There was an image which appeared on rotten.com as well as smyw.com which depicted a man who had his face apparently ‘blown off’, possibly by a shot gun wound/failed suicide attempt.
Many of these photos lack captions/side info, which makes me wonder if it is possible to survive such a grevious injury as having your face blown off. The man in the picture had no nose, upper or lower jaw. In fact everything from the eyes down looked like hamburger. However, he was sitting upright, and his eyes open, making me wonder if he was alive at the time of the picture.
There is another photo of doctors working on a patient who was impaled by a rather large tree branch (the branch looked to be about 6 inches in diameter) which gave no indication of whether he survived or not.
Unfortunately I have seen the photo, and yes it is real. I’m guessing it is pre-op but I am not sure.
On your last note however, there was a discovery channel documentary on a man in the UK who was impaled by a large highway garde rail piece of wood. You know the cylindrical posts with two wires going through them in a line for miles and miles…His car flipped over one and somehow he was impaled. Well, he lived to talk about it…not a nice looking scar though…
Oh and incubus - thanks for not linking to the pic. 
Well, the pics are simple enough to find. I figure gory pictures probably fall under the ‘two click’ rule like nudity does. All you’d have to do is go to those websites and find them easily enough (thus, if anybody is curious enough, they can see for themselves, but I’m not presenting a situation where people will get accidentally grossed out) I don’t want the post to be locked before my question gets answered!
I don’t know if the ‘impaled by branch’ guy was the same fellow you mentioned; the nature of the impaling looked like he fell on the branch (it ran from between his buttocks :eek: out his back just under his ribcage). An injury like that must scramble your insides, not to mention cause immense bleeding.
Though between the Discovery Channel and Ripley’s believe it or not I have learned that human beings are capable of surviving without some things, like a face. There was a guy whose face rotted out from some fungal infection (he had a huge hole in his face pretty much from his forehead down to his upper lip) but he is still alive, he wears a ‘face’ prosthetic and his wife cleans out his, uh, face-hole daily :eek:
I have seen pictures on a prosthetics site (just checked – the site has been revamped and the pics taken down) of a man who sustained a gunshot wound to the face and pretty much lost the entire middle of it – eyes, nose, upper jaw. What remained (the pics showed him fully “healed”) basically looked as if you had punched your fist into a ball of dough – just a big gaping dent, mostly skin except for the mucous membranes where his nose would be. And little magnets implanted to hold his prosthetic face on.
So yes, it’s possible to survive something like that. Whether you would want to is another topic entirely.