurvivable.
So now our Mars story doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Only, sadly, it really is.
These stories we have shared are far from the norm and many who undergo such extensive
trauma typically aren’t around to talk about it afterward.
A teen in Spain, for example, toppled 45 feet (13.7m) when he tried to step from a friend’s
balcony to his own.
Again, almost every bone in his body was smashed except for his arms and legs.
He was found in a pool of blood 10 feet (3m) wide, completely unconscious.
His ribs could be seen as well as tissues from a lung and his brain.
Part of his skull was removed as his brain haemorrhaged and swelled, both kidneys failed,
his lung was punctured, and he suffered from blood poisoning.
Though he fought a valiant fight, later he died.
Miracles can and do occur, but often people who break most of their bones won’t make
it.
Fortunately, statistics are in our favor and most people won’t damage very many.
In the United States, the average person will break two bones during his or her lifetime.
Then again, those in England are somewhat luckier and likely to break only one.
Though over their lives they will also have 4,944 different types of injuries and ailments,
develop two plantar warts, and feel badly at least 61 times annually.
This is according to population statistics.
We’d still prefer a bout of the flu or even a wart on our foot over breaking any more
bones than we have to.
Especially when falling thousands of feet from an exploding plane or crashing a motorcycle
into some buses.
Though, these do make quite awesome stories.
If you were told you broke a record after almost dying, would you be excited or would
you tell whoever was talking to get out or shut up?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video called What Happens To Your Body When You’re
In a Coma!
Thanks for watching, and, as always, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe.
See you next time!