Best Medical Stories of Reddit (3-Hour Compilation)

doctors when did a patient's lie nearly end up killing them middle-aged housewife comes to ed with episodes of headache and collapse vacant episodes usually early hours of the morning has the full work up with ct scans and lumbar punctures several times always negative it took several attendances before anyone asked her about recreational drugs she was an unassuming suburban mum turns out she was into sea in a big way leading to reversible cerebral vasoconstriction no more c equals no more headaches and no lasting consequences luckily not a doctor but i was in the air once separated from another patient by only a thin curtain it was impossible to not overhear what was going on she was an elderly woman who had taken an ambulance and due to feeling faint and said she had no other symptoms hours are going by she gets up to use the washroom a couple times and makes small talk with her brother sounding pretty woozy the whole time doctors keep checking on her they draw blood and check her blood pressure i think it was like remarkably low but they aren't sure why cut to several hours later when a nurse notices there's some blood on the woman's bed after some back and forth she finally admits that she had been bleeding profusely from her rectum for weeks the doctors gave her a hard time but got her out of there real fast yikes booty blood is never a good sign paramedic here one common one is when older guys are having chest pain and we want to give them nitroglycerine paste pills to help the chest pain one thing that doesn't mix well is nitro and viogra it causes a blood pressure drop that can be really dangerous we always ask and make it really clear that if we give the nitro and they are taking viagra and similar meds that they could die it usually takes three or four warnings in a row before the guy will admit it early on i made the mistake of trusting a guy after just a couple mentions of how dangerous it would be i sprayed the nitro under his tongue and he said does generic villager count frick at one point his bp wasn't even registering on the box cuff it was bad i thought i was going to get screamed at by my doctor but he just laughed and said it was so common that he wasn't upset and gave me a couple ideas on how to make it clear how dangerous it was to the patient i work in outpatient surgical center lying to anesthesia can be really dangerous i've had a person lie about not taking drugs and then react badly when given the anesthesia meds because they interacted fortunately for that patient not nearly dying but i will forever have it ingrained in my head the anesthetist leaning over their head screaming what drugs did you take another that i fortunately haven't seen serious event but definitely has happened to our providers and i've seen more mild versions people eating drinking before the anesthesia and them denying lucky for my patients they just have puked after waking up so we know they had it but made it okay the danger is you can puke during sedation and then get it in your lungs called aspirating and die from that could be really bad but fortunately i personally haven't seen the worst yet but i've heard plenty of stories of it not a doctor but my sister's godfather was diabetic he went to the ear because he had a really bad cold for like two weeks he went in and they asked him if he was a diabetic and for some reason he said no long story short they gave him something that made his sugar levels go up and he went into a coma he died about a month later because his organs shut down a hypo can give him delirium which may have caused him to say no when patients lion say they haven't eaten anything prior to elective surgery when they have i caught a patient snaffling biscuits that her partner had brought in for her because we are so cruel to deny her food people can die from aspirating stomach contents during a ga i didn't drink or eat for like eight hours because i might have surgery that day didn't have it until two days later i didn't drink or eat all day because i went surfing in the morning and broke my leg and the people at the hospital didn't let me touch anything just in case one of my relatives had a bad reaction to her moxicillin as a child puffy face trouble breathing emergency room visit bad fast forward 15 years she's off at college and has come down with some sort of infection she however didn't inform the campus health people because and i quote allergies are caused by a bad diet and since i'm a vegetarian i shouldn't have them anymore yeah they prescribed her amoxicillin and if it weren't for her roommate being home to call an ambulance she'd have been dead well at least that wasn't a lie just freaking stupid i wasn't the lead on this case but i was the assist when i was in dental school this patient came in and was really hyped up my buddy asked him if he has been on any drugs and the guy just said he had a lot of caffeine okay we move forward from what my friend told me his blood pressure was high but not too high for an elective procedure part of the local numbing we give patients has epinephrine in it and sometimes this gets into the bloodstream with certain types of nerve blocks not uncommon however if you've snorted a couple lines of c and then get tp in your bloodstream that's no bueno ended up calling the ambulance his bp was so high he was at risk for a stroke so yeah even stuff the dentist does can kill you if you lie every dentist's office i've been in as an adult has had a poster on the wall in the waiting room warning about this exact same thing here's a fricked up family story we had an 81 year old frail grandmother brought in by family for failure to thrive in the setting of incurable stage iv colon cancer being cared for at home patient was admitted awake and conversational poor historian complaining of pain she proceeded to gradually get sicker shut down like she was dying becoming gradually non-verbal unresponsive and dropping vitals she was dnr so we did supportive care and looked for causes such as ut sbp sepsis liver failure etc the family was around the whole time acting very involved and caring 36 hours later she gradually started coming out of it before recovering back to baseline it turns out she was given her home dose of morphine in the air prior to admission which was 100 milligrams extended release morphine twice daily as she had been complaining of pain her family had failed to mention that they been diverting all her pain medications that nearly got their grandmother killed as we had no reason to suspect an opiate as the cause that reminded me to always consider opiates we discharged her to a long-term care facility not a doctor but an army combat medic we were in a small fight fight and arana soldier was hit in the leg it was very easy to see the wound because of the desert camo doesn't blend in well with blood the part that almost killed him is he never told us that he was hit in the chest we asked him and he said only in the leg i knew he was lying because he was holding his chest too but i didn't want to make a bad situation even worse so i didn't say anything but when we asked him again and he said no i didn't want him to die of course so i pulled his plate carrier off and we did more medical on him he definitely would have died from that wound it punctured his lung and he was having trouble breathing we called for a medevac and he lived but with only one lung never knew it he joined the other again but i assumed he stayed out a lot of them i get this one no way i guess it is the stress from combat because i can see no way how a sane person could believe this lie would somehow help him i see he might have wanted to stay in combat but still it's your chest there's quite a bit of things you need in there i work in an std clinic so the stuff i deal with isn't usually deadly or at least not immediately deadly however i am constantly surprised by the percentage of patients who test positive and refuse to tell their partners a guy came in a few years ago who fought something relatively simple like gonorrhea but seemed to have trouble walking long story short a nurse called an ambulance for him and sent him to the aforespinal tap turns out an ex-boyfriend refused to tell him about his syphilis diagnosis after they had a rough breakup like 15 20 years earlier so not only was our guy possibly spreading syphilis unknowingly he now had untreatable neurosyphilis he worked with our disease intervention specialists to track down as many partners as they could but i think he died from related complications like a year after his initial visit that's just heartbreaking we had a patient that took her home heart meds religiously even in the hospital when we were also administering then to her she was educated to not take any of her homemades while she is hospitalized since were giving her the hospital meds she would sneak and take them her blood pressure bottom out and would have to bola sir security was called and had to remove the meds from her and lock them up we had another patient requested a sleep med the nurse gave it to her later found patient barely arousable and blood pressure dropped which did not make sense she was given a low dose of sleep aid patient had her purse open on the bed and found a prescription of amber then the patient took our sleep aid plus double dose of her homemade amber then we always instruct patients on admission not to take their homemades while in the hospital we are not allowed to go through their belongings due to privacy edit grammar my well step uncle brother of my stepfather never met him though lied about being in pain sick so he could stay home from school and miss a test i kept upping the ante so they'd believe him apparently his parents were pretty strict and he was terrified to admit he'd lied long story short they took him to the hospital he was diagnosed with appendicitis and they straight up cut him open the test was looking pretty good at that point it was pink and perfect and i dropped it in the scrap bucket i was admitting patience in the psychiatric ward busy night and i was way behind an older man with schizoaffective disorder is admitted with a caretaker a nurse asks them a few questions including if the patient has taken any medicine and or narcotics the caretaker says no i see the patient four hours later he seems delirious which often is caused by a somatic problem including medicine you know where this is going he can't maintain eye contact and can only sit in his chair and talk nonsense he drools and yells every word but somehow seems very tired i ask the caretaker if the patient has taken any medication and she says the patient broke into a medicine room at the institution he lives and just started eating random pills apparently this is somewhere around 80 pills not being more precise because she did not bother gathering the empty pill boxes the only information i could get was that he definitely ate over 40 lithium pills which is just great if you really hate your kidneys now after calling the emergency department to quickly prep and an ambulance with an anesthesiologist for transport i talked with the caretaker through my teeth just slightly angry apparently the nurse wouldn't understand because it wasn't his own medicine and she didn't want to make a fuss i screamed into my pillow that night in pure frustration i later found out he lived after intensive care and almost losing his kidney function that caretaker deserved to lose a job and probably some sort of legal criminal action when someone in your care eats pills and you know about it and then tell a medical professional that they didn't you are endangering the life of another human being don't freaking mess around with that crap had a grandma who was basically comatose status in her whenever we could rouse her or get a word she stated she wasn't on any drugs we yolo gave her narcan narcotic odd drug with no effect twenty thirty minutes later we do flumazinalromasicon benzodrug and she wakes up a lot of ppl weren't suspecting her of drug od given her age and statement so they were thinking 900 different routes in programming we call that shotgun debugging when we do our pre-op check before a surgery our office prints out a list of meds we have in file that the patient is taking we tell them please look at this list and sign it to indicate this is the current and up-to-date list of the meds you take patient signed and we plan for surgery next week get a call from anesthesia the day before her scheduled surgery apparently she forgot to mention she had started taking a weight loss drug that if you're taking it can cause severe hypertension when you go under anesthesia and in extreme cases you can die from that you have to have stopped the drug for at least four days to be safe to have in a seizure so her surgery got pushed back a week not cancelled just pushed back enough to be safe she called our office fuming and demanding a refund for the time she took off work seriously lady sorry but we have a signed document saying you told us all your meds exactly who should be mad at who you put us at liability and now the surge in our office doesn't get paid for that day when we could have subbed in someone else in that slot my cousin isn't a doctor and sees this quite a bit mostly people lying about having done drugs and underage drinking because they don't want to get in trouble not understanding that the doctors are less concerned with that than they are making sure the person lives one particular incident the person had drunk quite a bit and done several kinds of drugs but wouldn't admit to it and came in alone so there was no one to verify what had happened because this person wouldn't admit to the drugs they'd taken and thus wouldn't tell the docs what they had taken they had no way to help and could do little except watch as this person slowly died from the drug and alcohol interactions because without knowing what was already in their system giving them anything could have only sped up the process the person was a minor and passed away from massive organ failure because they were more worried about getting in trouble than saving their own life until it was far too late to admit the truth i was a l and my co-worker had a patient show up in labor she was six centimeters i was helping get the room set up for delivery and the patient's mom started to ask her so does that mean the baby and the patient violently shushes her her doctor wasn't on that night and that office didn't have electronic records we could access at night so we're just going about prepping for this delivery when her doctor happened to come into the nurse's station because she had to come and for a medical patient on another unit she just stopped by to chat but noticed that patient on the board and asks oh so her baby actually flipped turns out the kid had been breach all pregnancy and was still breach she didn't want a c-section so she figured she'd just try to come and so far dilated that she could just deliver that would have been okay if she was frank breach the down since it wasn't her first baby that she was food cling breech crossed legs with feet down that's dangerous as heck because it's super easy for the umbilical cord to come out first instead of the baby which cuts off baby's oxygen my fourth was head down and this ended up happening to me anyway emergency c section in less than 10 minutes her baby was so lucky her water hadn't broken especially if she'd been at home still she still kept refusing the c-section and my co-worker finally snapped we had another patient who was in for a stillbirth and had a lot of family down in our waiting room trying to process what had happened my co-worker asks if her patient had noticed all the crying people at the end of the hall as they were mourning their dead baby and would she rather have a c-section or deal with the grief that family had she finally got the stupid c-section my co-worker caught a lot of flak for checking that patient and not noticing she wasn't feeling ahead not a doctor but my dad's a paramedic he's told me plenty of times about when patients have told him they've taken zis drugs when they've been doing illegal drugs to avoid getting into trouble and he's administered drugs which just make it 10x worse because of the combination of them and he can't do anything else other than just take them to the hospital if they're still breathing the most frequent one is that they don't need a specific antibiotic or other life-saving drug because it is really just too expensive for them to afford the fault is mostly with the drug companies they find out they are the only ones making a specific drug and they raise the price just because they can then the insurance stops covering it and the doctors may not learn any of this until the pharmacies start calling his office to get the drug change to something else but there is no telling how many people die or suffer serious health problems because of the drug and insurance companies greed a lot of people get less than ideal treatment simply because of these middle men trying to get their cut it may please you to know that in canada the government regulates how much a company can charge for medication as a result medicine prices are just 10 percent of what you would pay in the u.s and in some cases just one percent it is amazing what happens when the government is for the people instead of the corporations i'm an np in a medical iq probably my most consistent as people lying about their drinking habits i could give less than a crap if you pound a bottle a night i just need to know so i can be ready for you to start detoxing on day three and have the right meds and q so you don't have a seizure aspirate etc i always make this abundantly clear and i am not the morality police yet every year we have a few coming with very fixable problems lie about heavy drinking habits and ultimately die in the hospital from complication secondary to their withdrawal my teenage brother had the opposite to most of these stories he came home after being out drinking with friends raided the fridge and went to bed a little later he comes out panicking to my parents that he's having trouble breathing is feeling dizzy and has a bunch of other alarming symptoms they rush into the ear and from what they tell me the staff were yelling at him to tell them what drugs he'd taken even though he was adam and he hadn't taken anything they wouldn't believe him my parents were begging him to tell them but he insisted he hadn't i'm not sure of the rest of the details but it turns out he had developed a nut allergy he wasn't aware of and had eaten something that was causing him to go into anaphylaxis well dang that was a huge stretch of the doctors to assume didn't even think to see what he had at least eaten before yelling at him what drugs did you take social worker at a children's hospital we have kids coming in through our resuscitation room that have been seizing and are unconscious with no prior history i'm constantly trying to get parents to tell me if there is a possibility that their toddler might have ingested something does your kid have access to cannabis could they have eaten some parents never want to admit it to doctors and so i'm always on a fact-finding mission as a social worker parents are either glad i'm there or they think i'm going to take their kids away so cannabis can affect children in horrible shut down your ability to breathe kind of ways my one-year-old niece died from cannabis poor thing had no chance to live not a doc but worked in m's for a handful of years we would get overdose patients who definitely don't use drugs yet respond to narcan had a relative that went in for surgery on his stomach there were holes in the lining that were caused by painkiller abuse no one at the time knew what was causing this except for my relative doc asks him if he was on any medications relative says no they put him under he didn't wake up his toxicology showed oxycodone and hydrocodone don't lie to doctors they don't tell anyone about your medical problems anyways one of my patients was smoking in the bathroom while on oxygen could have ended very badly for him and others in the hospital i'm not a doctor but a patient with a couple of really weird disorders that cause doctors who aren't familiar with them to think i am taking i have been denied very needed basic treatment like a bag of saline because my dehydration is exasperating my symptoms because they think i'm somehow gaming the system these assumptions that patients are lying do a lot of harm too i have a story about someone's