Last week, a lady was brought into the emergency ward and guess what’s the problem, she stuck up a large cucumber in there and I don’t know how it happen but it ended up breaking into halves inside of her and she can’t pull out the upper half, it was really a crazy day
Not a doctor but work in healthcare. Sexual assault of children is inarguably the worst, especially when they’re under the age of 10. Some humans truly don’t deserve to share our oxygen and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to understand how anybody could do something so cruel.
Story from my mom she is OBGYN in a high risk hospital but a lady ended up barricading a room she was on PCP pretty hard. By the time the doctors got it opened with security help she already gave birth. For 3 days straight she was telling everyone how she was the doctor not them.
A Lady eating a banana Through the hole in the mask for non-invasive ventilation (a sort of external respirator). She had removed had removed the pipes.
Maggots in the face. They didn’t even seem to mind.
Edit: More info, they were meth users with terrible health, including terrible oral health. They had an oral cavity tumor that ate through their cheek. They mentioned flies landing on them but never noticed that their larvae were having a feast. We had to essentially power wash the area before actually operating. Don’t do meth kids. Don’t smoke either.
A few years back, we responded to a call for “burn victim”. We could smell the charred flesh coming up the driveway and ultimately found a women in her early 30s who had tripped and fallen directly over a small bonfire pit. Her husband (a firefighter in a neighboring county) had found her and pulled her away but it was far too late. Her entire body above her knees was charred to the bone and her internal organs had spilled out of her burst abdomen.
Fortunately, she likely was knocked unconscious after falling as evidenced by some bricks disturbed from the fall with blood on them opposite the side she would have tripped over. Likely she suffered a major head injury and was hopefully spared the pain of burning alive. It was a rough one for sure, but mostly for the poor husband who I believe a few months later quit the fire service.
Have a few more that involve major trauma to the head (shotgun suicide etc…) but those were all pretty similar.
Not the craziest but one of the most memorable. I was working urgent care early in my career and had a lady in her 60s check in for “hemorrhoid” for the past 2 weeks. Usually straight forward. Walk in the room and she describes the typical presentation of a hemorrhoid and states she’s had them before. So I tell her to undress and put on a gown and I’d be back in with my chaperone.
The MA and I walk in and she’s bent over the exam table with her bare ass towards us and asks “do you see it?”. It looked like there’s a tail hanging out of her ass the size of an Arizona Iced Tea can except it was her rectum and colon. She had a complete rectal prolapse. One of the worst I had seen. And she thought it was a hemorrhoid.
What I have heard from family members in the field:
In some third world nations women have many children and their bodies can’t take it. Their uterus’ can’t stay in place and will hang. The woman have no access to medical care and turn to using potatoes to keep things in place. They can pick the right size and as the roots sprout, it stays in place better.
I heard of a mans penis dropping off when they went to examine it.
Toes falling off with diabetic patients.
Plenty of physical attacks.
Have only heard from one doctor of anything stuffed in a rectum. Drugs.
Incarcerated patients will often hurt themselves to just get out of jail for a while. Many would beat their genitals till they bled or their kidneys.
Men with broken penises get treatment damn fast. One patient was so freaked out by the thought of surgery on his penis he refused. He was advised that if he didn’t get the surgery, his penis would never function again and his life would likely be destroyed. Limped out AMA. Crazy.
When I was a student we had a patient, very large man, with a peri-anal abscess the size of a grapefruit. It had formed a fistula (connecting tube/channel) with his rectum. So he had this grapefruit-sized crater in his butt cheek that was oozing pus and feces. Every day a couple of us students would help roll him on his side so one or two PAs could change his dressing.
Tied for first place, at my first job, we had a woman who cheated on her husband, and bought cytotec (one of the abortion pills) on the black market. She took a ton of it and began hemorrhaging. When in the ER, she told us the full story, but told her husband that it was HIS child (he didn’t know she was pregnant before this) and that she was miscarrying. He was sobbing the entire time. Poor guy.
Was in medical school on inpatient psych. Happened right before I got on the rotation so I didn’t directly see it but everyone was talking about it, lady was in a schizophrenic episode and she pulled out her own eyeball with her finger and severed the vessels and nerves, then proceeded to eat her eye. She said it was because she wanted to “see inside herself.”
My sister’s story: she was working in the ER one weekend. A woman was brought in in bad shape. She had been in a single car accident. She was speeding, not wearing a seatbelt and on her phone. She was also pregnant. By the time she got to the hospital, there was no longer a fetal heatbeat. At any rate, the lady survived but lost the baby. Then the craziness started, she sued my sister and the hospital claiming that their negligence caused the death of her baby. Obviously this was bs but some ambulance chaser had gotten his claws into her.
After months of litigating my sister was furious to learn that hospital decided to settle. She went in to complain to the admins about why they settled when it was clearly a bs, frivolous lawsuit and neither she, not any other staff had done anything wrong. The lady caused the accident herself and the baby was already deceased when she came into the er. They told her that it was easier and much less expensive just to pay the lady 50K and have her sign an agreement to forego any future legal action than to continue litigating. System is fucked. So lady in southern rural Oklahoma who got 50k out the local hospital, it’s your fault that your baby died.
Happened to me many years ago when I was a junior in casualty. Guy comes in (20ish) Sunday morning wearing a long trenchcoat (always suspicious!) looking very drawn and haggard. Buzz starts going around and I go see him.
