Doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc.—what’s the most shocking thing you’ve seen after thinking “nothing could surprise me anymore”?

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Doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc.—what’s the most shocking thing you’ve seen after thinking “nothing could surprise me anymore”?

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  1. neverstoppedtrying Avatar

    Ex EMT here, I always thought babies took time to be born, well, thats not always the case. I was helping a woman who wasn’t english speaking, she was very pregnant, and we kept trying to tell her to calm down, to breathe, but she was just screaming, and in a blink a baby popped out into her sweat pants. We cut off her blue sweat pants and there was a baby girl. Just like that. It just popped out.

  2. Simple_Step_9722 Avatar

    I cut into a guy and the bones in his body were green. Like a moss green. Turns out he’d taken a lot of tetracycline as a kid and that’s what did it. Absolutely wild.

    Also undressed a deceased woman to do a physical exam. Removed her Johnny shirt and it looked like there was a head of cauliflower growing out of her vulva. Worst case of genital warts I’ve ever seen.

  3. Otherwise-Ground-503 Avatar

    Just last week there was a patient who kept putting things up his urethra so he could get pain medicine. He stuck styrofoam from a cup, rolled up paper, medication, silverware, and change. Probably more things too 😂

  4. chunkalunkk Avatar

    Following this thread….

  5. tacmed85 Avatar

    20 year medic. It’s actually really hard to say what’s the most shocking, but I once had a guy on hallucinogens completely remove all the tissue from his left forearm. Took it clear down to the radius and ulna. Dude was just chilling like everything was normal. It was crazy and definitely goes on the list.

  6. poopyscoopy24 Avatar

    Emergency physician. I thought I had seen it all until a few months back I had a septic lady who I couldn’t figure out the source. Admitted her and she was a boarder in our ED overnight. Next shift a nurse comes out of her room. Doc I literally just caught the woman injecting something into her PICC line. Woman was injecting a slurry of her own shit into the picc line. Yeah.

  7. unbutter-robot Avatar

    r/Antipsychiatry

  8. ToughLiterature1987 Avatar

    Back in the days! ! Preparing to do anesthesia to a patient that was involved in a motorcycle accident. I was preparing my area and all of the sudden I see the nurses wheel in the patient’s two legs with the high heels still on!! I couldn’t stop laughing at all!!

  9. Big_Bowler8424 Avatar

    Swallowed needles. He had like 6 in there. The xray was crazy. Apparently he’s a regular with swallowing things he shouldn’t.

  10. Jeffroafro1 Avatar

    The attempted murder of a 7 year old by the father…. With 10+ stab wounds and a slash to the neck. Humanity knows no bounds

  11. drRATM Avatar

    A 8×10 sheet of paper (front and badk, 2 columns each side) list of “allergies and intolerances” that a woman brought to the hospital with her. Laminated. Included things like saline in plastic bags, wet newspaper, toilet paper and tons of meds, except narcotics of course.

  12. Darth_Destructus Avatar

    I was a nursing student a few years back. During clinicals I saw a lot. In one week, I saw one of my patients lose a bit more of his foot from progressing gangrene that we just could not get ahead of for some goddamn reason, a colostomy bag seal failure that started draining into an open wound bed (I will never forget the smell), a guy with jaundice that was so bad that I thought he stepped straight out of The Simpsons, and was bitten by no less than 2 separate dementia patients, one of which had c diff…

    I didn’t stay in the program very long, but I will never forget my time working in the hospital.

    For those of you wondering what happened, I was doing nursing through the Army, thus making a four-year course be squeezed down into one year. And my instructors were, unfortunately, poorly equipped to meet the demands of the new NCLEX. That’s the problem with being in a pilot program: the instructors are also trying to figure it out, in the Army didn’t provide room for perceived failures in testing…

  13. milksteaknjellybean Avatar

    Probably a psychotic male shoving both hands up his own rectum and smearing feces in his own eyes.

    He was one of the sickest patients I have ever cared for as a psychiatrist.

  14. jmiller1856 Avatar

    Registered Vet Tech with 21 years experience: A 17 week old kitten declawed at home because he scratched the owner while playing. The little dude also had all four of his canine teeth broken and his feet were burned with a lighter to “cauterize the bleeding.”

    I have 16 years of experience in ER. I’ve seen some shit, but this is the one that made me cry while on shift. Anyway, previous owner was charged with felony animal cruelty and the kitten lives with me now. He goes to work with me every day.

  15. sam_neil Avatar

    Just before I retired I was working as an EMS lieutenant (first rank of being a supervisor). I worked in a huge city that had a lot of different radio frequencies for different sections of the city.

    I was supposed to sit right on the border of “central” and “north” and monitored both frequencies so I could respond to jobs without having to have the dispatchers relay the message.

    One night, the north got a call for a shooting. As I put it in gear, I hear another unit on central get called to the same address for a cardiac arrest. My jimmies fully rustled, I floor it and tell both that I’m responding.

    Upon arrival, along with police and a fire engine, we are met by the patients girlfriend, who is sobbing, but motions us in to apartment that has been given an Event Horizon themed makeover. There’s just a comical amount of blood. We follow the blood into the bathroom and find a guy sitting on the toilet holding a towel against his head.

    He takes it away for a second and there is obvious arterial spray from his temple. He says he’s fine and for us to leave, the girlfriend says he shot himself. Neither are directly true.

    The cops start demanding to know where the gun is, but there is no gun. Dude shot himself in the fucking head with a crossbow (the size of a large pistol)

    He made it to the hospital fine, and likely made a full recovery, but as we were patching him up one of the medics (one of the funniest people I’ve ever met) paused and said “between the five firemen, 4 cops, 2 emts, 2 paramedics and the EMS supervisor, there’s gotta be over 100 years of experience in this room. Any of you ever had a crossbow injury before?”

    This was followed by a chorus of “huh, hrm, hmm” from everyone realizing how fucking bizarre this whole situation was.