life that did end up killing them about 10 years ago my best friend's ex david bought some ecstasy for himself and his big brother john the ecstasy they bought was laced with something bad but they didn't know that yet they each took one and john started to od david wanting to save his big brother called an ambulance it showed up and david explained what happened they loaded up john and they asked david if he also took the ecstasy because he didn't want to get in trouble he lied and said only his brother took the bad ecstasy ambulance left with john while david started to od minutes later jon was taken to the hospital and survived david died alone at their house such a dumb accident but so sad nonetheless i think jon still struggles with the guilt of the death of his baby brother to this day how about the opposite i've moved a lot and when i visit a new doctor they often try to answer my health history for me drinking smoking exercise and diet men you're thin so moderate no regular healthy none of that is accurate but when i correct them i get oh so is this a cry for help what number i just want you to have the facts i'm not a doctor but my friend went to the dentist for an emergency root canal the dentist asked him if he had done any kind of drugs in the last week because anesthesia they needed to put him under would kill him if he had done any form of c he lied that the dentist was about to put him under when my friend finally came clean my dumb butt friend nearly killed himself because he lied to a dentist jesus nurse here we don't care we don't care about your history your finances your social scene you're anything we just want to help you christ we really don't care about anything except that you are a human being and we want to help you please people tell the truth it will save your life patience already what happened when a doctor or nurse accused you of faking it when you were actually in need of urgent medical care my friend's dad went to the ear and the doctor said he was fine after minimal examination her dad insisted something was wrong and said he wouldn't leave until they ran some tests as he was being escorted out by security he had a brain aneurysm and died her family was awarded a pretty massive malpractice settlement but they were absolutely devastated i fell down a flight of stairs one time while working hit a nail on the way down and ripped my forearm open and was bleeding a good bit adrenaline had me going long enough for my girlfriend a nurse at another hospital to drive me there i had a bloody paper towel on my arm and all the security guards and nurses assumed i was a junkie that blew a vein finally all the hype wore off and i kinda passed out and woke up in a wheelchair in the exam room i don't know exactly what happened but my girlfriend was flipping crap on the workers she said half of them assumed i was on drugs and the other half thought i was faking it to skip the line i wasn't dying of blood loss or anything i just got hoosy when i actually was able to see the meat in my arm for the first time they all just watched me as i fell to the floor and busted my head on the floor even then they didn't do anything my girlfriend who's not even half my size as i'm not a small guy at all had to pick me up and drag me into the wheelchair frick that hospital yeah my mom watched an old lady die from blood loss in a couple decades ago she just nodded off and collapsed and the nurses didn't do anything for hours my mom tried to yell at them to do something but this was before she had learned english so nothing came of it not as a patient but as a parent of a patient my wife and i started to suspect that something was wrong with our son starting at age two he would run around all day and was an active little guy but never sweat he also never appeared to get cold we live in new england and he would often take his shirt off before going to sleep even in the winter months these concerns were dismissed as a toddler's a weird sort of thing by his doctor we later noticed that he would stop and complain about his hands or feet hurting while playing or laying in bed these were also dismissed we were told that the pain in his feet could be because his feet are flat or because of growing pains we were told that it could also be attention related the doctor said that it's not uncommon for middle children to act out this continued for four years my sister is a biologist and asked us if we ever got him checked for fabry disease i flat out asked the doctor if he could be tested and the doctor told us that there was no way this was fabry and they weren't going to test a kid without any genetic history of the disorder the disorder is genetic and without a classic sign one that often doesn't show up until adulthood if it shows up at all we waited until our son was literally screaming in bed about his hands and feet feeling like they were on fire we demanded to get him tested and he was diagnosed with february it's essentially a metabolic disorder caused by a missing enzyme there are many issues associated with it but the main one is extreme neuropathic pain in the hands and feet the pain can be be random but with my son it is normally because he overheated since he lacks the ability to sweat he plays sport so we have to be careful over activity and fevers have to be watched out for since his body can't cool itself down a pain can last anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of days the average age of diagnosis for this disorder is around 16 so it's not surprising that his doctor missed it most doctors do since it's a rare disorder that was a little over a year ago and my son is doing well now there is no cure but treatment allows him to live a relatively normal life just with some added pain i couldn't imagine making him wait until his teens to get any relief i know someone with this he borrowed my ex-husband's cooling vest from glacier tech ex-husmus some symptoms brought on by heat last year to see if it helped and wound up ordering two for intense days it might be worth a check i was in labor and because it was my first they acted like i had no idea what was happening and kept denying what i was insisting i was over two months early and handle pain so well they acted like it was just in my head made me stand at the counter filling out paperwork while i insisted i needed to push they decided to lay me down to check if i had even started dilating and i promptly pushed him out i was furious with how i was treated i still am same here well they wanted me to wait for the doctor finally i just started screaming and pushing they all finally rushed in to help me my mother had a stroke at age 32. the doctors didn't diagnose it properly for over 24 hours because they were convinced her symptoms must have been related to drugs since she was in good health and so young my dad apparently tried to tell them that she has no history of drug use but they didn't believe him now she's permanently disabled because of how long it took for her to receive proper treatment not me but my mother she had called an ambulance because she had been experiencing chest pains to which they basically told her she was crazy about a month later she passed away from a heart attack that sucks especially since doctors consider chest pains an emergency sorry for your loss when i was in labor the hospital had my records wrong and showed i was due a month later i was pee especially since i was in labor and in a lot of pain the lady kept arguing until she realized i was in labor she must have heard all the crap my boyfriend now husband we're talking about her because nobody has ever gone into early labor was 12 years old and had a heart problem that was just starting to show arrhythmia and palpitations only happened when over exerting myself go to cardiologist and was accused of faking it to get out of the chores and soccer practice by the time i'm 15 my heart is absolutely unreliable throughout the day during an attack i would lose my sight and pass out a same cardiologist still claimed i was faking it kids just don't have heart conditions 16 years old and my heart finally stops luckily i passed out earlier at school and was in the nurse's office when my heart stopped after another episode woke up in the hospital and btw had a heart deformation that required surgery my mother blew her lid according my doctor of wanting to see me dead went to his office and threw his degrees and awards off his wall at him and was screaming at him only reason she didn't see was to prevent assault charges simple echocardiograph showed growth causing the electricity to pump my heart to go in circles it wasn't fun having heart attack simulations nearly every day for four years before anyone asks was poor and that cardiologist was the only one on my mother's insurance to my doctor's credit we both kind of had a laugh at this one before the test results came back i went to my primary because i'd been experiencing hot flashes doctor google couldn't tell me what was wrong and i knew it didn't feel right well at least we know it isn't meno cause my doctor joked i laughed what 23 year old woman spontaneously goes through menopause this one my doctor was very apologetic my mom went through full menopause at 36 and it turned out it was caused in part by hashimoto's which they also didn't know she had until she was in her 60s i'm glad your doctor did tests and helped you changing it up just a little my colleagues were convinced a girl was just faking a stomach ache she was about 16 years old and it was exam season a time when we would get many sudden tummy aches fits etc so i understood their skepticism but something didn't sit right with me i took her history myself and sent her for an emergency ultrasound of her abdomen ectopic pregnancy it was ready to rupture at any moment so i shipped her over to obs gin to get surgery asap she came out just fine but man oh man did i give my co-workers a hard time after that exam season or not we need to be thorough had another time when it was just me and one other doctor working admission she dismissed a case of a little girl faking fatigue for attention thankfully i overheard her telling someone so i went to double check the poor girl was having a carpool spasm and was most definitely not faking her condition he hooked her up to some calcium and sent her home with meds the next day i'm not trying to make it sound like i am perfect but in our line of work we must always be a little paranoid thank you for being conscientious thorough and taking your oath seriously it truly is the difference between life and death not my child my brother he was 11 and suddenly tired and lethargic he missed a lot of school he hated missing school my mom kept taking him in and they'd say it's the flu or puberty or mono and it wouldn't ever get better after a few weeks of this my mom brought him to the hospital again and yelled at his doctors that something was seriously wrong with her son and they needed to do their jobs and figure out what it was it was leukemia they called the next morning just before 2 am and said that tests came back your son needs to come in now not in the morning right now i can't imagine what happens to a parent in that moment when you know it's bad because they call you in at 2am but you don't know why he was in treatment for just over a year and was rediagnosed on his birthday a few months later he had a bone marrow transplant and was able to come home pretty quickly there were complications from the transplant called graft versus host disease like organ rejection but the new cells try to reject you it attacked his musculoskeletal system causing stiffness and some dangerous situations this october will be eight years since the transplant and he's cancer-free that boy loves to use the cancer card now but he definitely earned the right a doctor didn't believe me when i had a kidney stone that was too big to pass he only changed his mind when another doctor checked me and started freaking out since i was getting super sick from the stuck stone the doctor ended up getting fired from the hospital and my parents sued him i wouldn't call it urgent medical care but i was stuck in my room for about five hours on my bed with my head pressed into my shoulder because i had a pinched nerve i had never had one before i wasn't able to move my head at all and when my mom got home from work she called an ambulance for me they carried me out in a sitting position and off to the hospital we went when we got there it took about a half hour for me to get into the hospital bed and ended up just giving up and leaving me sitting upright the doctor pulled my mom out of the room and asked if i had a history of faking injuries in order to get painkillers because i was pressing against the pain instead of leaning my head away from it whenever i get close to headaches i find that counter pressure against the pain feels better than none had people questioning if i was really in pain or not when i was 16 i was in a really dark place and one day i decided to confide to my doctor that i thought i might be depressed and see what he would recommended dude straight up laughed in my face and said you're not depressed you're just a teenager i told my mom i wanted to change doctors after that and it took another year and tons of self-destructive behavior before i sought or taught or taught same thing happened to me i begged for help at 15 got told i was an over dramatic teenage girl that just wanted attention despite how intense my mood swings were in the suicide attempts never asked for help again until i had a four-month depressive episode at 22. turns out i'm bipolar too this is not as serious or urgent a condition as the others but it still manages to raise my blood pressure years later starting from when i was about seven i would have terrible stomach pains which my pediatrician claimed was attention-seeking behavior he told my parents that they should punish me anytime i complained of stomach problems my parents who love yelling jumped at a new reason to scream at me on a nearly daily basis when i went to college i was finally diagnosed as having a hiatal hernia just like my grandparents father and aunt when i was a kid they even commented that i had the same symptoms they did which for my pediatrician meant that i was just mimicking their complaints and didn't have the same condition because it had been untreated for so long i now have to worry about barretts and esophageal cancer lucky me new hearing doctor didn't believe that i needed hypoallergenic molds made and ended up making regular ones to try them out within a few days my left ear was sore it hurt a lot more than usual doctor and a specialist thought it was just a little bit of irritation and that it would clear up quickly it ended up being a major middle inner ear infection ruptured the eardrum pus and blood everywhere on my pillow about a month of agony a lot of drugs and a lot of specialists in the hospital i was already very hard of hearing that crap made me lose another 10 db permanently this isn't so much a faking it situation but more of my ex-girlfriend having to deal with a really incompetent security guard that hindered her getting medical help my ex had a severe peanut allergy and one time she had a thai chicken pizza in the college cafeteria that did not list peanuts as one of the of the ingredients after her throat started burning she knew something was wrong so she grabbed a glass of milk which i guess helped a bit and went outside for some air because she was having trouble breathing a security guard was passing outside in front of the building and saw that she might need some help at this point my ex was panicking and frantically looking through her bag for her epipen the security guard asked what was wrong and she tried to explain that she had a severe peanut allergy and needed to be taken to the hospital but when the security guard saw here take out the epipen she took it from her and said that it was school policy that she'd be the one to do it she then asked her to hold out her arm so she could inject her my girlfriend could not believe that the security guard was trying to inject her arm like it was a flu shot and out of frustration she yanked it from the guard's hand and put it in her thigh like you are supposed to and sternly told her i need to get to a hospital now for future notice to any allergy sufferers that have ep pens if anyone tries to take your ep pen and play hero kick them in the shin and do it yourself likely you have more experience and training with auto injectors than anyone else when i was nine i would get stomach aches when i went to school my doctor insisted i was faking but my mom insisted he take it seriously finally they gave me a barium x-ray and saw i had a stomach ulcer i had to take mallocs and drink milk at every meal and snack i even had to get special permission to get milk from the cafeteria at morning recess my teacher ridiculed me for that she was horrible and abusive while i never received any of her physical abuse there were two other boys in my class who got it on a regular basis this would have been 1980 so it wasn't normal for teachers to be pulling hair or knocking a kid's face into a desk every friday the three of us would have to stay after school while she told us all how stupid we were my stomach aches did not get better and the doctor accused me of some combination of faking exaggerating non-compliance we literally had to save all the empty mailox bottles to prove i really was taking my daily doses today we know that having me drink milk six seven times a day was exacerbating things and in retrospect my mom never really understood how stressful it was being in that class it wasn't until the last few months of fourth grade when they finally transferred me to another classroom that i got well again later my mom told me that even she thought i'd been exaggerating when i talked about how mean the teacher was because i'd left the honors class moved down a level my former teacher still ridiculed me pretty frequently when we crossed paths but it didn't tie my stomach up in knots not me but my mother she had been very sick and tired imagine a cold but it's 100x worse the doctor she saw multiple times kept basically blowing it off saying she just needed some rest it kept getting worse one day i was home with her she was in bed sleeping and i was out in the living room watching tv for some reason she decided to walk out into the living room and sit in the chair across from the couch she looked like a legit zombie and and when she sat down she could barely hold her head up i immediately call nine one one turned out she had pneumonia and one of her lungs was entirely full of fluid while the other was more than halfway she spent a few days in the hospital and fully recovered i don't know what made her decide to walk into the living room but if she hadn't don't that she likely would have died that day all of that could have been avoided if the doctor she saw would have just paid closer attention to what was going on every time i've gone to a with anything the first thing they do is a chest x-ray to check plus blood work to check everything else in army training going to sick call made you a bag and trying to get out of training even doctors kinda brush off people cause they see so many some who are actually faking it so when i went in with bad back pain the medic clearing me brushed me off and told me to go back to my company turned out my kidney was severely infected i can barely remember this but i was around the age of 11. i went for a sore throat severe cough that would make me dry heave phlegm just the whole thing doctor says it's all in my head despite me having an obviously inflamed throat and a very wet cough i remember sitting there with my grandma who was like oh i don't think it's in her head i went back the same week and was diagnosed with walking pneumonia i think that's when we switched doctors to lol i was 17 and had excruciating lower abdominal pain was sent home twice because i was young and it was probably just menstrual cramps third time i went to her i happened to be on my period so i told them i was also bleeding finally the nurses passed me on to a doctor and gave me a scan ultrasound had an ovarian cyst the size of a golf ball ended up losing my ovary i only have partial hearing in my left ear due to an idiot pediatrician i was 15 i had an ear infection between dumb alcoholic mom swearing up and down that everything i did was for attention and this idiot who must have printed his diploma using this paint i got no treatment he