History was he was at a house party that night. Found a padlock and thought it’d be funny to put it around the neck of his balls. “Friends” with him then jumped him and broke the key in the lock! Result a very large and rather permanent “Prince Albert.” Anyway guy goes home to get the padlock off…but it just can’t make it over his balls. So what does he do? Yep….smothers them in baby oil. Still no result..so then it becomes serious. He decides to try and squeeze each one of his balls through the hoop of the padlock in turn. He told me he had to count to three and make a muffled squeal (not waking the others in the house) as he tried to make them oval to push through….but still wasn’t quite enough and the pain was so great he fainted.
So that is where we rejoin the story and he’s stood there with a very shiny, rather purple and distinctly swollen pair of..well, plums. We had to call the fire brigade with bolt cutters to free his balls…and the guy was out of casualty like a shot….lesson learned..!
Had a 19 year old who was shot several time when I was in residency. He was coding on the way, we did CPR in the trauma bay, ran the ATLS algorithm, even did a thoracotomy. We kept going because we’d get a moment of normalish rhythm. After we were done and called it, i was sitting across from the trauma bay writing the note (I was an intern), cleaning crew is in there mopping up the chaos — the kid sat up and let out this horrible guttural groan. Very likely just abdominal and diaphragm spasm that caused both of these, but none the less — scared the absolute shit out of everyone. Cleaning crew looked dead. Kids just sitting up, chest cut wide open with his heart visible, then fell back down. We instinctively re-ran the code, but ya, still died.
Dumbest shit: 18 year old moved in with her boyfriend. She didn’t want to poop in the house with him, so she took Imodium on a schedule — no bowel movement for 2 months. Came into the ED with abdominal distension. She had a stool impaction that was her entire abdomen, pelvic bone to the base of her pericardium. It was like 15 kg. It had stretched her colon so much, it necrosed from the pressure — had to have an open laparotomy to remove it and the dead sigmoid colon, and left with a bag.
The first serious car wreck I went to at around 19 was a suicide attempt. Guy drove full speed into a concrete wall, skinny end first. Turned his midsized into a compact and he was just in shock when we found him. not literally, he couldn’t believe he did that / survived.
I had a girl my age miss a bridge and fall onto an overpass, and she needed a tracheotomy before the ambulance pulled away. She was really messed up on drugs and kept saying her boyfriend was in the car, so we were looking for an ejected body in the hillside for a while before she was deemed tripping balls.
Next one after that a few months later, I buried my friend Jorge who was killed on his way to college. He misjudged an oncoming car and was killed almost instantly via blunt force.
It’s never the ones who kind of deserve it, is it?
Not a doctor, but when I was in Basic in 2010, I stress fractured both legs. While I was in the waiting room during a follow-up appointment, there was a bunch of shouting and commotion outside. Then, about 6 soldiers, including 2 or three drill sargents and the rest trainees, came barging in carrying a trainee. It turned out that the guy, apparently their best in training, had somehow fallen off the side of a steep hill during a ruck march. While on his way tumbling down the hill, he somehow separated one of his testicles from his body
As a emt the worst thing I have seen was someone that had fallen off the top of a internet tower way up in there air. When I arrived there was absolutely nothing I could do and there body looked like a giant has smushed it with there foot.
A small glass bottle in the rectum. It got “lost”, so we had to sedate him do a colonoscopy, but weren’t able to grab the bottle with the endoscope. Woke him up to schedule surgery, but he ran away from the hospital. Turned up the next day in the ER, only to leave again before seeing the doctor. It came out by itself in the end. Oh and did I mention that he had untreated HIV and Hepatitis C infections?
I had a frequent flyer who would cheek her meds, then when the nurse left she’d crush them and mix them with urine from her urostomy bag and inject into her IVs. We knew she was doing it because her blood cultures would grow four different unrelated bacteria.
Not me but my cousin. She knew she wanted to marry her fellow pathologist boyfriend (at the time) when he called her over to look at a picture on his computer….of a woman spread eagle that had a small suspicious patch on the outside of one labia. It was one of those weird porn solicitation emails that were really common in the early 2000s. He wanted her to look at it to confirm his suspicions and then emailed the address back stating he wasn’t interested but to go to a doctor immediately for testing. Close to a year later he got an email back (from a different email) thanking him for suggesting to go to a doctor because it was a melanoma. Guy is 10/10. Cousin married well. He tells that story to everyone.
I had a woman ask me for sedatives to keep her husband knocked out while she managed to escape with the kids.
Guy came in not responding with head trauma, he was high and got into a fight with a group of men and recieved a grand slam to the back of the head with a bat. On top of that he had to be sedated in the ambulance because he was trying to fight the EMTs.
Later that night this woman and her child came to the ER asking for him, turns out the guy had been missing for a while. I told her that he was sedated and that he would be out for a while. That’s when she ask me for more sedatives and explained me that he abused them before disappearing. I was just a student and had barely started doing rounds, so I sent her to the ER doc and that’s the last I heard from them, I never knew if the doctor did prescribe sedatives, didn’t want to find out either but I do hope they’re okay.
I’m not a Doctor but had a Doctor in an emergency room literal say “what in the fuck…..” as he felt a mass on the inside of my leg just next to my knee
After finishing a 100 mile Ultra Marathon I had a cut that I just wrapped up and continued on my way
The following week I flew to Vermont to do another 30 mile Ruck in Killington reopening the wound
I put quick clot on it, bandaged and flew back home
About a week later the wound was closed but it hurt like hell and I felt a round mass that was hard as a rock
I go into the ER and the first Doctor has no idea what it is. The second Doctor feels around and decides that we need to cut into it.
