Nigh Invulnerability/Real Life

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Examples of Nigh Invulnerability in Real Life include:

Kazuyuki Fujita's skull.
Water Bears. Can survive extreme heat and near Absolute Zero temperatures. Can survive being exposed to lethal doses of environmental toxins and radiation. Can survive six times the pressure of the deepest part of the ocean. Can survive without water for a decade. Can survive the vacuum of space.
Michael Malloy, a target of gangster/bootlegger duo Tony Marino and Joe Murphy in the early 1930s. He survived being given enough alcohol to be fatal, being given whisky spiked with antifreeze, being given several drinks spiked with antifreeze, turpentine, horse liniment, and rat poisoning, being fed a sandwich made with spoiled sardines, metal shavings, and tacks, being fed a sandwich made with oysters soaked in wood alcohol (which could cause blindness, and that didn't work either), being buried in snow in below-zero temperatures, and being hit by a taxi. They finally managed to kill him by knocking him out and gassing him, but it's still unknown how he survived all the attempts on his life.
- Though to be fair, since the treatment for antifreeze poisoning is alcohol, spiking whiskey with antifreeze to kill someone wasn't likely to work in the first place.
Alan Magee, who survived 28 shrapnel wounds, severe oxygen deprivation and a 22,000 foot freefall in one sitting. He lived to the ripe old age of 84.
Army Corporal Alvin York. During WWI, his unit was sent to capture a German railroad, when they came under fire from dozens of hidden German machine gun nests. With half the squad dead and the other half cowering, York stood alone with his rifle and took concentrated fire from thirty-two machine gunners and over 100 German riflemen and didn't. Receive. A scratch. He fired back, killing 28 Germans, and according to his account he didn't even miss.

York: I jes couldn't miss a German's head or body at that distance. And I didn't. Besides, it weren't no time to miss nohow.

The Germans, slowly realizing that York was somehow not dying from the hurricane of lead they were firing at him, sent a six-man squad to rush him. Since he had few shots left in his rifle, York drew and shot them all down with his pistol, back to front, so the ones in front wouldn't notice the others dying until too late. Shortly after, he accepted an offer of surrender from the German major present and marched all 130 or so remaining soldiers back to his base as prisoners (surviving several false surrender gambits including brushing off a hand grenade attack from one such, as well as heavy artillery fire all the while he was escorting the captured soldiers), after having had tens or hundreds of thousands of bullets from scores of heavy machine guns and rifles fired at him without leaving a mark on his body. Not enough gun, it seems.

- Incidentally, York himself believed that God protected and guided him during the battle...if he was right, this may be more of a literal example than it appears.
Grigori Rasputin was supposedly poisoned, shot, beaten, and stabbed in an assassination attemp before being bundled into a carpet and thrown into the river where, it was claimed he actually died of drowning. However, according to his Wikipedia entry, new evidence claims there might not have been any poison in his body and the bullet wound to his head should have killed him instantly.
In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson mentions a species of bacteria, Micrococcus radiophilus (since renamed Deinococcus radiodurans after genetic analysis showed it wasn't a micrococcus), "found living happily in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors, gorging itself on plutonium and whatever else was there." It doesn't just survive radioactivity, like the water bears above — it eats radioactives.

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