didn't even look in my ear it ruptured that night blood and pus everywhere over my pillow a doc said i had the worst ear infection he'd ever seen broke my foot in five different places but the scan only showed one little tear they sent me home and were like you will be back to normal in six weeks six weeks later and my foot was still swollen and bruised and couldn't stand on it so i went back the doctor said well i can see on the old scan you had just one little tear maybe you need to try harder but for ein we will do an mri on your foot few days later i came back for the results the doctor said well sometimes a regular scan can't see everything and as we look at your foot here here here and here you can see the broken bone fragments it's already healing just fine but this will take months to heal completely no wonder you couldn't walk i wasn't in that much pain and if they saw the brakes at the scan i would have needed a cast for six weeks at least so i don't really mind what happened not a doctor or nurse but a bunch of camp counsellors and the infirmity doc i went to a sleep away camp for children with cancer anything chronic and or life-threatening it's the second day and i wake up feeling a little bit sick with a sore throat okay i'll just drink some water and i'll be okay it's the summer after all i can't get sick breakfast rolls around at 10 a.m and i'm not hungry and my throat is getting worse i tell one of my counselors that i'm not feeling good and he says eat something wait till after the morning activity i couldn't bring myself to swallow and just sit there and then go to arts and crafts i feel so sick at this point i just sit in the corner of the arts and crafts room literally fading in and out i tell a different counselor and he says drink some water i do it doesn't help at all i realize that they're not going to do anything unless i make a big deal about it i think to stand up and make an announcement when i stand up i immediately need to sit down again and now my throat hurts too much to talk a third counselor walks up to me and asked me how i'm doing i say i don't feel good in my raspy weak voice he says wait until after this activity lunch comes around at 12 30 and i go to the bathroom before sitting down and i look like a zombie in the bathroom mirror i go back to my table and say i can't eat the counselors ask why i say i fell sick one of the counsellors begrudgingly agrees to take me to the infirmity which was a mini hospital because all the kids here had medical issues i can barely walk but i make it there and promptly get sat down on an old wood bench and left alone as my counselor walks back to eat lunch after about 15 minutes of waiting a doctor pokes her head out of her office and asks me what's wrong i tell her i've felt sick since i woke up my throat hurts she feels my forehead and says you don't feel warm but i'll get a thermometer she comes back with a thermometer and puts it under my tongue i had a fever of 102 and strep throat at a tightly packed dinning hall surrounded by kids with compromised immune systems i'm surprised i didn't get anyone sick but the fact that it took five hours to get a chronically sick kid some freaking medical attention still makes my blood boil i was bedridden for three days and missed literally everything i wanted to do while there the worst part was this was my last year before i got too old i was losing my hair my gums bled randomly my skin looked like butt my muscles cramped up randomly i literally fell over once while standing on both my feet i got horribly depressed world felt like cardboard is the only way i can think to describe it and all i wanted to do was eat and sleep sometimes i would start talking in conversation and get a word jumble midway through where words didn't come out right which was the beginning of some social anxiety for me i went to several doctors who plainly thought i was full of crap several of them asked me how much i drank and one of them asked me over and over again as if he didn't believe me when i said i didn't i was tested for low thyroid cancer rheumatoid arthritis and some other scary things but nothing came up this was over a six-month period i finally figured it out by googling my symptoms which led me to a message board that suggested i find a doctor who would give me a blood test for it so i would know for sure turns out i was really really low on b12 somewhere in the low 300s i think they went from nearly ironing me to my face to giving me a b12 shot in the office before i left on my second visit and prescribing sublingual b12 to me i actually found out a few years later that i have a gene mutation that keeps me from methylating b vitamins i mention it to every new doctor i see now and they always look at me like i'm a hypochondriac then look it up on their laptop and kind of go okay like they're relieved i'm not full of crap it took me a year and a half to find a doctor who tested me for b12 and gave me shots mentally it was really difficult to describe my state i am so happy i never have to relive that again not exactly accused of faking it more so just disbelieved or taken lightly i went into emergency at the hospital because it was saturday for a medium level abdominal pain that had been ongoing since the previous weekend i'd been to the gp on wednesday or thursday and had a blood test booked for the coming tuesday earliest possible however my mum decided to take me in because of how long it had lasted without change at the hospital i had a blood test taken and the doctor thought 50 milligrams of codeine would take care of my non-problem it did nothing so he gave another one and panadol he ended up believing and sending everyone frantic when i ended up bent over frothing at the mouth and coughing up blood and the blood test said pancreatitis several years ago i walked into traffic and a sort of vague dying would be nice kind of way when i told my psychologist about this he rightly had me carted off to the air to be admitted into impatient care they shuffled me from room to room and eventually stuck me with this teenage girl who appeared to be having severe pregnancy complications in the hall i could hear a woman screaming and vomiting violently we sat there for hours finally the doctor came by this point i was completely numb she asked me questions i answered do you have any plans for suicide i'm not really the planning type she finally said well you look fine to me and sent me home i bust to my apartment and lay face down on my couch for several hours i passed out walking to school so my brother called an ambulance paramedics were hesitant the second time it happened and began asking if i was trying to get out of a test or if someone was messing with me at school turned out i had stage three colon cancer at 17. glad you're okay now had an asthma attack once and a middle school nurse didn't believe me told me to get up and go back to class took five steps out the door and passed out woke you up in a hospital with tubes being jammed in my nose and a mask over my face oxygen and albuterol and never was a claim about asmr ever not taken seriously ever again in that school district not really accused me of faking but misdiagnosed me had horrible loss of motivation and was so up and down with my emotions i constantly slept and never felt rested even after sleeping for 10 hours doctor told me i was just depressed and put me on meds they made me feel like a zombie and i couldn't concentrate so i stopped taking them a year later i went in for checkup with a different doctor and he found a lump on my thyroid turns out i have hashimoto's causing my hormones to go up and down constantly basically the other doctor was just putting a band-aid on symptoms and never bothered to find the underlying cause not exactly accused of faking it but here's my story one night i was working at this bar and suddenly i'm overcome with an excruciating pain in my abdomen low left quadrant just below my ribcage i would rate the pain a solid nine and the only reason i don't say 10 is because i've never been shot stabbed or anything like that so i reserve my tens for the really extreme stuff but it was serious pain the kind where i couldn't even carry a conversation the pain backs off to about a five so i duck out of work thinking i'll go home and see if it happens again but on the way it jumps back up to a nine again maybe a 9.5 i pull over at a gas station and call 9-1-1 because i can't drive and i don't know if i'm dying or what i ride in agony for 10-15 minutes while i wait for an ambulance and wouldn't you freaking know it the pain drops to a zero the second they get there the paramedics check me out do an ekg what have you i'm fine they take me to the air fridge nurse decides i'm fine and i have to wait when i finally see a doctor it's this payoff resident who's probably on hour 61 of her shift by this time my mom and step dad have arrived the doctor has a thick accent and my stepdad very casually asks her where the accent hails from purely making small talk no malice whatsoever the lady gets all bent out of shape about it like does it matter where i'm from anyway from that point on she's not listening to anything i'm saying she asks me if i've had alcohol in the last 24 hours and i say yes i had a night cap last night she asks what's a nightcap i told her it's a drink right before bed to help you sleep i tell her i had a whiskey one whiskey and it's truly all i've had in the previous 24 hours she finds the concept of a whiskey before bed baffling she says she doesn't believe that's all i had to drink she basically tells me i'm an alcoholic i'm not and that the pain was from drinking too much and then she discharges me i've never felt that pain before or since and i have no clue what it was but a crabby doctor chalked it up to her bs diagnosis and that was that doctors have read it even after learning and seeing the gross and gory aspects of medicine what still makes your skin crawl i can handle skin sloughing diseases gore and m head tweakers just fine but dang i hate parasites bed bugs scabies tapeworms fun fact you can end up with tapeworm eggs in your brain if you have tapeworms and your hygiene is rank enough how rank is rank enough large parasites that live in the skin i can deal with worms in the organs or microscopic spiders living in my face pores but when it comes to scabies or butterflies i want to claw my own skin off all the creepy crawlies living where they shouldn't be the more slivery the worse it is a kid is awoken by intense pain and a scratching sound in the ear usually a cockroach not so bad but a hassle to remove piecemeal leg by leg if it comes to that some guy is complaining of nasal congestion and some bleeding months after a vacation yup leeches in the nasal cavity i'm never going swimming in any rivers ever diabetic patient complaining of a non-healing wound behind his ear i scoop out dozens of maggots from underneath the skin flaps and they're falling on the patient stretcher a pregnant patient admitted for delivery is complaining of itching down there after maybe straining a bit too much an asceris roundworm is poking its head out the butt and saying hello always makes me gag when i have to be the one to remove them i'm a trauma surgeon so blood and mangled bodies doesn't really faze me but full body skin conditions do things like eczema herpeticum and norwegian scabies make me itch all over and really uncomfortable exam herpeticum i can tell just from the amount of time it took me to pronounce that that it isn't pleasant very little does i can see blood guts death and very little phases me but watching any video of somebody breaking a bone gets a big nope out of me the freaking louisville basketball player who had his tibia break through his skin during the game is the worst thing i've ever watched on live tv how cruel people can be dealing with disease is one thing they're dealing with victims of any kind of assault domestic violence or mass tragedy is chilling to the bone yeah i can only imagine how hard that must be i've seen all sorts of disgusting and gory things which uniface me but for some reason chopped or dismembered fingers still get me kinda the same here crazy injuries gore infections etc fascinate me did anything to do with clean deep cuts i can't handle scabies definitely scabies don't want it don't want to be near it try not to touch people i'm diagnosing with it makes my skin itch just thinking about it patient as mr skip the gown because we all have it it's fine whatevs a patient has scabies bed bugs just jesus freaking christ where the frick is my third ppe gunter i need six gloves and four shoe covers and if they even so much as touch me i'm taking a bath in bleach i left my phone in the break room because if it fell out of my pocket it will stay there till the end of time obligatory not a doctor but work at a vet abscesses dead living hit by car fine with all that and a little fascinated maggot cat though shudder for me it's nasty teeth there are very few things that move me in any way medicine or otherwise but damn nasty teeth i could never ever be a dentist my friend works in emergency medicine and can't stand hand wounds she's the toughest most bad butt lady i know but hand wounds make her swoon like a medieval maiden among other doctors i know it's usually skin conditions and burns the common thing we all hate is abuse for me it's nasty teeth do not try to google images of rotten gums they are nasty and maggot filled and just sad and i'm going to brush like 10x more than normal when i get home now i don't mind pus blood poop urine but for the love of god i can't stand saliva it grosses me out when anesthesia suctions out saliva arty here love me some sputum all day long night shift actually there's nothing quite as satisfying as sucking a huge goober out of the back of someone's throat or a trash when you really clear them for the first time since they arrived and it's so thick it won't even get down the catheter for me vomit is the line if i smell vomit it makes me vomit not a doctor bitter former funeral professional i've seen and smelled and handled the goriest of gore in my day but i still can't stand cleaning out someone's nostrils and getting crusty boogers out hook you should just hold the tissue up to their nose and say blow not a doctor but i was a combat medic in the army infantry with several deployments to iraq during the war interestingly enough i dealt with a lot less gunshot wounds than i thought i would all things considered i guess the body armor the issue really works there was a lot of trauma from explosives though anyway i was fairly immune to most injuries i encountered including a pretty bad head injury with exposed brain matter he lived by the way but one thing that will always make my skin crawl just to think about it is burns especially full body burns i'm always grateful that i never had to be on scene when treating severe burns but i did work in several aid stations and a hospital stateside that received and treated people with third-degree burns covering most of their bodies thank god or whatever whoever that these injuries were far less common than others but if you ever meet someone who said they were a fueler in iraq or afghanistan they had what was potentially one of the most dangerous jobs in the war fuel trucks don't mount armor i probably shouldn't tell you this but well i feel like you should know you have eyeballs i'm so so sorry my wife dislocated her kneecap several years ago the nurse told us that she can handle cuts blood all manner of bodily fluids but things out of place still make her queasy oh geez i did that at work a few years ago the sight of that made my stomach drop i still cringe thinking about it i can't even see or hear the phrase fernie's gangrene without cringing don't google image search that at work unless you also work at a hospital also i really don't like going into patients rooms when they have bed bugs even if i gown and glove before heading in and only touch them to do an exam i will have phantom matching for hours and then change clothes in my garage when i get home because nope made a mistake googled it nearly vomited i work at a maxillofacial surgeons department and i've seen a lot of procedures which don't phase me teeth extractions upper and lower jaw realignment traumas of all types broken jaws broken orbital sockets oncological procedures explorations and a lot but there's one procedure that makes my gut wrench rhinoplasties there's something about that open nose and people cutting and prodding around that makes me so uncomfortable i don't know why the knowledge of how often filing is used in plastic surgery is what does it for me jaw filing etc doctor nothing visual physical really gets to me these days smells can be absolutely ghastly but people's suffering can be profoundly affecting both patients and families upvote for doctor any injuries to nails just make me go weak fine with eyes and all the other crap that usually freaks people up bit nails work when i was a student i was watching something have finger surgery under local anaesthetic the finger was numb surgeon was prepping it to cut and had this little tool in his hand suddenly rams it under the fingernail and hooks it off wretch anesthesiologist here blood gore and people trying to die on me don't really faze me much but when i'm in the eye room and the surgeon sticks a needle into someone's eyeball i have to suppress a shudder i work with vulnerable adults and people with dementia in old age psychiatry the number of people financially exploited by their family is very disheartening people need to learn some humanity my wife has been a family practitioner for 10 years she says the only thing that really still grosses her out is nasty unclean nose issues i'm nurse i can handle pretty much anything like mangled arm in half head blown off by a shotgun you name it but if someone has a runny nose green boogers hanging out of their nose it takes an act of god for me not to gag vomit answering for my wife since she's on a dock she's been studying medicine since her teens both her parents were doctors but she still can't bring herself to go into the morgue if there's a child there dead children are very very difficult for her to deal with it prediction not a doctor but also not a doctor but my brother is and he always says the way a lot of elderly people are treated really gets to him sometimes by their carers sometimes by children and other relatives often he talks about people hanging around like vultures waiting for them to die so they can get their inheritance obviously this isn't the case with all elderly people but it's common enough my mom is a nurse that specializes in palliative care and has often told me the same things feckle vomiting basically vomiting dire here from the mouth i guess constipation has to be resolved somehow sometimes just not from where you think i've done that christmas night 2006 i was in surgery a few hours later god bless the nhs it didn't taste very nice but to be honest you're so chucking or you don't care my buddy who isn't a doctor really hates volunteers who come to the hospital to play music like loses his crap insane he moved to a local hospital because it only allowed one instrument to be played by volunteers and he thought he would really never hear it again they had a harp only policy and now once a week a woman plays the harp and i freaking love it nails when someone's been in some form of minor trauma and their nail has been peeled off worse than any vomit feces or sputum my daughter is a physician assistant she said the morbidly obese patients who come in with maggots crawling out of their vagina or from between the folds of their flesh does it for her nope nope and a double nope student nursina plussy i've seen some crap but generally anything to do with hurt kids i'm far too soft for their tears usually you have to go through your gastro rotation before you've seen some crap not a doctor but a wound ostomy nurse i see all the gnarly diabetic feet mummified limbs trauma wounds failed surgery incisions colostomys fistulas pressure injuries etc but the idea of starting an iv makes me want to cry i've only ever started one and was lucky to find a passion in nursing that has nothing to do with pokes omg i absolutely cannot do ivs or blood draws somehow i made it through school and through various clinic and research jobs without having to do it i eventually became a psych np so there was absolutely no chance that i'd ever have to do anything with veins and i bow down to you wound ostomy nurse you truly are an angel that walks