They shoot me up with a sedative and slice away……only I felt every bit of that scalpel yelling “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST” as a hissing sound is coming out of my leg
Apparently an infection became encased in a silicone ball and was just sitting against the inside of my leg.
The worst part, the Doctor in the most father like way said “Son, this is where it’s going to hurt like hell but I need you to remain still and hold on”
He took this mini surgical spoon like tool and proceeded to scrape out the inside of where he cut. What seemed like hours was just 30 seconds of this Doctor trying his best to clean out this infection while I’m screaming in agony
Translated for a doctor. She had a patient that was a digger in Chernobyl (if you watch the show they got coal miners to dig a tunnel to allow some water reservoir to cool part of the reactor IIRC). He was exposed to a lot of radiation and showed us a limb that did not look like anything that occurs in our biology.
We kept it professional but after the session both the doctor and I told the office manager we were leaving. She asked when we’d be back (assuming we were taking a break) and we both said “maybe tomorrow.” It’s was…a lot but I’m literally don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I saw.
Ex-911 dispatch. Guy called because his dad went through his tractor’s power take-off (the spining shaft behind that gives power to equipements). Protocol says to administer CPR for massive trauma. He said “There isn’t anything left from under the jaw”. I told him to go back inside and wait for the paramedics. I called them while they were on the way to warn them and I called their super to talk to them afterwards.
I always had a fear to get caught in PTOs and that was a rough one to get out of my head.
I have a happier one: super early catching of lymphoma. A person came to the hospital because their dog had yanked them hard enough to hurt their shoulder. In the exams and work up, abnormal lymph nodes were found around the shoulder/armpit. That led to one of the earliest diagnosis of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, DLBCL, that the oncologists had ever seen.
It was very personal for me because they were rather anti-medicine. Did not want to take medications. Rarely went to the doctor. And had a general distrust of all things medical. So this would have probably not been caught until it was far too late. I spent a lot of time with them to walk through their chemotherapy regimen. There were several drugs, some much scarier than others. They were originally not going to pursue treatment due to their distrust. The last time I saw them, they were sitting in the chair getting their first treatment.
I was an intern (first-year physician) assigned to the colorectal surgery service. As a noob, I naturally got only the best, most prestigious of jobs. This of course included helping manually disimpact constipated patients. This involved placing anal suppositories and enemas, then fishing around with my fingers to get things moving.
There was a 400lb patient who hadn’t shat in weeks. By this point in the rotation, I was getting pretty good at getting things moving. I did my thing. And after removing my finger, the poo starting flowing. Nothing dramatic happened (e.g no fountain of poo shot past me), but the poo just kept coming. It had a texture somewhere between pudding and soft-serve ice cream and it: Just. Kept. Coming. It filled the space between his legs and then flowed down onto the floor. He shat continuously for almost 30 minutes. Volumes of shit I didn’t know a human body could hold. Truly something to behold.
It was in my first year of anesthesiology residency.I was in the trauma OT next to the trauma ward where patients who need ICU admission are recieved.
So my patient needed blood and in our hospital it is the workers who bring the the blood. I got informed that it is in the recieving area and that I need to fetch it. The blood usually comes in the portable box just like a freezer.
So when I went there was one box. I opened it and to my horror there was severed hand waiting for someone to high five it. It belonged to the new patient who had just come into the receiving area. I needed 3-4 minutes to come back to my senses!
There was another box which I hadn’t seen which contained the blood.
Once an investigator in clinical trials injected the test article in the wrong eye. Instead of helping the affected eye, they made patient almost blind. Subject was excluded from the trial and never had a chance to complete the treatment. Insuarance covered all the stuff, but the TA was a new drug, and patient could have a chance for recovery with it.
I am not a Dr., I am not a medical professional, I am just a man who witnessed something so incredibly disturbing that I will NEVER forget it.
A location I was working at had 4th class engineers on hand to deal with boilers and mechanical issues, legally we had to have one in the building if anyone was in it.
It’s a slow evening, us warehouse guys are working away in a warehouse that has huge fans going in it to maintain perishable products so it’s loud… some guys opted to use earplugs for hearing protection type loud.
Suddenly there is this scream that rips through the building, if the door from the warehouse to storage hadn’t been open we’d have never heard it, it honestly made me want to fall to my knees just hearing the pain and fear in this scream.
Me and another worker go running and we find the source in the parts shop… the engineer is on the floor, screaming, that scream that turns your blood to ice. Without looking I tell other fellow to call 911 and wait outside for an ambulance… the smell in the shop was acidic… wickedly so.
The fellow on the floor is thrashing around, the best I can do is try and keep the area clear around him to ensure he doesn’t smash himself into anything on the floor… I still don’t know what’s wrong with him but the scream won’t stop. I’m calling out his name while trying to keep the area safe, he just keeps screaming.
The ambulance arrives the EMT’s get me out of the way and start to help the injured worker, it’s then that I see his face…
Imagine a candle, melting, still warm with wax running down it… that was his face. If you ever looked at any Two Face makeup and went “that’s pretty good”… no it’s not.
The engineer was having a slow night and he figured he’d pour some drain cleaner down the drains in the shop… that shit that eats organic matter… well, he had poured a bunch down one drain and it wasn’t draining so he goes and gets a plunger to try and clear the drain. Turns out there was a pocket of air, or something stopping the flow, he plunged it a couple times and looked over it (no PPE on) and the bubble bursts… acid straight up into his face.
That poor man, luckily he didn’t lose an eye, several skin grafts later and he is “presentable” but not normal looking, you know?
