Woman Spends 500 Days In A Cave

It's real quick to jump to a different conclusion when you read a headline like "Woman Spends 500 Days In A Cave."  The keyword there is "spends."  It's a lot different from where your mind naturally goes, "trapped."  Either way, though, survival is impressive.  That being said, Spanish extreme athlete Beatriz Flamini CHOSE to go down into a cave for 500 days.

Beatriz was 48 when she went more than 200 feet down into a cave in Granada.  She left strict instructions for her team:  No contact, not even in the event of a family death.  This was an experiment on the effects of extreme isolationism, not deprivation.  So, Flamini had plenty of water and rations.  However, she had NO contact with the outside world.

In the almost 2 years that she was in the cave, Beatriz Flamini consumed 1000 liters of water, read 50 books, and passed her time knitting, exercising, and drawing.  Her health was closely monitored by scientists throughout.  Beatriz says she lost all sense of time after two months and had no idea how long she'd been down in the cave when the extraction team arrived on the 500th day.  “When they came in to get me, I was asleep,” she told reporters, per NBC News. “I thought something had happened. I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.”

You'd think, "How much could possibly happen in 500 days while I'm in a cave?"  Well, enough to make you think you've been in the "Twilight Zone."  Just a couple of major world events that occurred while Flamini was underground include Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the death of Queen Elizabeth II.