among us prion diseases i don't love blood veins arteries but i can deal with them poop pus gore i can handle it all for the most part but i thought about prion diseases and what they do to you too much the other day and almost passed out at my desk i don't know why but they thought of them just makes me queasy and lightheaded just typing this is starting to have that effect i'm not a doctor but seeing those videos of a knee replacement where they are removing the anchor from the tibia and they have the literally whackered out with a hammer i work at a children's hospital and snat all suspected non-accidental trauma aka child abuse still really gets to me especially when the suspected abuser is the one bringing the child in also scabies bed bugs lice and neonatal newborn herpes not a doctor but i've worked in medical education and policy for 12 years so there's very little that grosses me out anymore but a while back i sat in on a wound care educational activity that was case study based the second case study was a post-surgical patient where a combination of refusing follow-up care and super morbid obesity had caused wound separation underneath a fold of fat on the abdomen this person was like two years post-surgery and had an open wound festering in a massive wet bacteria-ridden crevice of their body just typing that out almost as me dry heaving it was the most disgusting thing i have ever seen the doctor teaching the course waited until everyone had made uncomfortable noises and then said now imagine the smell no thank you the photos are enough to haunt my nightmares until the day i die hopefully not from a festering wound not a doctor but i had an emergency room doctor look in my throat after an allergic reaction and say oh my god needless to say it didn't help me calm down at all i'm there thinking this is an emergency room these people see some crazy crap this is probably kinda bad emt i can handle blood gore vomit fesses urine and all the emotions that come with it but for some reason i can't do boogers or mucus it makes me gag to no end facial fractures that involve teeth i can clean up open fractures close-up gashes and lacerations assist during amputations or even examine festering sores without batting an eyelash but there's something about traumatic loss of teeth that really unnerves me loose teeth broken teeth open jaw fractures basically anything that might need a maxillar facial surgeon makes me gag a little bit med school teaches you one heck of a poker face though i'd like to be a doctor and this thread is making me reconsider maybe i'll just be a vet instead oh maggot kittens my weakness isn't one specific injury but the kind of panic that comes with an obviously deadly injury like someone that has their throat cut in the look in their eyes that says i know i'm going to die please help me that crap makes me freak out i have pretty damn good crisis handling skills and i can do cpr like a champ but if the person that was injured starts begging to save them or something i will panic like a frightened child not a doctor but i work in pharmacy we won't judge you on nearly anything but i admit i get the heebie-jeebies when people have rxs for scabies something about whole body parasites is just so unsettling dentures especially gunked up dentures that aunt in the mouth the other day i was talking to an elderly lady on ward round i was holding her hand as i am wound to do with my frail elderly patients especially those with dementia or delirium for some reason she suddenly decided to remove her top dentures with her other hand and plonk them on the table in front of her i spent the rest of that discussion with my hand in some kind of vice like grip being slowly but surely inched towards the dentures while i tried desperately to resist every now and then she would stroke my arm with her still damp right hand anyone working in geriatrics knows the horror of the unexpectedly moist examination bit urine feces vomit blood snot sputum saliva etc i can easily take in my stride however dentures definitely turn my stomach i think we all want to run away screaming when someone is infested with lies or bedbugs you just feel like things are crawling on you for days i worked in the ed for a bit and one time we had an entire family coming with scabies going into their exam room was unnerving patients with serious infections i've dealt with only a few in my practice but god dang during medical school i saw some of the grossest infections ever also diseases of the skin i would have went into dermatology if i could handle them not a human doctor but a vet tech i can take anything but parasites and eye injuries my surgeon wound care friend claims phlegm she says you have no idea how crazy it can get i counter that with bloody past filled swollen body parts that you need to take a huge needle to a suck out one of the worst smells ever but the prize goes to cancer tears in my eyes the worst part of someone you love dying the saddest and worst was a 10 hour greyhound ride with a woman on board i'm sure was dying of cancer skin fatty esp the kind off of old people's feet you just peel off a sock and that crap gets airborne makes me wanna exhale till i pass out doctors over at it what are some moments that made you wish you had never became a doctor we had a new student come and do rotations at our hospital and being new i had the honor of supervising her first digital rectal exam as soon as she inserted her finger the patient proceeded to evacuate his bowels all over her hand lab coat and she began vomiting all over the patient it was hilarious and disgusting all at the same time watching children die torturing the 90-plus end-of-life patients because their children are unreasonable and don't want to let go teaching new interns the same bulls every year watching all the male practice that goes on around the country torturing the 90 plus end of life patience i work as an emt last week we picked up a 97 y o who was altered she had a dnr and dni on file the sun was there and he was a proxy he wanted us to ignore the dnr dni if she coded during transport i tried explaining what we would do and how that would not help her go against her wishes he ignored me i cannot imagine the stuff you have to deal with i had a nine-year-old girl bought in one night with her parents complaining of fever and respiratory distress presenting with coughing and wheezing the kid was really out of it and the parents were very upset i thought it was bronchitis but i admitted her and ordered treatment for her fever and cough as well as throat cultures i was with another patient when the kid started hallucinating sobbing and spewing everywhere i figured it had to do with the fever so i packed her with ice but she died maybe a half hour after that this wasn't my first death but it was one of the worst i couldn't tell the stiff neck since the kid was out of it she also couldn't tell me anything else that would point to simple or complex seizures she died of knee syria manager to this completely wrong diagnosis to make matters worse we called in all her schoolmates and anyone else we could wake up just in time to see three other kids go the rest got antibiotics quickly enough probably my worst day in medicine this is one of my favorite stories from my mother she has been a doctor for probably around 30 years now when things go wrong with patients she takes it hard the experience that sticks out to her happened when she was in russia she is an american but went abroad to do some volunteering she met a young girl living on the street who was very ill and at the time around the same age as me her daughter she had no family no money no food nothing my mother treated her as best as she could and spent several days playing with a girl and keeping her company this girl was so grateful she insisted my mother take her only possession as payment a ripped plastic shopping bag my mother initially refused but eventually they agreed to tear the bag in two and each keep half my mom never really wants to talk about what happened next but i do know when she went to find the girl again a few weeks later she had passed away my mother was devastated she keeps that ripped plastic bag tied onto her stethoscope and about to this day makes me sad when i see it my mom says she learned to not take her ghosts with her but that one will always stick by far the saddest story i've ever seen on reddit not my experience but my mom's boss he became a doctor and was getting overall fed up with it one night a homeless person came in that was covered head to toe with lice they put him in some kind of dunk tank but the nurses were running around dealing with other things and the guy drowned in it he left the profession and went back to school to become a lawyer he got fed up with everything involved with that and went to work for russia my mom said he was the most caring boss she had there in over 30 years what a horrible horrible way to die one starting residency and realizing your work schedule is pretty much set in stone for at least the next three years and you only get four days off per month two feeling the stress of loan repayment watching as about ten thousand dollars of interest is capitalized each year of residency on your loans three chronic stress from knowing that your actions and decisions that you make affect whether or not people live or die even at the earliest part of your career looking back at decisions that you made and wondering if you had done something different would that patient have lived at four having to tell strangers on a regular basis that they are going to die or their parents spouse is going to die or worse that their child is going to die one of my quasi-elderly patients had terrible bladder control issues pills didn't work and surgery was not an option so i refer her for a pessary which is a rubber donut-shaped device placed in the vagina to lift the bladder she came back in a few months later with pelvic pain and it became obvious the referring doc wasn't clear about her need to remove it monthly to wash it off we get her in the stirrups covered with a sheet i sit down not realizing how much wafting that maneuver would create until the smell hit my eyes began to water as i held professional composure and it looked up at my nurse who was clearly also dying just a bit inside time for the speculum exam words cannot describe how bad the yeast and or pus was white glue covered everything and was oozing out like molasses just get in and get out i thought but no the pessary would not come out i had to stand up stabilize my footing like i was in a tug of war and reached in with just a couple of fingers i got around the edge and pulled and that sucker was stuck finally as the seal started to separate we heard a grand sucking sound that even the semi-deaf patient heard there was a bit of blood and the mixing with pus yeast reminded me of strawberry quick but we got a done she chose not to have it replaced ever tl dr knope you gotta read it to believe it well mid-school final year here it's just the misery you see every day small children dying old people they're in the hospital beds where no one is by their sides and since i am from india we see this gloominess on the family's face when we break out the news that they just had a baby girl they are so excited about the delivery otherwise but as soon as you tell them it's a girl they make such a horrid face and tell you to get out of their face this when you face almost every second day gets you so mad that you wanna break their heads but can't do anything that is the time i regret being in training for being a doctor nothing has ever grossed me out enough to make me wish i had never become a doctor pee crap vomit tissue neck roses pus whatever i knew what i was getting into nevertheless about nine months ago when i reconsolidated my loans and saw how much i owed total and what my monthly payments would be i banged my head against the desk and thought to myself that i should have been a plumber as a gp i have it pretty good and i can honestly say that i am satisfied with my line of work i'm glad i wound up in medicine i loved talking to patients and don't have any regrets having said that i trained in nyc and it was very hard to be working on weekends and evenings when everyone else was out partying you could see greenwich village from our hospital which didn't help during those stressful night calls in the iq at once as a med student i got up at 4am on a saturday to take the subway to the bronx for a surgery rotation walking to the train i passed a diner that was packed with people i wondered why it was so full at 4 00 am then i realized it was still friday night for those people my father responded with when i realized someone had to take care of problem hemorrhoids on christmas edit liberal arts student here can't spell anything medical worth crap well my brother a fourth year med school student recently told me an experience he had to deal with that made me question whether i could handle being a doctor four 19 year olds came in after a horrific car accident they were all drunk including the driver the first guy was pronounced dead on arrival his chest was completely caved in the second guy's head was just a pulpy mess and they had to sedate paralyze him so he wouldn't flail and further screw up his skull the third guy had to have his chest drained after massive internal bleeding and the fourth a girl somehow got caught under the car apparently and her pelvis and fema were completely shattered granted he wants to be an urdoc but man i've always wanted to do pediatrics and while i may never have cases as gruesome as this in pediatrics i might have a patient die a child that you witness grow over the years i have been rostered to the bone marrow transplant unit for the last 10 weeks and it has been the most miserable weeks of my life our patients die often and are usually reasonably young aged 16 60 they have terminal hematological cancers and usually the transplant is their last hope of survival one-third die in the first few weeks one-third do well and one-third have horrible chronic complications the thing that gets me the most is that they fight the bravest most courageous excruciatingly painful battle of their lives and frequently lose to see a patient with multiple infections joints from septic arthritis and bloated and distorted from 10 kilograms of extra fluid on board endure excruciating pain for two weeks only to die in the end it's heartbreaking often i go home and cry fourth year medical student here last week i had to do a pelvic exam on a gross 20 year old with a horrific gonorrhea chlamydia infection fml doctor here my list one listening to patients addicted to pain meds beg for more two ordering labs that are not medically necessary but my family member read on the internet three listening to colleagues complain about obamacare four patients who won't take their medications but will take every supplement known to man at gnc five hospitals that transfer patients to us that could easily have been cared for at the smaller facility six family members who think aunt sally who had a stroke has heart failure is 90 years old and is intubated should still be full code i.e that a good outcome is still possible if cpr is needed in this case seven letting insurance companies dictate care which i don't allow the list goes on and on but i still wouldn't trade it for another gig helping patients truly in need is very rewarding cheers but this saint john's wort isn't a chemical man it's all natural and that has to be better than this highly researched other medication when i was a junior surgical trainee called to emergency to see a homeless guy complaining of foot pain likely ischemic limb he was wearing boots in order to examine the foot i had to take the boots off pulled really hard boots wouldn't come kept pulling heard a crunch boot comes off maggots and liquefied flesh pour out leg stump with protruding bone waft of pure necrosis fills my nose ran out of cubicle vomited became a radiologist kington here i work in the of a government hospital i get a lot of ungrateful patients wanting special treatment i have to explain calmly that i attend to those with life-threatening conditions first my hospital is a trauma center encircled by depressed areas so we get a lot of patience should put up a sign that says those with life-threatening conditions will be treated first if you don't have a life-threatening condition and insist on being treated first we will provide you with one my brother is a doctor one day they brought in a dead body for an autopsy he recognized the girl as an old friend of his also he delivered both of his children i don't know why would anyone want to see his wife's vagina get destroyed when my wife is babies i will be noping nearby side note my parents are also doctors everyone was in the room sometimes even i don't understand my own family when it is your kid being born your wife's vagina means diddly jack crap i was surprised to see this thread filled with gross out stories i've seen my fair share of funky and smelly things and been sprayed with fluids i didn't know existed before medical school but i expected that going in that may have directed me away from certain fields but not from medicine the moments that make me wish i never became a doctor are the flashes where i see the true job landscape out there i will not have the option of getting the job i want won't be able to work where i want and won't even be able to start working as a staff doctor until i pull off a couple of additional years of fellowship to be competitive after chugging through medical school and putting in 80 hours weeks in residency there's no pot of gold at the end i'll be graduating soon from one of the most world-renowned radiation oncology departments in the world and it's no help in canada the unemployment rate for recently graduated specialist physicians is higher than the national unemployment average in my discipline it's about 50 percent the issue isn't that i'm picky it's that there aren't jobs people are doing huge amounts of extra training to get competitive for when that one spot opens up and all we want to do is treat patients try explaining it to others too that makes me wish i'd never became a doctor every conversation someone says frick it you're a doctor you'll be fine but i can't easily find a job in the same city as my parents like you can my girlfriend will have to give up her job to come with me and i'll be stuck in my 30s looking across north america for my first position my friends working the oil rigs if they haven't wasted it on h and blow should be a million dollars ahead of me by then those are the moments i love what i do i truly truly love it and it's an honor to do it but if i had any idea what the job situation was really like i would have done something else many people say if they won the lottery they'd take care of their friends with new cars and junk i tell myself that if i ever win the lotto i'll try to get a few more doctors and specialists to move to my town from numerous comments and this thread it seems that paying off student loans would be a major enticement i'm very new but i think missing something is the worst i had a terribly sick guy develop severe edema i shut off fluids and gave him lasix he was having a severe heart attack no complaints and no chest pain he died overnight and i felt terrible my attending reminded me he had a brain bleed anyway and we wouldn't treat the heart attack anyway but i still missed it and it still got to me he was old and had terminal cancer but i'll never make that mistake again he was doomed but you helped and you tried ultimately that's all that matters this is a story my father told me about his residency one night while he was in the air the paramedics brought in a girl who had been assaulted and had her eyes gouged out he said they brought her in handed him her eyeballs even though it is impossible to reattach eyeballs with severed optic nerves and left later that night members of a rival gang of which the aforementioned girl was affiliated with returned to try and finish the job i trained and work in australia but i have worked a stretch in a tertiary referral hospital in southern africa in a resource limited setting one afternoon i admitted a 20-year-old man in severe respiratory distress likely pcp pneumonia he presented way too late and the policy in that hospital was that patients with hiv did not go to the iq there was nothing we could do and all i could think about was what i would be doing if this poor guy was in australia universal