I’ll never forget that scream and I’ll never forget that face.
My dad worked in the hospital in the military. There was a motorcyclist that came in to the ER with the bottom portion of his jaw, practically resting on his chest. The guy was needing his face and jaw to be sewn back together/entirely reconstructed.
Turns out the dude and some friends were on motorcycles somewhere out in the country where there was lots of open land and the freedom to pretty much go whatever speed they felt was safe. The unlucky one in the front of the pack had reached a point, that while he was in the middle of gunnin it, somehow a metal wire/line appeared before him; before he was able to see it or make any attempts to slow down…
well…contact clearly was made with this wire fencing line and he nearly had the entire bottom half of his jaw entirely ripped off demanding an ambulance ride to the E.R.
I’m not a doctor but a paramedic. I once went to a man who was found in cardiac arrest with a half eaten Big Mac next to him. About 2 mins of CPR and he ROSCd (Return of Spontaneous Circulation) and sat up.
He was confused for all of 10 seconds before he looked at his Big Mac, looked at us, said thank you and then processed to scoff and finish the rest of his burger and joked “can’t forget that”. We got him to hospital but not sure what happened to him after that.
To add to your “major trauma to the head” mention. There is a famous case that is absolutely chilling that I’ve heard a few times.
A police department received numerous 911 calls from people who claimed that a man in a terrifying zombie/monster mask was banging on their doors.
He went to numerous addresses and scared an entire community.
When the police responded, they learned that it was MUCH worse than they expected.
The man wasn’t wearing a mask. He had shot himself in the face with a shotgun…and unfortunately survived the ordeal. In a panic, he ran door to door seeking help…but none of the residents could understand that the horrific mask he wore was in fact an actually traumatic facial injury. He died shortly after police responded.
Paramedic: got a call to a car driving the wrong way down a motorway head on with a lorry.
Once we arrived, the lorry driver says the car matched his position everytime he tried to change lanes to not crash as he could see the car coming up in the distance the wrong way (intentional collision by the car).
The car was cut clean from the wing mirrors front to back.
Car drivers head was missing, and for some reason we found his penis about 20ft away in the central reservation.
Turns out the car off’d himself following a arrest and bail for being a pēdô.
Also went to a father that strangled his 6 year old some o the day he got custody the hung himself.
Had a 16 y/o patient in labor who was very nauseous upon arrival at the labor room. While one of
the interns was inserting an IV line, she pulled a 5 to 6 inch worm from her mouth. PULLED. Like it was nothing. Her nausea stopped then few hours later she gave birth. So a good day for her I guess 😬
My mom’s story, happened not that long ago, and in 20 years of Adult Protective and Post Hospital Placement, it was the ONE thing she’d never seen before.
Young girl comes in after ODing, in absolutely AWFUL shape. Meth, unfortunately. However, during exam and treatment, the doctors come to realize…she has BOTULISM. WTF right?
Then two more young people came in to ERs in the area, suffering from signs of Botulism. Also using Meth.
They traced it back to ONE batch of bad Meth. Nobody could figure out HOW they’d tainted a batch of meth with Botulism, but IIRC about five people ended up ill.
Unfortunately, the young woman ended up with SEVERE brain damage, because Botulism is a hell of a disease. My mother had to help place her into a nursing home. She’d worked with a lot of post OD clients, but this was absolutely a new one.
Moral of the story kids: If you’re gonna do drugs, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHO’S MAKIN IT AND THEY’RE DOING IT RIGHT. (Also, check your drugs anyway. There are kits. Many cities have safe injection and testing sites. Please. Get your drugs tested)
Not my story but my Sister is a Nurse and this story is one of the most ridiculous I have ever heard so I’ll share.
When doing placement on the urology ward a patient comes in with pain in his penis. So when my sister and the (male) Dr ask if they could please take a look he obliges. At this point they see his black and blue swollen penis. Hanging out the urethra is a folded in half phone charger that he had inserted up there for sexual pleasure. Then not happy with just doing that he then jacked off for 3 hours (stay off meth kids) and was them unable to remove it after his methed up wank session. So it had sat in there for 2 weeks until the pain was unbearable and he presented to ED. In the end his Penis required amputation.
I’m an EMT the craziest thing I ever saw was a man who was decapitated in a head on collision. When the car was prayed open his pants were down and a dead woman was in lap. She died giving him a BJ
Internist resident doctor here. Had a stage 4 laryngeal carcinoma 68 y/o patient couple of years back admitted to our ward while he was unconscious, and was a real piece of work when he woke up. (Rude af) He was in constant pain and wanted hospice palliative care. When the nurse that was assigned to him came to visit him for the first time, she was shocked and ran out of the room begging to be reassigned, but was denied due to our place being severely short staffed. Turns out the patient was her biological dad, and she already cut ties with him years prior, but couldn’t believe it was him due to sharing the same name. Unsurprisingly, he made her life hell while she tried her best to help him. About a week later, the nurse decided to end her own life one evening, while her asshole dad still lives for another 4 months. That chain of events still stuck with me for ages.
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Last week, a lady was brought into the emergency ward and guess what’s the problem, she stuck up a large cucumber in there and I don’t know how it happen but it ended up breaking into halves inside of her and she can’t pull out the upper half, it was really a crazy day
Not a doctor but work in healthcare. Sexual assault of children is inarguably the worst, especially when they’re under the age of 10. Some humans truly don’t deserve to share our oxygen and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to understand how anybody could do something so cruel.