healthcare is fantastic as it was i admitted him to the ward and watched him die over the next few hours i am a final year medical student so not yet a doctor but my first urinary catheterization is a story that usually gets a lot of laughs there was an elderly gentleman who presented with severe urinary retention he had not urinated in several days and his bladder was so full of urine you could feel it about the consistency and size of a softball when palpating his lower abdomen the nurses asked me if i wanted to catheterize him and as a typical eager and overconfident third year student i gladly accepted the challenge after inserting the catheter and draining some of the urine into a small collecting dish i went to connect the catheter to the catheter bag stupidly i pointed the catheter upwards staring at the opening as if i was staring down the barrel of a gun the patients then proceeded to cough resulting in a torrent of urine shooting out the end of the catheter and all over my face in the moment i was pretty disgusted though i wouldn't say it made me wish i wasn't pursuing the career i wanted it did however influence me to pursue pediatrics rather than working with adults for the rest of my time working on that ward i received quite a lot of laughs from residents nurses and attendings the silver lining is that it provided me with a great story to tell people when they ask me what it's like to work in the medical field watching helpless how the spawns of some of my patients absolutely destroy my office while i'm trying to do my work and their parents don't even bat an eye sometimes i go postal in my mind just to vent a little while reviewing their medical history and finally calm down when i realize that i only have to tolerate them for as long as they're there not my whole life one of my colleagues who was a fantastic physician and good friend committed suicide last year after being struck off the register after he was found to have been injecting ketamine on a regular basis this made me think about how stressful the job is and how someone who i respected so much and someone who was really progressing the field could find themselves in a horrible situation i'm not a doctor but i can tell the story that made my mom go into medical billing rather than becoming a nurse or doctor she was working as a medical assistant when she was in her late teens and early 20s and planning to go into medicine her employer was this elderly italian doctor really old school in terms of technique and attitude and kind of a badass guy despite his age one day she checked in a woman who had recently had a mastectomy performed when the patient came in the smell emanating off of her was palpable and she was visibly dirty my mom put her in an examination room and brought the doctor the doctor started unwrapping the bandages around this woman's chest with every layer the smell grew stronger and more nausea inducing it was clear the patient hadn't followed the directions about changing her bandages at home the doctor finally reached the last of the bandages and yanked them off the source of the smell became instantly obvious as maggots started pouring out of the patient's chest the doctor started shrieking and slapping the maggots off of her screaming at my mom to help him though neither of them really knew what the best course of action was right at that point my mom tells the story with fondness but it was that incident that made her go into the bureaucratic side of medicine rather than staying in the trenches if they were fly maggots they only eat the dead tissue they were helping i'm a pa in ant and i'm pretty happy with how things turned out i assist in surgery and get to do some relatively simple office procedures i work 40 hours a week one half day friday which is awesome no weekends no call major holidays off get to help lots of folks out buzz weird things by my attending docs who are all right a student loan sucks still like said earlier older practitioners seem to have skated through the inflated tuition and bank more money a golden age as said by some of my peers i have roughly 100 k in student loans kind of regret wonder what the difference would have been money wise if i would have stayed as a medical technologist cls making 60k all said and done i'm happy where i'm at and would recommend it still here's to hoping the student loan bubble collapses cheers i'm a pet groomer groomed my very first cat not too long ago she died in the cage while drying after her bath according to the vet she had a panic attack i will never groom another cat gang not a doctor that did a stint as a cornea recovery tech for a few months basically the job is to harvest corneas for transplants or medical research this happened to my boss the first night he went out by himself after training he had to go to a morgue to operate on a young woman who had gotten a bad car wreck college town heavy drinking ran car into a tree ejected through windshield the young woman's face had been partially slewed off along with the skull being split in half he had to hold tape the skull back together so he could remove the corneas aseptically and properly the worst part the young girl's phone was ringing in her pocket the entire time this was from her friends calling her to see where she had gone only my boss the girl's parents and the doctors knew she was dead at the time gladly didn't experience any of that myself not quite sure how i would have handled it if i was in his place i've been a doctor for three years now so i'm relatively new to it for me it's when you're 71 hours into a shift have had about an hour of sleep and are called to review someone that's acutely unwell you'll find yourself not caring purely from fatigue and at that point you'll hate yourself and the job that's making you become what you've always hated i'm happy with my current career as a radiologist there are some very sad stories though it helps that most of my friends and my partner are all doctors so we all thrash out the difficult stuff together radiologists are awesome as you get older and more distinguished you can make the connections to start working from home still as a radiologist if you wish my father has been a radiologist for 40 years and currently he works from home in a system where he has sent a set of x-rays writes a report on those x-rays and sends them back i am not a doctor i know i know it but i work on medical malpractice suits from the legal side i have always thought it must be very difficult to do everything in your power and still have things go wrong and then get sued for it i work on damage quantification so i don't usually read the medical report details because it isn't relevant to my report but since i'm a parent who suffers from morbid curiosity i sometimes look through when i see the date of birth is the same as the date of injury i am amazed how often i read through a statement of claim where the doctor's actions follow all the standard procedures for a complicated birth emergency c-section use of forceps all of them have risks sometimes bad things happen i think it would be difficult to have a close call save the patient save the baby but then be sued because either mother or child or both were injured in the process of saving their lives not me but my dad has been a paramedic for over 30 years now he's said there's things that you'll never shake from your memory things like being called on a beautiful saturday morning for someone who killed his wife and kids with a hammer hospital work is tough emotional work but sometimes i believe first response is harder but being at the scene must have a whole other sense of horror than seeing the patients come in and imagining the scene m's medical people at music festivals what are your most crazy stories some people next to us of fishes labor day weekend shows not a fest but a bunch of people camp outside the venue had this bike pump they fitted the end with a little cup and were blasting coke up their noses with it we heard them jokingly say you know those people that party too hard and get taken away by medics that's totally gonna be us well it was them at like 4 a.m sunday morning idk i think that's freaking hilarious freaking works a guy jumped from the nosebleed section and then yelled what's my favorite type of fruit pie and then we took him away because of being so high on drugs and having a concussion baselight's 2015 in hampton virginia this girl was running around the venue topless mercilessly crushing a water bottle which was empty in her first running up to people and shoving it in the faces screaming does anybody need any water her pupils were black as night and she was grinding her teeth to a pulp it was terrifying i worked campus ems in college and got paid to watch t-pain perform he had them turn the base up so much ceiling tiles fell onto the basketball court where the concert was being held later in the show when girls started throwing their bras on stage he grabbed a handful and started humping them also was on duty for 303 and before the show two guys walked by i legitimately thought from the look and smell that they were homeless but apparently it was the band later on they threw a box of pasta and some chicken wings into the crowd lolt payne is a cool dude i work at bonnaroo and got to talk to him for a little bit i always thought you emt guys had it rough much harder work than what i have to do got called to an unresponsive person in a stream a few years back he was almost kay hold and high on ghb with his head dangling off the end of an inflatable couch just touching the top of the water seriously if he fell off he would have been a goner as a harm-reduction-based first-aid team we brought him to a semi-coherent level of consciousness and explained why it was a bad idea to pass out in the water and he got quite upset which led to one of my favorite quotes from a festival ever bro it's a rave and this is how i party man a few inched away from drowning apparently since he was awake we brought him in the zouch to shore and bid him good day then got called to the girl who had oh dead on ghb in the middle of the stream and was barely breathing and totally hypothermic we worked on her for hours and she made it point is don't do dissociatives around water kids unless it's a raven that's just how you party ketamine and water definitely do not mix so easy to drown in an emtb i worked an anime convention nearby and let me preface this by saying that every neck but weirdo on the face of the earth showed up to this thing along with a slew of every other weird drug using person you could imagine they had an entire hotel rented out and the entire convention center for this four-day event it was 11 30 p.m on the first day when we got a call for a possible seizure in one of the hotel rooms rented out for the convention we show up to a girl who is but but naked strapped to the bed via leather bindings as well as a giant black metal vibrating dildo who is actively seizing the girl is seizing as well as the dildo inside her her sexual partner called us and bailed he neglected to remove the dildo as well about a dozen other various size phallic objects my partner worked on getting an iv in her while i untied her and removed the massive dildo from her we got some versed in her which stops seizing and she was okay but absolutely nuts how we found her tl doctor found girl at anime convention with a massive vibrating dildo in her who was actively seizing burning man 2017 was my first and probably last burn a dude that was hanging around my friends sprinted vaulted dodged his way past numerous security professionals and managed to run into the fire he died as tens of thousands watched 2017 was a bad year for traumatic deaths accidents at bm not an ms bit on the woodstock album there's an announcement bugsy please report to the medical tent i know that bugsy he was a family friend whoever was in charge of the medical tent heard about bugsy and he spent a lot of time helping diagnose symptoms and talking people down from bad trips bugsy was the go-to guy in town that vetted every single drug that entered that town until bugsy gave the okay nobody would touch anything if bugsy said it was not legit not only did no kids use the stuff but the older guys would run that dealer out of town for trying to hurt people we all looked after each other in those days good times that is freaking awesome every festival needs a bugsy i'm just a festival goer but shout out to all the 110 pound white girls that take too much of something within the first two hours of the festival day one and get escorted out on a stretcher it's really hard to know your limit beyond zero at 110 pounds been there this is a very famous copy pasta at least in the music festival scene at echo project i watched her work at giving birth during the jizzer set i was just peeking on some 2c people were trying to get medical help but they hadn't arrived some other wookette claimed to be a midwife and was coaching the woman through this her work man is standing there shirtless and spun like top just making these weird sounds while he is crushing his be a can and spraying cause light all over everyone he looks really anxious about the whole thing grabbing his face and just making grunts and stuff the baby's head starts to crown and the medics still haven't arrived this is where it gets crazy it was so freaking dusty out there and the baby and all the surrounding fluids were immediately modified by the blowing dirt i mean it's freaking gross all of a sudden this freaking kid probably 19 or 20 in his oversized neon flat brimmer largey hat runs up yelling welcome to the party b before he blows a huge plume of smoke right in the baby's face while the umbilical cord is still attached and crap the smell was unmistakable this baby had just been deemed he must have pulled the hit from a bong bc it was monstrous the surrounding crowd dropped their jaws and someone tackled the kid as he starts to run away he didn't make it more than 10 feet and the he was probably blasting off about now the mom is clutching the dirty baby and trying to calm it though strangely the baby was not crying tripping balls i guess and while the dude is getting screamed at the dad suddenly pounces into action he jumps on the dude and starts smashing said bisco kid's face with the crushed up beer can of which he seemingly just can't let go the bisco kid is kicking and trying to roll out of it and the work dad grabs the kid's hair w one hand he finally let the can go and shoves his other hand halfway inside the guy's mouth he is pulling his mouth open and rips his cheek open repeat rips his freaking cheek open there is blood everywhere and the dude lets out this braveheart like scream as he gets pulled off by the folks around him blood all over bisco kids face shirt and formerly fresh flat breezy the cops medics arrived about that time and took over the situation crap was crazy as heck welcome to the party b waiting in line for a shower one of the showers went out of order because a woman was blasted on something and was rubbing herself raw i didn't know that's what was going on till a health and safety volunteer i'm friends with told me later i did glastonbury a few weeks after qualifying as a paramedic first night shift was with a local gp as my driver he'd been to every glastonbury a true gentleman and suggested watching the sun rise from the stone circle the next night i worked with a small town emt who was frightened of people that were high and wanted to take everyone to hospital if they'd so much as been around drugs in the last 72 hours as they might be spiked and od the best patient was a girl so wasted on ketamine she'd not noticed her ankle was badly broken she sprained it on friday night took it easy on saturday but dosed up with ket on saturday night to the point she was dancing on it she got a ride to hospital sounds like cat girl just did the anesthetist job for them not an emt but at lollapalooza last year i saw this girl climb a tree and was stomping jumping on a branch like twenty plus feet up then she just laid down and straddled the branch arms and legs hanging off thinking she finally passed out only to surprise us when she came back to life and started jumping on this branch again then quite expectedly it broke and she fell hit the ground hard i don't really know what happened after that because my vantage point wasn't great but i do remember seeing her in thinking that she was on some kind of trip girl straight reverted centuries of intellectual evolution obligatory not on ms at download festival this year in the uk one of our group headbanged so hard they gave themselves a bleed on the brain and had to have an operation unfortunately the symptoms were very similar to just being insanely drunk and after spending three hours passed out in the festival village with the paramedics the rest of the group being quizzed about anything we had taken 100 nothing but alcohol as far as we were aware and two days in the first aid tent it wasn't until their vision started blurring and word slurring that they went for a ct emt here this literally happened last week i was working a rave and i had a patient who took a lot of mdma i mean a lot he ended up being escorted up to our first aid room by security when he got poked for a blood sugar he ended up on the floor kicking his feet and flailing his arms around he was being super combative with us to the point where he wrapped his arms around my neck at one point my partner at the time called for more security pd and an ambulance me and one of the other security guards had to restrain him on the ground until the medics got there i was sweating like crazy trying to keep him held down paramedics came and gave him something to calm him and took over care that was a fun night here's a good recent story for you mid-july working as a paramedic at a festival pretty quiet all shift finishing up at midnight and getting excited to go party with friends a call comes in over radios that security is chasing someone down who is in full drug induced freakout start heading that direction in case medical needs to get involved arrive on scene to six people trying not very successfully to hold down this shirtless guy who is thrashing on the ground absolutely losing his mind proliferacy on board no further info on what he's ingested dude and screaming at the top of his lungs bloody murder the only part of him not being held down is his head starts to bash himself face first into the ground while chewing through his lip tongue i'm now holding his head with all my might while he's trying to bite my fingers crappy latex gloves i have immediately tear so i'm covered up to the forearms and this dude's sweat and blood managed to get something soft under his face so he can't pancake his face anymore while prepping drugs for sedation managed to sedate and strap the guy down to a board where he had a nice little snooze at the med building until whatever he took wore off washed off clocked off my shift and hit the dance floors [Music] festivals just two weekends ago i was at rockagrass chilling on my top listening to the tunes when a lady 10 featuring in front of me starts screaming help over and over her 18 mo old kid was choking blue in the face and his eyes were starting to roll back i was an emt mana moon's back so i flipped him over and gave four back blows to clear the watermelon chunky was choking on happy feelings all around you saved a beautiful and innocent life that day that's like all the karma you need you can go rob a bank now not a medical person but this story involves one does that count peach fest 17 last day my buddy and i were about to leave we were actually going between campsite and car packing our crap away in small trips there's seven or so of us standing around at this gate waiting to be driven to the car when this hippie looking dude walks up and asks someone for a smoke one kind guy obliges and then this dude just starts talking you know how a stereotypical hippie will start telling a story all slow-like and drags out the word maria he did this classic nobody asked him to start telling this story he just went for it story goes from perspective of hippy guy at festival whatever in the 90s i was working as a bodyguard my tent was near the medical tent so i saw some crap go down once these two dudes on lsd won a skinhead the other a black guy was stuck together in a medical tent both having a bad trip they were yelling at each other but they were high so they kept forgetting why they were so mad so the yelling was just circles of noise eventually medics come in and try to stabilize both guys but if you've ever done acid you'll know that medical questions and how you help alleviate a bad trip that's gotta come from a personal not professional side so anyway i see this going down and i step in and convince the medic to let me take over considering i've done acid plenty of times so i get in and i start asking very basic questions to these guys where are you from what's your name are you high the black guy says yeah i just wanted to listen to metallica live for the first time in my life the skinhead responded dude my favorite band is metallica eventually these two start getting over their fight and start bonding over their favorite band it was like magic in an instant once these two found something in common became not only amiable but friends and i mean good friends i saw these two attached at the hip for the rest of the festival both singing and dancing side by side watching metallica headline the festival it was a surreal moment for me too if you've never seen hatred get subdued by pure kindness and love it's a magical experience for everyone we all learned a lot that day i haven't forgotten that happy guy he was strung out but he was a good soul and he could tell a good freaking story had ha i went to lollapalooza 2006 to see queens of the stone age and the red hot chili peppers when i got heatstroke queens was playing right before the chili peppers and me my friend and his girlfriend decided we wanted to stake out a spot near the front where we would be able to get a good view they had these fences going up to middle leading to the sound board so we staked out spots against it to have something to lean our backs against we tried to bring in a giant jug of water but security wouldn't let us so we each bought one small bottle inside and decided to take turns filling them up at the water fountain most of the day was fine but it was one of the hottest days of the year and it got brutal eventually the crowd around us got so big we couldn't walk to refill our water a bunch of us sat around in a circle talking in this security guard with a ponytail and handlebar moustache walked up to us and said if any of us had any weed to trade he would hook everyone up with waters throughout the rest of the day we all looked around giving each other is this guy for real looks i had weed but no way in heck was i trusting this shady freak the day went on but being out under that brutal hot sun was definitely taking its toll on us we got water sprayed on us occasionally from security people but it was not enough cotta was awesome and we were looking forward to the chili peppers about one song into their set my friend's girlfriend was feeling like she was going to faint so he told the security guard and they pulled her out a couple of songs more and he looks at me and asks if i'm alright i didn't want to say anything but i felt awful like i was gonna pass out and seeing things like i hadn't slept in days i tell him i'm fine but he looks at me and says dude no you're not you should go too and have them look at you i eventually caved and got pulled out as well the security guard walk me down the path to basically the front of the stage and then off to the right to a patch of grass with a bunch of sick people he sat me down and told me to wait about a minute later some lady comes to check on me she points a flashlight in my eyes and says watch her take i told her nothing because i hadn't taken anything come on watch her take i told her again nothing i've been in the freaking sun all day she says aha then signals over to someone who comes and dumps a bucket of ice water on me and gives me a bottle of water i just sat there soaked for the rest of the concert and then tried to find my friend and his girlfriend after the crowd had cleared i finally find them and they ask me why i'm all wet i ask why isn't she wet even though we both got taken away for the same thing i was the only one that had a bucket of ice water dumped on me she got a bottle of water and to peacefully enjoy the rest of the concert from the side still pisses me off to this day have witnessed a number of people seizing up really tough to see wouldn't wish that on anyone people drinking too much taking too much take your time be smart hydrate know what you're ingesting got nothing to prove out there moderation is key i was at edc vegas and stopped by the med tent with my boyfriend so they could wrap his shoulder that he hurt in the pool the day before we were outside waiting to go in and saw four guys trying to drag their friend to the tent the dude was on something i've never seen before he was jumping up and down aggressively and shaking his head and looked like he was having a seizure all four friends were having an extremely hard time getting him under control once he realized he was close to the med tent he somehow broke free from the four guys and booked it back towards main stage his friends took off after him along with two cops they managed to get him close enough to the tent and a med person ran out and literally stabbed him with a needle some tranquilizer to which he immediately collapsed and finally got carried into the tent my boyfriend and i just stood there staring at this whole ordeal in shock i have been to a lot of festivals and have never seen someone behave like that even on multiple party drugs i have no idea what he was on but it was terrifying the guy wasn't even big probably five feet seven and not more than 150 pounds yet it took four friends two cops and a tranquilizer injection to make him stop keep in mind this was like two hours into the festival on the first day probably got slipped pcp honestly actual festival ms worker here in brief we get tons of crazy stories and they become routine but the first i remember was the guy who was found naked before his sunglasses running around bonnaroo attempting to non-violently evade ems he came in restrained to her backboard equally confused energetic and friendly but managed to flip himself and the board off of a cot talk to all the other patients etc woke up unaware that he was naked we'd covered him up obviously with no memories of the night before or where we left his clothes sent him on his way with his sunglasses and a blanket shout out goes to the young lady who did the same but was covered in only glitter and was absolutely sure we were aliens tried unsuccessfully to climb a fence before getting a sedative to the butt actually ends at a music festival here definitely not a craziest thing but it was one of my favorite calls i've been on because no one got hurt and i was brand new and somebody calls me over because some old guy is having a heart attack immediately my fresh out of school brain leaps into action and walks over to this older guy he doesn't seem to be in any apparent distress but he says he's dizzy going through all my textbook questions i eventually land on what he last ate as he tells me it was the chocolate cake that was being passed around his eyes go wide and he stammers am i high yes yes you are i haven't been high for 40 years i feel like such a square it was just so fun to watch the realization come over him and to be there while he decided to make the best of an unexpected trip paramedic here was working standby at an edm type concert rave end of the night i had to wrestle a gay dude wearing only a jock strap and butterfly wings out of a water fountain some bad xtc was going around must have been cut with an upper or bath salt type deal as i was working with a whole bunch of insecure dudes that didn't want to catch the gay they elected on me the queer dude to get this guy out 4th of july festival we get a call for a fight no lights or sirens needed except to disperse the crowd a bit on the way we get upgraded and police are asked to join us unfortunately they're currently dealing with a higher graded call just before we arrive we're informed that one of the fighters has bitting two people and is screaming that he has hep c this is very serious so on the way over stuck in 4th of july traffic we run into some local cops who join us on our way food smells good music is fun we arrive on scene first thing we see is a big dude hunched over by some trash cans huddled over by three women i didn't see anyone else out of the normal at first we approach and ask how he's doing says something along the lines of that guy attacked me he's got hep c we turn around and see a particularly sweaty dude and a wife beater a pair of what could best be described as triangular denim jean shorts and lastly a stained pair of boxers of course these were basically fully exposed as we walk up to this upstanding citizen he makes a break for it and our lovely officers in tow join him until they all make it to the ground this is sadly in front of many youngins and elderly folk just trying to enjoy the music and fireworks once on the ground he gives up and his girlfriend shows up crying asking what's happening what we're doing etc we ask him about the altercation and if he has hep c he's unclear on the disease but very clear that the other guy started it and is completely at fault after transporting the two we got word that the biter did have hep c and a while later that the bitten was lucky enough not to have contacted it guy sitting in a chair out in the middle of a field told me he ate a rice crispy treat with blue specks in it found this out later refused to move get out of the sun it was at least 100 degrees outside thought he would float away he had a death grip on that folding chair we finally just picked him in the chair up together took him to a medical tent sorry not emt but my first year at okeechobee 2017 i had a chick jump in with our crew on the first day after she left hers cause they were doing hard crap security was super lax she failed to mention until that night that she was diabetic and left her insulin at her old camp she insisted that she would be fine we go out and party the first night and had a blast woke up the next morning and she was delirious and forcing herself to vomit wtf i asked off she needed to go to the medical tent which was a five-minute walk but she refused luckily some volunteers were passing in a gator and asked if she needed help i told them her problem and they took her to the medical tent and i told them i'd come check on her in an hour or so i knew she was in good hands and i didn't want to miss out on some of my favorite sets sorry if it seems selfish later on i go to the tent and what do you know she had freaking vanished along with the crew that picked her up i asked the workers that are there where tf she is and describe her but no one has seen anything crap we basically lost her and didn't hear about her the entire night i woke up early the next morning groggy after a night of fun and used the pisser about 200 meters straight down from our camp as i'm walking back i see two cops and two older women standing at my camp where my dumbass friends left their drugs and paraphernalia out in the open mainly hallucinogens and whippets i'm like frick thinking i'm about to get arrested or some crap when one of the cops turns to me and asks a youth a silver potato to which i replied like a smartest whose ask and they told me i wasn't in trouble or anything and then something weird happened that the lost chicks mom runs up and hugs me thanking me for saving her girl and i'm like the freak apparently she was in such terrible condition that they rushed her to the ear and she was in the aiku recovering i told her it was the crew that saved her but she wouldn't have it lol her grandmother was the other woman and they were all super nice we packed up her stuff and gave it to them and they went on their way i kept in touch with that chick for a while and not even half a year later it turns out her mother passed away i wasn't going to ask how but that was the strangest experience of my life tl dr adopted a chick with diabetes and no insulin she went to the aiku her mom showed up and thanked me her mom passed away a few months later doctors what was the best excuse you've heard for someone having something stuck in their butt had a guy with a screwdriver up there handle first he was honest said the wife wanted to try something new why the screwdriver something shaped like a dong would have been gay i always thought that was a real weird place to draw that line i guess you could say he got screwed i've got this one not a doctor but ridge guy comes in walking kinda awkwardly doesn't take a seat when it's his turn he's called up to tridget again refuses to sit what brings you in today i said i uh i've lost her glass you know like a tumblr shuffles okay so why are you here well we had a party that got out of hand last night i was cleaning the house this morning and i noticed one of my drinks glasses was missing and i think it might be up my butt that's it as far as explanation but sure enough there it was on x-ray rim side first so after it disappeared up his butthole it basically filled itself with crap now anytime people that know the story ask if i've seen something they've lost i ask if they've checked their butthole my friend is a nurse she told me about a guy who came into her he claimed to have fallen out of a tree and a branch went right up his butt they x-rayed him and he had this perfectly round wooden rod up his butt when they removed it they saw that it was sanded painted and primed that branch must have come from a genetically modified species of tree lol crazy how the human body do that my mom was a nurse and always remembered the guy whose wife was out of town so he was cooking naked and slipped and fell on a potato i am a nurse a male as well guy came to my hospital with a cue ball stuck in his rectum said him and his wife were having sex and this happened made no excuses and showed no shame a doc was unable to remove it with forceps and he had to get anesthesia to have a minor surgical procedure to get it out my job was basically to just go through a pre-surgical checklist and send him on his way when i'm done he shouts excitedly all right let's get this ball rolling i almost died laughing it was near the end of my shift and i always wonder what happened to him i'm sure he did fine and is back to having amazing kinky sex with his wife all right let's get this ball rolling this guy has hero material had this elderly guy come in with a cucumber up there first month of residency so my attending asks why did you put that up there guy dead's normal says well it was just like every tuesday i woke up made some coffee and sat on a cucumber stifling laughter my attending just said so you shouldn't do that anymore he says okay we removed it and never saw him again guy told me he was constipated so he stuck the brome handle up there to break up the poop i almost believed him edit it was half of a broom handle cut off and wrapped in electrical tape all the way inside his butt i'd believe that people are stupid a college friend who is an or nurse said the best thing she ever witnessed was a small snow globe with the message world's greatest dad on the inside saw someone with a remote control stuck way up in their colon she said she was getting herself ready for anal sex with her boyfriend and then it got stuck the kicker was that she showed up to the hospital with her boyfriend and her husband in tow i am really curious as to how that conversation went my ex is a nurse one night she sent me a pic of her computer of what she was working on 16 yo male brought in by his mother shoved a sausage up his butt and lost it imagine the embarrassment of telling mom hey mom i lost a sausage in my butt can you take me to the air freaking kids paramedic here had one guy tell me he slipped on a banana peel and landed on the upright bars on the floor he then proceeded to produce a banana peel for good measure the fact that he genuinely had a banana peel made me laugh more than the entirety of this thread not in but but a vagina i was doing my clinical rotation in third year did a cervical assessment on 36 w pregnant woman who thought she was in labor painful cramping plus plus discharge i found eight cloves of garlic she thought she could avoid group b strap with it she read it online she thought they would dissolve one you can't avoid gbs like this two they turn to slimmer mush bulbs they don't dissolve she was not in labor she was responding to an infection a nasty one she was admitted for fluids object removal meds and monitoring of fetus for treatment overnight i finished my 24 8 shift before the next op wrapped up cramping stopped very soon after we got it all out last i saw her she was just feeling sad and dumb i felt really awful for her she was trying to do the right thing for her pregnancy gbs gut bacteria found in one stroke three of adults at any time some cow tries screen for its presence because in rare cases it does nasty things to baby if they get colonized at birth i had a patient who was trying to treat bacterial vaginosis with garlic cloves you have a special knowledge of how thankful i was she'd made a little cheesecloth pouch for it first all came out in one gloriously funky chunk garbage had to go out immediately guy came in with a cordless phone up his butt like one of the old school ones from 15 years ago he said that when he was in the kitchen bending over opening the oven door someone threw it through his open window and it just went right up when i was a student working in an old guy came in with an unraveled wire hanger stuck and hooked up there he said he was trying to fish out the vibrator he lost it always boils down to the person accidentally sat on it the best my dad saw a former emergency doctor was a young guy who accidentally sat on a giant tub of vaseline accidentally i asked how doctors record that in their patient files and the common way to do so is to say the patient claims to have sat on ex-object there was a news story in my country a man went to the ear and they discovered that he drunkenly put two hammer heads in his butt his reasoning being that he ate a jar of preserved cherries with pits and then had abdominal pain and wanted to smash the pits took me a few seconds to realize you didn't mean tiny sharks related guy puts a vibrator one of the massive cordless one types one a up there like a mega seed and it gets sucked into the sigmoid colon when he gets to me in the air i ask him how he was feeling he answered well doc i'm way better since the batteries died made my night i've been trying to entertain the medical staff since my open heart surgery was having problems with low blood pressure it hit 90 stroke 58 i got the ringing in my ears everything went red and i passed out oh no yeah but my carpet smells fantastic a nurse i tried to dig something out of my butt with a barbecue skewer skewer got stuck whipped a hole in his intestines he waited so long to come and he was septic one stat or visit and then i could stay later please don't call my mom guy was tripping hard on lsd i stuck it up there on purpose and now it's stuck please help it was a perfectly honest and valid reason for have something stuck up your butt and we helped no further questions needed now i'm interested how often that happens i mean the honest answer not an excuse but a medic told me that they have contests about what is the most unexpected thing they pulled out of butts the winner was a guy that put an electric christmas decoration the ones you wrap around the tree in her own words the legend doesn't say whether he plugged it or not i should have asked what the excuse was for that one so i actually once did fall naked in my bedroom and my butt cheek smashed hard onto the end of a small dumbbell that was angles up at 45 degrees i'm coming to realize after reading all of this that had it hit the ball see no one would have freaking believed me my cousin who is a doctor once told me that when you really do fall on something and it goes up there it's not pretty there is tearing and overall injury when there is no injury where it went in you know it was likely eased in and that's how they know the eye fell on its story is bulls presented at her in sydney with carrots stuck in the ass doctor what happened patient i heard a noise in the garden went to investigate slipped and fell over carrot went up my bum doctor carrots grow upside down out your way huh friend's mum was a nurse a man came into her with a cucumber in his bum apparently he was vacuuming his fruit shop in the nude and slipped over worked on ambulances not a doctor mostly bottles or vegetables the aubergine was the biggest but potatoes and carrots seem to be popular ketchup mayo and glass cola