Story from my mom she is OBGYN in a high risk hospital but a lady ended up barricading a room she was on PCP pretty hard. By the time the doctors got it opened with security help she already gave birth. For 3 days straight she was telling everyone how she was the doctor not them.
A Lady eating a banana Through the hole in the mask for non-invasive ventilation (a sort of external respirator). She had removed had removed the pipes.
Maggots in the face. They didn’t even seem to mind.
Edit: More info, they were meth users with terrible health, including terrible oral health. They had an oral cavity tumor that ate through their cheek. They mentioned flies landing on them but never noticed that their larvae were having a feast. We had to essentially power wash the area before actually operating. Don’t do meth kids. Don’t smoke either.
Former EMT here.
A few years back, we responded to a call for “burn victim”. We could smell the charred flesh coming up the driveway and ultimately found a women in her early 30s who had tripped and fallen directly over a small bonfire pit. Her husband (a firefighter in a neighboring county) had found her and pulled her away but it was far too late. Her entire body above her knees was charred to the bone and her internal organs had spilled out of her burst abdomen.
Fortunately, she likely was knocked unconscious after falling as evidenced by some bricks disturbed from the fall with blood on them opposite the side she would have tripped over. Likely she suffered a major head injury and was hopefully spared the pain of burning alive. It was a rough one for sure, but mostly for the poor husband who I believe a few months later quit the fire service.
Have a few more that involve major trauma to the head (shotgun suicide etc…) but those were all pretty similar.
What you’re looking for is the Reddit story Swamps of Dagobah.
You’re welcome.
Not the craziest but one of the most memorable. I was working urgent care early in my career and had a lady in her 60s check in for “hemorrhoid” for the past 2 weeks. Usually straight forward. Walk in the room and she describes the typical presentation of a hemorrhoid and states she’s had them before. So I tell her to undress and put on a gown and I’d be back in with my chaperone.
The MA and I walk in and she’s bent over the exam table with her bare ass towards us and asks “do you see it?”. It looked like there’s a tail hanging out of her ass the size of an Arizona Iced Tea can except it was her rectum and colon. She had a complete rectal prolapse. One of the worst I had seen. And she thought it was a hemorrhoid.
What I have heard from family members in the field:
In some third world nations women have many children and their bodies can’t take it. Their uterus’ can’t stay in place and will hang. The woman have no access to medical care and turn to using potatoes to keep things in place. They can pick the right size and as the roots sprout, it stays in place better.
I heard of a mans penis dropping off when they went to examine it.
Toes falling off with diabetic patients.
Plenty of physical attacks.
Have only heard from one doctor of anything stuffed in a rectum. Drugs.
Incarcerated patients will often hurt themselves to just get out of jail for a while. Many would beat their genitals till they bled or their kidneys.
Men with broken penises get treatment damn fast. One patient was so freaked out by the thought of surgery on his penis he refused. He was advised that if he didn’t get the surgery, his penis would never function again and his life would likely be destroyed. Limped out AMA. Crazy.
the list goes on….
PA, not doctor
When I was a student we had a patient, very large man, with a peri-anal abscess the size of a grapefruit. It had formed a fistula (connecting tube/channel) with his rectum. So he had this grapefruit-sized crater in his butt cheek that was oozing pus and feces. Every day a couple of us students would help roll him on his side so one or two PAs could change his dressing.
Tied for first place, at my first job, we had a woman who cheated on her husband, and bought cytotec (one of the abortion pills) on the black market. She took a ton of it and began hemorrhaging. When in the ER, she told us the full story, but told her husband that it was HIS child (he didn’t know she was pregnant before this) and that she was miscarrying. He was sobbing the entire time. Poor guy.
Not a doctor, but worked in psych.
A teenager girl severing her brachial artery with her teeth was pretty intense
Was in medical school on inpatient psych. Happened right before I got on the rotation so I didn’t directly see it but everyone was talking about it, lady was in a schizophrenic episode and she pulled out her own eyeball with her finger and severed the vessels and nerves, then proceeded to eat her eye. She said it was because she wanted to “see inside herself.”
Mom had cardiac arrest, ED set up emergency c-section. It was a blood bath. Baby lived.
My sister’s story: she was working in the ER one weekend. A woman was brought in in bad shape. She had been in a single car accident. She was speeding, not wearing a seatbelt and on her phone. She was also pregnant. By the time she got to the hospital, there was no longer a fetal heatbeat. At any rate, the lady survived but lost the baby. Then the craziness started, she sued my sister and the hospital claiming that their negligence caused the death of her baby. Obviously this was bs but some ambulance chaser had gotten his claws into her.
After months of litigating my sister was furious to learn that hospital decided to settle. She went in to complain to the admins about why they settled when it was clearly a bs, frivolous lawsuit and neither she, not any other staff had done anything wrong. The lady caused the accident herself and the baby was already deceased when she came into the er. They told her that it was easier and much less expensive just to pay the lady 50K and have her sign an agreement to forego any future legal action than to continue litigating. System is fucked. So lady in southern rural Oklahoma who got 50k out the local hospital, it’s your fault that your baby died.
Happened to me many years ago when I was a junior in casualty. Guy comes in (20ish) Sunday morning wearing a long trenchcoat (always suspicious!) looking very drawn and haggard. Buzz starts going around and I go see him.
History was he was at a house party that night. Found a padlock and thought it’d be funny to put it around the neck of his balls. “Friends” with him then jumped him and broke the key in the lock! Result a very large and rather permanent “Prince Albert.” Anyway guy goes home to get the padlock off…but it just can’t make it over his balls. So what does he do? Yep….smothers them in baby oil. Still no result..so then it becomes serious. He decides to try and squeeze each one of his balls through the hoop of the padlock in turn. He told me he had to count to three and make a muffled squeal (not waking the others in the house) as he tried to make them oval to push through….but still wasn’t quite enough and the pain was so great he fainted.