bottles were common at one point also one butt plug and a toilet brush the last two were honest and very distraught others all had naked gardening stories there's an even worse question you haven't asked which is for things people have shoved up their urethras only men in my experience my brother was a trage nurse and examined someone that came in with a barbie doll up their ass don't know if they were male or female though there was a guy who would often come to my friends a for barbie head removals he had several barbies he kept in his jacket held in place by loopholes he had sewn in they always knew how many heads to look for by how many heads were missing from the barbies in his coat my sister is a surgical nurse and a guy came into to the hospital with a pool noodle shoved up his butt it was so deep that they had to cut open his abdomen intestines and colon to cut the foam out of him he said he fell on it while swimming nude but when they cut him open it had a condom stretched over the end of it when they confronted him he said please don't tell me wife at least he was practicing safe sex the best one i've heard is a priest who had peeled a potato and left it on the side for his dinner either decided to hang the curtains back up while nude and fell off the stepladder onto it it was in the uk paper years ago if i find it i'll post the source what i love is that some poor bloke just one did fall on something naked and no one is going to believe him i went to med school in the deep south burley middle-aged southern gentleman showed up in the ed chief complaint rectal pain after a full history and physical examination couldn't ascertain the case of his pain other than him saying feels like something's up there we decided to start with some x-rays before we obtained them he says all right i'm gonna be square with you i was walking down the street minding my own business when these thugs jumped me out of nowhere and held me down and stuck a cucumber up my butt please you got to get it out i immediately went to get my attending one surgical consultant gi consult later a cucumber wrapped in a condom was extracted from this man's rectum i was walking down the street minding my own business when these thugs jumped me out of nowhere and held me down and stuck a cucumber up my butt smh look how far america has fallen we have gangs of thugs going around putting cucumbers in people's buttholes for though i laughed so hard at this comment friend is a stomach surgeon so always gets called in to pull things out of asses he has loads of stories but the one i remember is a guy who had a glass ketchup bottle up his arse he'd claimed to have returned home with his grocery shopping realized he'd lost his key so put shopping down and attempted to climb through a high window he slipped fell backwards ass first onto his groceries and shlum the ketchup bottle just shot up as a hole ignore that guy was presumably not naked the time after removing it at the hospital my doctor friend said that strange the ketchup you bought is only half full i think the worst thing is that it suggests he was gonna eat the rest of it another time a light bulb you could always tell when someone came into the air with something lodged in their rectum because everyone would be standing around looking at the x-ray it was still in perfect light bulb shape i have no idea how the patient got it up there without breaking it i'll tell you what their bobo either the kids got to light bulb up his butt or his colons got a great idea dr cox had a patient who showed up with his soon-to-be ex-wife they were reconciling at a nearby motel she convinced him that if he loved her he would let her put a dildo in his butt only it wasn't a dildo it was a vibrator without a flared base rule number one of anal play is make sure that it has a flared base rule number two is nothing sharp the whole thing went up there and he couldn't get it out i had to take it out under anesthesia she felt awful and was crying the whole time he was a very blue collar normal dude and she was dressed in very fancy clothes an unlikely match in my mind he was just happy that they were at my urban hospital and not the uppity town about 15 miles away where they lived i often wonder what became of them and their marriage i feel like nothing sharp should be rule number one shudder trying to reduce prolapsed hemorrhoids he developed after a long arduous book dr term of course i wondered how a vegetable peeler was the most available object to be had in the bathroom the vegetable peeler became stuck as these things tend to do however this was the kind with slits and the plastic and his formerly prolapsed amahi tissue protruded into the slits making it impossible to remove also cutting off blood supply which made them necrotic by the time we went to the oar what kills me is that his next move to try to remove this object from his anus was to try to cut i.t out with scissors omg it was horrible a jagged piece of plastic wedged in horrifying and indeed quite memorable ah and that's officially the worst thing i've ever heard of my god that's freaking horrifying not a doctor but i don't know that i'll have a chance to share this again growing up there was an urban legend about a local bloke that had to have a button-up pumpkin squash removed from his ass fast forward 25 years and i'm reading the book written by my dad's liver specialist and lo and behold it wasn't a legend in fact an entire chapter was dedicated to gentlemen with foreign objects needing removal from arsenal bladder just reading bladder made me cringe i don't know how anyone can stick things up there you asked for the best but i have the worst but possibly the most honest response i've gotten i was an emt and ran a call at a methadone clinic she was a 28 year old female who had possibly od'd when we got there she was sitting on the ground completely naked my captain asked what was up about to which i responded quickly as trash bag sir for some reason there was a contractor back jammed right up her anus my captain ordered me to remove it and it felt like i was a magician pulling a bunch of napkins out of a dove or whatever magicians do she looks at me without a word until i asked her why there was a trash bag up her butt at which point she responded we didn't have a condom this was my second week on the job it wasn't an excuse and it wasn't the butt a young lady in riverside tx very heavy m presence was dared to stick a live catfish in her vagina she shoved it in head first those who know catfish know they have very sharp dorsal fins while the dorsal fins lodged in the walls of her vagina and became stuck she came into the air screaming in pain with a live catfish flopping all willy-nilly out of her privates i wish i still had a copy of that x-ray welp my vagina has packed its bags and nope the frick out of this thread i once had to take a guide to the or to remove the cucumber from his rectum since it had migrated up further than could be extracted manually i don't remember his excuse but it had been in there for more than a week and when we took it out it had started to pickle i am pickle shy my grandmother used to be in a nurse apparently back in the day these kinds of stories were shared over facts a hospital in network had a story about a patient cc was abdominal distress radiograph reveal odd radio opacities in pairs about three stroke four of an inch apart docs counted three four pairs couldn't figure out what it was exploratory surgery resulted in four barbie doll heads in the patient's large intestine after the discovery patients stated that he had a fetish he swallowed barbie heads because he liked the way the hair felt on the way out the radio opacities were the dull eyes apparently there used to be metal in the paint or something top comment after reading facts barbies are expensive did he recycle this is eerily similar to another comment on here involving barbie heads jesus christ how many people just stick random crap up their butt a whole lot of sexually frustrated kinky people caught up in the moment of getting their rocks off without actually considering the potential consequences resulting in having to go to the a4 extraction is my guess i heard a story probably made up that a bunch of guys were hanging out and getting stoned while camping or somewhere outdoors when one of their members went into diabetic shock his buddies knew he was a diabetic and realized what was happening but had no idea what to do about it except to get him to a hospital not a bad choice so they all piled into a car to drive him to a hospital this was before cell phones on the way they were arguing what to do they felt he needed sugar whether right or wrong that is what they decided and they argued over how you get sugar into an unconscious person supposedly the a doctors found a snickers bar or whatever candy shoved up his bum when they examined the patient i will say if true he has really good friends dumb friends but good 20 years ago an ex was in a nurse a guy came in with a magic mushroom air freshener stuck up in there he was embarrassed and did not even attempt to explain it she said that when the doctor got it out he said funny it doesn't smell pine fresh and everybody laughed i am kind of surprised that didn't lead to lawsuit taking the doctor to court would have involved explaining to the judge what happened yes your honor after the doctor put his medical degree to use by getting elbow deep in me like jim henson working kermit he made a joke and it made me sad rn here had a jehovah's witness gentleman admitted to haiku with his bowels perforated states he had constipation so he decided he needed a cleaning he happens to do pipe work so he hooked some pipes up to the hose then inserted the other end in his rectum to just give it the oil swish and dump burst his colon from the pressure and all the hard pipe crammed up his butt unfortunate thing was he needed a blood transfusion but oops he is a jehovah's witness so no go i learned then that they actually send a group of people to the hospital to watch you and make sure you don't stray from your faith i always wondered what he told them como i learned them that they actually send a group of people to the hospital to watch you and make sure you don't stray from your faith jesus christ frick them so hard i worked on a surgical ward for a while and we had a few strange items i can't tell you what their excuse was because we saw them post operatively one guy stuck not one not two but three snooker balls up his bum one guy stuck a clay pigeon up his bum that one was pretty impressive one guy 92 yellow tried to fish out a vibrator with a coat hanger and my personal favorite a guy stuck an old nokia 3310 up his bum they x-rayed him and took him to theater they kept trying to fish it out but he kept getting phone calls from his mum wondering where he was every time she rang the phone would vibrate further up his bowel remember how back in the day you could get those crappy two dollars ringtones where it wouldn't sing the lyrics but it would buzz to the words and music guess what his ringtone was will smith's getting jiggy with it thank you and good night if i had a nokian up my butt the last place i'd want to go is the movies a doc and a little late to the game here i've lost count how many rectal foreign bodies i've removed but there was this one kid well teenager he got a battery stuck up his butt told his mom that he had been experiencing constipation and thought his butthole was just too small for the poop to get through so he was trying to dilate it with a battery um yeah okay the kicker was that his mom completely bought this story and she's there telling me how this whole thing happened to her precious innocent son my mum worked an emergency for a long time back in the 80s and this is her favorite story but it was a vagina and not a butt a woman had used one of those white shallow face cream tubs as a diaphragm predictably it became stuck while doing the deed and she presented at the hospital fully honest about what she'd done anyway they managed to remove it and then she asked for the tub back because it still had face cream in it emergency medicine physician here on the flip side there is nothing more refreshing to this than when people come in and are completely honest patient i like to put golf balls into my rectum sometimes and i can't remember if i put in three or four but i only got out three me perfect you have a problem that i can solve let me order an x-ray and see if there is one more that i need to remove for you sounds pretty much par for the course this isn't exactly what you asked for but a family friend is an endocrinologist and a surgeon he has his fair share of oddities they have to remove but what stands out to me is that he must have a few cases every year where the patient has no idea how the peanut butter got on their crotch or why the dog bit them way more common than it should be i thought it was something out of the movies the frequency of occurrence and confidence in lie always baffles me true story and not funny to this day in high school my best friend's twin sister got a frozen banana stuck in her butt she was so mortified that she had her girlfriend's attempt to remove it by squirting boiling water in her rectum with a squirt gun some of the material from the melted water gun was also found she suffered burns so bad she was put on a special liquid diet and missed the final two months of school including graduation worst of all it happened at spring break in cancun her parents didn't trust the hospital but due to the severity rather than fly her home the surgery was delayed a full 24 hours until her parents could travel down to supervise a student on the yearbook committee was almost expelled because on the page on which a picture appeared he replaced their second digit of the page number with a small banana this happened in a very small high school in the early 90s so i'm not afraid of someone recognizing the specificity of the story doctors have read it what is the most mind-blowing recovery you've ever witnessed resident here when i was a medical student on a cardiology rotation we had a very nice 40 years old lady that was being treated for a heart attack kinda young but okay this type of heart attack deemed an nstemi is the type where she did not have to be urgently rushed to the cath lab so she had hers the morning after she was admitted seemingly fine before going down while in the cath lab she spontaneously went into cardiac arrest they got her back after two shocks multiple rounds of cpr and a round of ep usually if someone is coding for a while it doesn't look good for them but she came back and was intubated so it's more of a watch and weight deal after well overnight she self-extubated herself when i rounded on her in the morning she was awake and said she felt fine her only complaint was that she felt like she got burned on her chest and that was irritating her a bit oh yeah that was the 200 jay of electricity going through you a few hours ago she then went on asking when she was going to be discharged because she needed to go home and take care of her two dogs the fact that she went into cardiac arrest in house and in a shockable rhythm definitely helped her chances of a good outcome but it's still one of my cooler stories bc contrary to what people see in the tv shows people don't just wake up eager to take on the day after cardiac arrest ha i had a guy like that he rolled in with an nst emi and coded in the trauma room was quickly coded and actually woke up asking the trauma nurse to stop compressions i cared for him the next day after his angiogram and he told me that story i hadn't before realized just how much he scared the crap out of the trauma nurse resident here this one is more of a mind-blowing remission than an acute recovery had one patient in one of my internal medicine rotations in medical school who was admitted for hip surgery who was one of the nicest sweetest people i've ever met her surgery was pretty routine and there were no complications in her past medical history she was diagnosed with stage iv endometrial cancer that had spread to her brain apparently she had undergone chemo radiation primary tumor resection and surgery to remove the brain met she remained cancer free since that period the fact that she had undergone that whole ordeal and appeared to be mostly healthy and was in remission from her cancer really blew my mind have seen a lot of remarkable recoveries back to baseline from people unconscious and intubated in aiku especially in young people who have high physiological reserve to bounce back from catastrophic events for example thyroid storm aneurysms ketoacidosis i'd say the most surprising recovery was in a drug and alcohol patient man in his 20s with a very difficult upbringing dropped out of high school at 15 and was just hooked on him and alcohol since very expensive habits so he'd commit crimes to fund the drugs get out of prison and back to us for rehabilitation commit another crime a horrible cycle he wasn't motivated to recover because he didn't have much of a life to return to serious health problems from drug use nobody would hire him due to his criminal record parents in prison also seemed mildly intellectually impaired possibly from chronic drug use he only had his girlfriend then his girlfriend died of a drug overdose i thought he'd follow after because he was hanging on just for her but he did a total 180 booked himself into detox attended all his appointments got his high school equivalency stayed clean for years and got hired as a security guard on discharge he was with a new partner and they had a baby on the way during his last appointment he dropped into the dollar store and had a bag with a stuffed elephant and pink blanket inside just wow that's him will right there not a doctor but a nurse who worked in long-term care i had a patient who was apparently actively dying she had stopped eating for three four days and was on comfort measures only this meant she was receiving morphine every hour and the rest of her medications were discontinued and she was only being fed and given water as tolerated out of nowhere one day she just sat up and said i'm hungry and like that she was back to normal she lived for around another year or so after that paramedic fireman here had a guy 65-ish years old who dropped dead while on a treadmill leeds showed a sisterly which means dead as heck zero electrical activity in his heart one round of cpr with one round of als meds goes into a shockable rhythm defibrillate shock one time guy gets a normal heart rhythm back with a pulse loaded him up had a five-minute transport by the time we got to the hospital this man was making jokes with us and would have walked and if we let him this is not how cardiac arrests go you usually die and if you live your quality of life after is usually greatly reduced if not negligible this was absolutely incredible as a resident i admitted a patient for a copd exacerbation pretty routine what wasn't was her history she had been discharged from the hospital four years before with hospice she had biases proven small cell lung cancer that had metastasized to other organs essentially zero survival and she had gone home to receive medicine to make her comfortable she hadn't taken any cancer treatment four years later when i admitted her there was no trace of cancer the only suggestion from the pulmonologist was her cracksy habit must have been lethal to the cancer or her body just found a way to fight it off basically we don't know how and her odds of doing it should be about zero doctors hate her she cracked the code sorry i am not a doctor but my brother had been given hours to live three times during his battle with cancer i flew to see him and say goodbye all three times and another 20 odd times to give moral support over the two years he fought one night in the hospital the doctors told us to say goodbye as he had only hours to live we all fell asleep holding his hand and at 6am i opened my eyes and listened to see if i could hear breathing it was quite dark and all i heard was my brother's voice saying holy sh t i am still here he lived for another year holy sh t i am still here is a great quote i'm a patient not a doctor i was diagnosed at 22 with lupus and got acutely sick very quickly which is a little out of the ordinary for the disease long story short it's almost killed me a few times but i'm lucky enough to call myself healthy for the time being i've had a lot of doctors and met a lot of rounding med students since i'm a fun teaching case