So that is where we rejoin the story and he’s stood there with a very shiny, rather purple and distinctly swollen pair of..well, plums. We had to call the fire brigade with bolt cutters to free his balls…and the guy was out of casualty like a shot….lesson learned..!
Had a 19 year old who was shot several time when I was in residency. He was coding on the way, we did CPR in the trauma bay, ran the ATLS algorithm, even did a thoracotomy. We kept going because we’d get a moment of normalish rhythm. After we were done and called it, i was sitting across from the trauma bay writing the note (I was an intern), cleaning crew is in there mopping up the chaos — the kid sat up and let out this horrible guttural groan. Very likely just abdominal and diaphragm spasm that caused both of these, but none the less — scared the absolute shit out of everyone. Cleaning crew looked dead. Kids just sitting up, chest cut wide open with his heart visible, then fell back down. We instinctively re-ran the code, but ya, still died.
Dumbest shit: 18 year old moved in with her boyfriend. She didn’t want to poop in the house with him, so she took Imodium on a schedule — no bowel movement for 2 months. Came into the ED with abdominal distension. She had a stool impaction that was her entire abdomen, pelvic bone to the base of her pericardium. It was like 15 kg. It had stretched her colon so much, it necrosed from the pressure — had to have an open laparotomy to remove it and the dead sigmoid colon, and left with a bag.
Ex volunteer firefighter.
The first serious car wreck I went to at around 19 was a suicide attempt. Guy drove full speed into a concrete wall, skinny end first. Turned his midsized into a compact and he was just in shock when we found him. not literally, he couldn’t believe he did that / survived.
I had a girl my age miss a bridge and fall onto an overpass, and she needed a tracheotomy before the ambulance pulled away. She was really messed up on drugs and kept saying her boyfriend was in the car, so we were looking for an ejected body in the hillside for a while before she was deemed tripping balls.
Next one after that a few months later, I buried my friend Jorge who was killed on his way to college. He misjudged an oncoming car and was killed almost instantly via blunt force.
It’s never the ones who kind of deserve it, is it?
Not a doctor, but when I was in Basic in 2010, I stress fractured both legs. While I was in the waiting room during a follow-up appointment, there was a bunch of shouting and commotion outside. Then, about 6 soldiers, including 2 or three drill sargents and the rest trainees, came barging in carrying a trainee. It turned out that the guy, apparently their best in training, had somehow fallen off the side of a steep hill during a ruck march. While on his way tumbling down the hill, he somehow separated one of his testicles from his body
As a emt the worst thing I have seen was someone that had fallen off the top of a internet tower way up in there air. When I arrived there was absolutely nothing I could do and there body looked like a giant has smushed it with there foot.
A small glass bottle in the rectum. It got “lost”, so we had to sedate him do a colonoscopy, but weren’t able to grab the bottle with the endoscope. Woke him up to schedule surgery, but he ran away from the hospital. Turned up the next day in the ER, only to leave again before seeing the doctor. It came out by itself in the end. Oh and did I mention that he had untreated HIV and Hepatitis C infections?
A 16-year old girl who set herself on fire and burned in front of my eyes
I had a frequent flyer who would cheek her meds, then when the nurse left she’d crush them and mix them with urine from her urostomy bag and inject into her IVs. We knew she was doing it because her blood cultures would grow four different unrelated bacteria.
Not me but my cousin. She knew she wanted to marry her fellow pathologist boyfriend (at the time) when he called her over to look at a picture on his computer….of a woman spread eagle that had a small suspicious patch on the outside of one labia. It was one of those weird porn solicitation emails that were really common in the early 2000s. He wanted her to look at it to confirm his suspicions and then emailed the address back stating he wasn’t interested but to go to a doctor immediately for testing. Close to a year later he got an email back (from a different email) thanking him for suggesting to go to a doctor because it was a melanoma. Guy is 10/10. Cousin married well. He tells that story to everyone.
I had a woman ask me for sedatives to keep her husband knocked out while she managed to escape with the kids.
Guy came in not responding with head trauma, he was high and got into a fight with a group of men and recieved a grand slam to the back of the head with a bat. On top of that he had to be sedated in the ambulance because he was trying to fight the EMTs.
Later that night this woman and her child came to the ER asking for him, turns out the guy had been missing for a while. I told her that he was sedated and that he would be out for a while. That’s when she ask me for more sedatives and explained me that he abused them before disappearing. I was just a student and had barely started doing rounds, so I sent her to the ER doc and that’s the last I heard from them, I never knew if the doctor did prescribe sedatives, didn’t want to find out either but I do hope they’re okay.
I’m not a Doctor but had a Doctor in an emergency room literal say “what in the fuck…..” as he felt a mass on the inside of my leg just next to my knee
After finishing a 100 mile Ultra Marathon I had a cut that I just wrapped up and continued on my way
The following week I flew to Vermont to do another 30 mile Ruck in Killington reopening the wound
I put quick clot on it, bandaged and flew back home
About a week later the wound was closed but it hurt like hell and I felt a round mass that was hard as a rock
I go into the ER and the first Doctor has no idea what it is. The second Doctor feels around and decides that we need to cut into it.
They shoot me up with a sedative and slice away……only I felt every bit of that scalpel yelling “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST” as a hissing sound is coming out of my leg
Apparently an infection became encased in a silicone ball and was just sitting against the inside of my leg.
The worst part, the Doctor in the most father like way said “Son, this is where it’s going to hurt like hell but I need you to remain still and hold on”
He took this mini surgical spoon like tool and proceeded to scrape out the inside of where he cut. What seemed like hours was just 30 seconds of this Doctor trying his best to clean out this infection while I’m screaming in agony
central venous pressure being higher than fucking central aortic pressure…
Did an Xray of a woman who had a surgery in Mexico and was complaining of abdominal pain – they had left the scissors in her
Translated for a doctor. She had a patient that was a digger in Chernobyl (if you watch the show they got coal miners to dig a tunnel to allow some water reservoir to cool part of the reactor IIRC). He was exposed to a lot of radiation and showed us a limb that did not look like anything that occurs in our biology.
We kept it professional but after the session both the doctor and I told the office manager we were leaving. She asked when we’d be back (assuming we were taking a break) and we both said “maybe tomorrow.” It’s was…a lot but I’m literally don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I saw.
Ex-911 dispatch. Guy called because his dad went through his tractor’s power take-off (the spining shaft behind that gives power to equipements). Protocol says to administer CPR for massive trauma. He said “There isn’t anything left from under the jaw”. I told him to go back inside and wait for the paramedics. I called them while they were on the way to warn them and I called their super to talk to them afterwards.
I always had a fear to get caught in PTOs and that was a rough one to get out of my head.
I have a happier one: super early catching of lymphoma. A person came to the hospital because their dog had yanked them hard enough to hurt their shoulder. In the exams and work up, abnormal lymph nodes were found around the shoulder/armpit. That led to one of the earliest diagnosis of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, DLBCL, that the oncologists had ever seen.
It was very personal for me because they were rather anti-medicine. Did not want to take medications. Rarely went to the doctor. And had a general distrust of all things medical. So this would have probably not been caught until it was far too late. I spent a lot of time with them to walk through their chemotherapy regimen. There were several drugs, some much scarier than others. They were originally not going to pursue treatment due to their distrust. The last time I saw them, they were sitting in the chair getting their first treatment.
I still wonder how they are doing.
I was an intern (first-year physician) assigned to the colorectal surgery service. As a noob, I naturally got only the best, most prestigious of jobs. This of course included helping manually disimpact constipated patients. This involved placing anal suppositories and enemas, then fishing around with my fingers to get things moving.
There was a 400lb patient who hadn’t shat in weeks. By this point in the rotation, I was getting pretty good at getting things moving. I did my thing. And after removing my finger, the poo starting flowing. Nothing dramatic happened (e.g no fountain of poo shot past me), but the poo just kept coming. It had a texture somewhere between pudding and soft-serve ice cream and it: Just. Kept. Coming. It filled the space between his legs and then flowed down onto the floor. He shat continuously for almost 30 minutes. Volumes of shit I didn’t know a human body could hold. Truly something to behold.
It was in my first year of anesthesiology residency.I was in the trauma OT next to the trauma ward where patients who need ICU admission are recieved.
So my patient needed blood and in our hospital it is the workers who bring the the blood. I got informed that it is in the recieving area and that I need to fetch it. The blood usually comes in the portable box just like a freezer.
So when I went there was one box. I opened it and to my horror there was severed hand waiting for someone to high five it. It belonged to the new patient who had just come into the receiving area. I needed 3-4 minutes to come back to my senses!
There was another box which I hadn’t seen which contained the blood.
Once an investigator in clinical trials injected the test article in the wrong eye. Instead of helping the affected eye, they made patient almost blind. Subject was excluded from the trial and never had a chance to complete the treatment. Insuarance covered all the stuff, but the TA was a new drug, and patient could have a chance for recovery with it.
Guy stood in front of a large firework
Basically had a small rocket sticking through his abdomen
I am not a Dr., I am not a medical professional, I am just a man who witnessed something so incredibly disturbing that I will NEVER forget it.
A location I was working at had 4th class engineers on hand to deal with boilers and mechanical issues, legally we had to have one in the building if anyone was in it.
It’s a slow evening, us warehouse guys are working away in a warehouse that has huge fans going in it to maintain perishable products so it’s loud… some guys opted to use earplugs for hearing protection type loud.
Suddenly there is this scream that rips through the building, if the door from the warehouse to storage hadn’t been open we’d have never heard it, it honestly made me want to fall to my knees just hearing the pain and fear in this scream.
Me and another worker go running and we find the source in the parts shop… the engineer is on the floor, screaming, that scream that turns your blood to ice. Without looking I tell other fellow to call 911 and wait outside for an ambulance… the smell in the shop was acidic… wickedly so.
The fellow on the floor is thrashing around, the best I can do is try and keep the area clear around him to ensure he doesn’t smash himself into anything on the floor… I still don’t know what’s wrong with him but the scream won’t stop. I’m calling out his name while trying to keep the area safe, he just keeps screaming.
The ambulance arrives the EMT’s get me out of the way and start to help the injured worker, it’s then that I see his face…
Imagine a candle, melting, still warm with wax running down it… that was his face. If you ever looked at any Two Face makeup and went “that’s pretty good”… no it’s not.
The engineer was having a slow night and he figured he’d pour some drain cleaner down the drains in the shop… that shit that eats organic matter… well, he had poured a bunch down one drain and it wasn’t draining so he goes and gets a plunger to try and clear the drain. Turns out there was a pocket of air, or something stopping the flow, he plunged it a couple times and looked over it (no PPE on) and the bubble bursts… acid straight up into his face.