anyway a couple years ago i was out with my daughter at a park and i ran into the doctor who originally diagnosed me forever ago but i was acutely ill at the time i met him and my prognosis was pretty grim i hadn't seen him in over 10 years he hesitantly walked up to me and asked my name and then yelled oh my god you have a daughter honestly i have never seen a grown man so excited in my life he was almost giddy he wanted to know everything about how i had been doing and just kept smiling when i said i was married with kids and had been feeling good for the past few years it was such a chance running but i'm so glad he got to see me doing well since he had seen me at my absolute worst makes me smile just thinking about it aww that's so cool it makes me all silly to hear of the doctors getting all cute because they want you to be healthy not a doctor but this is my mom's story from a few years before i was born she was driving home during a really bad snowstorm she lost control of her car swerved into the opposite lane and got t-boned by a pickup truck the truck hit her car so hard the driver's portion of the car was pretty much all that was left somewhat intact my mom sat there lifeless for 30 minutes before anyone even called for help rescue had to use the jaws of life to get her out of the wreck and rushed her to the hospital while in the hospital doctors told her family that they've done all they can it's all other patients in situations like hers either died or were comatose for the rest of their life and she probably wasn't going to make it soon after that her blood started to coagulate and her road to recovery began she had to learn how to do everything again talk walk hold her head up feed herself clean herself dress herself etc to make a long story short after a year i think she went to the house of the head surgeon who operated on her and introduced herself the doctor had to excuse himself for a while so he could gather his emotions because he just couldn't believe that my mom made the recovery she did she doesn't even look like anything happened to her but since her accident she has lived with a quarter of a lung missing one kidney missing double vision and partial loss of feeling on her right side other than that she looks and acts perfectly healthy four years after her accident she gave birth to me i think she's a walking miracle and she's the strongest person i know dang this reminds me way too much of my own mother's accident that kind of hard hit has lasting effects and i'm dang proud of both your mother and the surgeon for keeping her alive my mom crashed on black ice and broke too many bones and received at b medics thought she was a doa 19 years later and she's still kicking not a doctor but a relative my grandma ended up in bed for about a year when she was in her mid-seventies she had been declining for a fair while and just kept getting more and more medication to take care of her different illnesses and discomfort i went up there three months before this and i was sure i wouldn't see her again she was almost comatose just lying in her bed barely being responsive at one point my seven-year-old second cousin randomly overhears my mom telling my aunt that grandma started on yet another type of medication far into double digits seven-year-olds start crying because apparently she thinks that medicine is making grandma more sick and every time she gets more pills she gets more tired my mom and dad comfort this poor kid telling her that it is not the medicine that is making her sick and whatever you tell a seven-year-old to calm them down my mom is a nurse or was back then she is retired now she worked with her best friend at a smaller private hospital in denmark and a week later in the lunch room she is telling her friend the story about my cousin the in-house anesthetist picks up on the convo asks about what type of medication grandma is on mom starts mentioning the ones she remembers which really gets this guy's attention basically my mom names a chain reaction like medicine a has lack of energy as a side effect and another side effect which is then treated with b that causes lack of energy and another side effect that is then treated with c etc so basically if grandma didn't get a she wouldn't need b c d ori and that is just the five medicines that my mom remembered off the top of her head mum gets a list of all the medicines together for her colleague apparently him and his doctor mrs went over them as an after-dinner activity and the next morning he had a three-page letter written up that my mom could give grandma's doctor arguing why 25 out of 28 medications where at best unnecessary if not harmful mum got the next day off drove 450 kilometers to see grandma's doctor showed up without an appointment pulled to karen got to see him showed him the letter and half an hour later left with a new medicine scheduled to step grandma out of 25 different medicines and half the dose of the three remainings two days later my grandma got out of bed for no apparent reason for the first time in six months two months later she was walking the dog and baking again 15 years later grandma is still alive she is missing a leg now and four years ago she moved into a retirement home with my grandpa i haven't seen her for three years but she is doing good he ended up getting compensated by the stated can't remember the figures but it was the maximum amount mind you not that high in denmark for some reason the phrase paul de karin is utterly hilarious to me glad to hear grandma is doing great cardiac care nurse here got called to the ear to assist with a cardiac arrest of this patient in his 50s he had a delay of 10 minutes no oxygen to his brains for 10 minutes the emt already tried reviving him for 45 minutes on a flat line after 15 minutes the doctor said last check before we declare this patient deceased and when we did he actually had a pulse and a decent rhythm on the monitor mind you we use an automatic cpr machine so we don't have to do manual compression so we had to turn off the machine to check he got wheeled to the iq ended up on the core any care two days later pretty confused by my dad and a week later he walked out of the hospital when the doctors discharged him without any brain damage or visual physical damage coma reviving him for 45 minutes on a flat line holy crap they were determined good for them i had a patient during med school 19 yo guy who had had a history of his aortic valve replaced because he was born with a bit of a funky one bicuspid aortic valve well when i saw him in the cardiac floor he was walking talking totally normal except for a bit of weakness on one side pretty much just on that floor for more monitoring and treatment for a vegetation on one of his valves prior to that though he'd arrested in the field ms got called and did cpr for 30 minutes got circulation back took him to the ed where he arrested again they got him back and took him up to the aiku intubated on presses he woke up got better and got transferred to us one of the aiku attendings that took care of him stopped by and just kind of stared at him and said you were dead i think that was a huge win for him i was an intern working in the miku during flu season an elderly woman came in with respiratory distress due to the flu she was already in bad shape prior to this copd heart failure etc she was subsequently intubated started on bedside dialysis went into liver failure developed an allergy to heparin to name a few she was maintained in a medically induced coma for about two weeks because she could not be extubated safely a long story short after about six eight weeks either hospital she went to her rehab without needing a trash or dialysis i'm still surprised how she managed to make it out i'm a rehab doctor so this is right up my alley i saw the guy who was impaled by a 2x4 it literally went through one side of his abdomen and out the other somehow it avoided his internal organs and the surgery team was able to safely remove it he got discharged to rehab service a few days after admission and we discharged him home a few weeks after that basically a normal guy with some residual pain and new scars typical not a doctor and not mine either my mom was driving someplace on the highway and it was winter she started seeing semi-trucks on the side of the road having slid off from the ice by the time she decided enough was enough it was too late she hit black ice and slid into the opposite lane straight into a semi-going 60 miles per hour rolled down the side of the semi and somehow ended up with both the cab's landing leg and her van's engine in her lap the entire back half of her vehicle was sheared off behind the passenger and driver's seats ended up in the median the first person there took me into their vehicle to keep warm i was a year old saved by the blanket draped over my seat and she called for the medics because of the horrific scene paramedics assumed she was doa so they did code one to the scene the medic strolls up to the driver's side and my mom says boo she tells me the practically guy crap his pants then hurried to set her free after cutting through the wreckage they got her to the local hospital then life flighted her to the bigger one she had a broken femur loss of cuts from the glass broken left arm two or three ribs hip knee and ankle plus internal bleeding that seemed to disappear once they arrived at the hospital turns out she received it b which she still suffers from 19 years later the most significant part of the recovery however was raising a special needs child and a son by herself my father left her because of the accident and no one else would help her she couldn't do physical therapy or even get treatment for her pee because of it spinal orthopedic engineer here a small set of patients whose disc degenerates to a grade four spondylolisthesis in a very fast span of time such as a trauma case can become either paralyzed or partially paralyzed in their lower body a two-hour surgery involving a spinal interbody and posterior fixation can under most circumstances have a patient walking the same day although that never happens due to safety precautions such as having them rest a day or two to allow muscle soreness to fade had an elderly patient who presented with a severe kidney infection condition called infasamatus pyelonephritis normally we would take her to the operating room and perform an emergency nephrectomy or removal of her kidney however she was unresponsive and hemodynamically unstable and was deemed too unhealthy to undergo a big surgery as a last resort we placed a drain tube into her kidney to give the bacteria a way out she didn't improve much after this she was never really alert or had energy to get out of bed she was eventually discharged to a nursing home on palliative care a month later i saw her in clinic and she was pee she was completely coherent and furious about the nursing home apparently one of the other residents was bullying her and ruining a card game she liked to play we admitted her to the hospital that day and did her nephrectomy she had one of the fastest recoveries ever seen after a nephrectomy and she was in her 80s incredible recovery from where she started in a messed up way that jerk in the crappy nursing home saved her life by gave her motivation to get better in april of 2014 my husband was diagnosed with als at the mayo in rochester after what we thought was a simple visit to be tested for knee replacement we were shocked as you might imagine there is no cure for als and average life expectancy after diagnosis is three years in july he retired from his job as a writer director at a global reinsurance company as a christian family we prayed and we believed he would be healed every three months he returned to the mayo for tests to see how the disease was progressing it never got any worse in january of 2015 he asked his company if he could return to work because he didn't appear to be on the way to death and we weren't in a place financially for him to retire they had not been able to replace him and were happy to have him back in april of 2015 the doctors at the mayo diagnosed his als in august of 2015 he had surgery at the mayo to relieve an impinge nerve in his spinal cord this sounds much simpler than it actually was it was hoped that over time this would allow his body to heal and correct the foot drop he was suffering that brought him there in the first place they said this could take a couple of years as the nerves heal extremely slowly his feet and ankles were checked by a nurse about six hours after surgery and all normal strength had returned all the doc could say was this is very unusual he is very much alive and still working and has a great story to tell he calls it his year of living dangerously this isn't a recovery he was clearly misdiagnosed you don't just recover from als it's a death sentence the only uncertainty is how long the degeneration will take before it kills you diabetic with fornia's gangrene do a quick google image search had to be de-breeded and was basically flayed from mid-thigh to the pubic area down to the muscle surgeon did a stellar job on debridement and the patient albeit had a very long impatient stay had all things considered a pretty incredible recovery not doing the google image search this is a long comment tl dr at the end we had this few hours old newborn transferred into our ward she had her older sister die at the age of 11 days without any diagnosis a metabolic disorder was suspected but not proven we feared that she didn't have much time to live if we didn't diagnose and treat her asap her mother was traumatized to the point of refusing to name her she thought that if she lost her without naming her that it will hurt less i was a part of the team that took care of this case i spent a lot of time with both the newborn and her mother i managed to convince the mother to name her she gave me a couple of names she had in mind and i chose one both of them were the first people i would check on when coming in and the last to see right before going home finally the team managed to diagnose her phenylketonuria deficiency the treatment was dietary she had to avoid consuming the phenylalanine amino acid she got better a year later she came in for a checkup and a couple of dietary touch-ups she was the most beautiful one-year-old girl i have ever seen i wanted to mother her with kisses and hugs and i'm someone who's not usually a fan of kids when i first saw them her mother looked at her and said that's uncle sam he's the one who named you he played a huge role in saving your life give him a big kiss and warm hug that almost brought me to tears she was a healthy and energetic little angel the best part of my medical career so far p.s to be totally transparent the disease she had is kind of common and not a hard diagnosis to find and the prognostic is a good one if treated early one last thing i played a small role in the medical investigation but the difference between the day we got her in the ward and a year later is unbelievable tl dr a mother refused to name her newborn because she thought she the newborn would end up dying i named her played some role in taking care of her a year later she came in for a checkup and she was the healthiest one-year-old frick me it's got dusty in here all of a sudden honest another not a doctor comment but a friend of mine was a pretty bad alcoholic with a weak heart he was 40 years old tried to quit drinking cold turkey in his second day without a drink he started having seizures so his wife took him to the hospital that night he decided he didn't want to be in the hospital and tried to leave he was getting violent so the doctors and nurses sedated him and put him into a medically induced coma during the coma all of his organs except for his kidneys went into failure he was being kept alive by machines and medications in the aiku for three weeks nobody expected him to live the doctors said he was the sickest person in the hospital and didn't expect him to live but miracles happen he slowly started getting better over his stay in the aiku and the doctors did a tracheostomy breathing tube in his throat different than a tracheotomy as a last-ditch effort to take out his feeding and breathing tubes to try to wake him up it took a week just to wake him up from the coma after a few more weeks of pt and at least a month in a rehab facility he is currently fully recovered and getting back to a normal life from what every single doctor and nurse that worked on him said that his recovery would be described as mind-blowing also the doctors and nurses at valley hospital in ridgewood nj are the best in the world and deserve all the thanks in the world for the work they do every day tl dr my alcoholic friend went into organ failure from quitting drinking and recovered after being in a coma for three weeks this does raise a good point as well if you're an alcoholic quitting drinking go see a doctor the withdrawal symptoms from quitting cold turkey are well known to be potentially lethal better to get medical advice and do it safely dr md here i have a patient who is in her 20s who was a micropreemie born at 24 weeks gestation that is just at the cusp of viability and can have debilitating consequences or very commonly ultimately death as a newborn she tells me at birth they gave her mother the option of palliative care for her allowing her to pass naturally or fighting for her life mother chose the latter somehow she beat the odds has no noticeable deficits and got accepted to a prestigious university i would say that is a pretty good recovery not the doctor but the catalyst my grandmother had a tumor that was apparently unreachable just behind her ribs i did not know this and went to snuggle with her for a while because she was generally just very nice to be around however while repositioning myself i elbowed her in the ribs right where the tumor was now keep in mind again i'm like nine i don't know anything all i knew at the time was that i elbowed grandma and she shouted in pain my mother and grandma both comfort me while i cry over this a few days later grandma goes to the doctor again and it turns out the tumor had been dislodged to the point where they could remove it she kept kicking for a few more years after this and i like to think that i helped a kid who had a three percent chance of survival with surgery and still survived for two years and lives to this day i'm the patient i went through 10 surgeries in 800 days from 2015 through 2018 bone spur to amputation two bone biopsies in three days two separate ankle fusions a vascular necrosis and osteomyelitis 18 inches piccc line for 10 weeks then i became an lbk amputee on the 19th of april received my first prosthetic on the 18th of june 2018. on the 6th of november 2019 i squatted 607 pounds and leg pressed 1005 pounds within a year of being blessed with the ability to walk again i am squatting more than most two-footed beings i'm just stoked on it and felt this question was a dope place to put it keep crushing the recoveries my medical misfits man in his 30s was brought into my intensive care unit having drowned in a lake for roughly 30 minutes before being pulled out by friends and emergency services his core temperature was 29 celsius but the paramedics had managed to restart his heart on the way to the hospital i wasn't holding out much hope for this guy 30 minutes underwater usually means either death or permanent brain damage we put tubes into every orifice and created a few more for good measure he was hooked up to her ventilator in a filtration unit and placed on a warming pad over the next 24 hours we slowly warmed him back to normal temperature once his vitals were quite stable we held off on his sedation and slowly woke him up while i was off shift by the time i was back in 12 hours later he was sitting up having a cup of tea i walked past him that morning he looked at me and i looked at him i felt like i'd seen a ghost when he saw that look on my face he started to cry one of the few times i've ever hugged a patient he walked out two days later and five days after the incident which by all accounts should have meant his death i will never forget him if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: On Tap Studios

Views: 198,165

Keywords: doctors, medical, medical stories, doctor stories, reddit doctors, reddit doctor stories, reddit doctors funny, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap, reddit stories 2021

Id: elQLnyTRIjA

Length: 172min 10sec (10330 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 28 2021