That poor man, luckily he didn’t lose an eye, several skin grafts later and he is “presentable” but not normal looking, you know?
I’ll never forget that scream and I’ll never forget that face.
Edit – typos
My dad worked in the hospital in the military. There was a motorcyclist that came in to the ER with the bottom portion of his jaw, practically resting on his chest. The guy was needing his face and jaw to be sewn back together/entirely reconstructed.
Turns out the dude and some friends were on motorcycles somewhere out in the country where there was lots of open land and the freedom to pretty much go whatever speed they felt was safe. The unlucky one in the front of the pack had reached a point, that while he was in the middle of gunnin it, somehow a metal wire/line appeared before him; before he was able to see it or make any attempts to slow down…
well…contact clearly was made with this wire fencing line and he nearly had the entire bottom half of his jaw entirely ripped off demanding an ambulance ride to the E.R.
I’m not a doctor but a paramedic. I once went to a man who was found in cardiac arrest with a half eaten Big Mac next to him. About 2 mins of CPR and he ROSCd (Return of Spontaneous Circulation) and sat up.
He was confused for all of 10 seconds before he looked at his Big Mac, looked at us, said thank you and then processed to scoff and finish the rest of his burger and joked “can’t forget that”. We got him to hospital but not sure what happened to him after that.
To add to your “major trauma to the head” mention. There is a famous case that is absolutely chilling that I’ve heard a few times.
A police department received numerous 911 calls from people who claimed that a man in a terrifying zombie/monster mask was banging on their doors.
He went to numerous addresses and scared an entire community.
When the police responded, they learned that it was MUCH worse than they expected.
The man wasn’t wearing a mask. He had shot himself in the face with a shotgun…and unfortunately survived the ordeal. In a panic, he ran door to door seeking help…but none of the residents could understand that the horrific mask he wore was in fact an actually traumatic facial injury. He died shortly after police responded.
Paramedic: got a call to a car driving the wrong way down a motorway head on with a lorry.
Once we arrived, the lorry driver says the car matched his position everytime he tried to change lanes to not crash as he could see the car coming up in the distance the wrong way (intentional collision by the car).
The car was cut clean from the wing mirrors front to back.
Car drivers head was missing, and for some reason we found his penis about 20ft away in the central reservation.
Turns out the car off’d himself following a arrest and bail for being a pēdô.
Also went to a father that strangled his 6 year old some o the day he got custody the hung himself.
Honestly i forget more than I remember.
Had a 16 y/o patient in labor who was very nauseous upon arrival at the labor room. While one of
the interns was inserting an IV line, she pulled a 5 to 6 inch worm from her mouth. PULLED. Like it was nothing. Her nausea stopped then few hours later she gave birth. So a good day for her I guess 😬
Not me, but my wife.
Shampoo bottle in rectum. Entirely inside of it. Had to be removed surgically
Edit: my wife is the doctor who saw it.
My mom’s story, happened not that long ago, and in 20 years of Adult Protective and Post Hospital Placement, it was the ONE thing she’d never seen before.
Young girl comes in after ODing, in absolutely AWFUL shape. Meth, unfortunately. However, during exam and treatment, the doctors come to realize…she has BOTULISM. WTF right?
Then two more young people came in to ERs in the area, suffering from signs of Botulism. Also using Meth.
They traced it back to ONE batch of bad Meth. Nobody could figure out HOW they’d tainted a batch of meth with Botulism, but IIRC about five people ended up ill.
Unfortunately, the young woman ended up with SEVERE brain damage, because Botulism is a hell of a disease. My mother had to help place her into a nursing home. She’d worked with a lot of post OD clients, but this was absolutely a new one.
Moral of the story kids: If you’re gonna do drugs, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHO’S MAKIN IT AND THEY’RE DOING IT RIGHT. (Also, check your drugs anyway. There are kits. Many cities have safe injection and testing sites. Please. Get your drugs tested)
Not my story but my Sister is a Nurse and this story is one of the most ridiculous I have ever heard so I’ll share.
When doing placement on the urology ward a patient comes in with pain in his penis. So when my sister and the (male) Dr ask if they could please take a look he obliges. At this point they see his black and blue swollen penis. Hanging out the urethra is a folded in half phone charger that he had inserted up there for sexual pleasure. Then not happy with just doing that he then jacked off for 3 hours (stay off meth kids) and was them unable to remove it after his methed up wank session. So it had sat in there for 2 weeks until the pain was unbearable and he presented to ED. In the end his Penis required amputation.
I’m an EMT the craziest thing I ever saw was a man who was decapitated in a head on collision. When the car was prayed open his pants were down and a dead woman was in lap. She died giving him a BJ
Crack rock loving prostitute with raging Chlamydia infection that started in the stoma for a colostomy bag… yup
Internist resident doctor here. Had a stage 4 laryngeal carcinoma 68 y/o patient couple of years back admitted to our ward while he was unconscious, and was a real piece of work when he woke up. (Rude af) He was in constant pain and wanted hospice palliative care. When the nurse that was assigned to him came to visit him for the first time, she was shocked and ran out of the room begging to be reassigned, but was denied due to our place being severely short staffed. Turns out the patient was her biological dad, and she already cut ties with him years prior, but couldn’t believe it was him due to sharing the same name. Unsurprisingly, he made her life hell while she tried her best to help him. About a week later, the nurse decided to end her own life one evening, while her asshole dad still lives for another 4 months. That chain of events still stuck with me for ages.