Doctors Confess The Worst Mistakes They've Made

doctors have read it what is the biggest mistake you've made serious pathologist here biggest mistake I ever made was cutting myself during an autopsy on an HIV patient lucky for me I did not acquire the virus so everything had a happy ending for me anyway that guy was still dead doctor here I don't think you're going to get a lot of responses the average non-medical person just doesn't understand how certain things happen and it seems egregious that Dana Carvey had a coronary bypass to the wrong artery even though it's pretty damn hard to find a specific vessel at a specific location on the heart I'm impressed this isn't a more common situation then after an incident like that people just think that the doctor should lose his license for that never mind that the physician may have spent 15 years in extremely rigorous training went hundreds of thousands into debt and has committed his life to the profession my entire identity is partly wrapped into being a physician that's like saying a parent who makes a serious parenting mistake should simply lose their children forever and yes I'm a parent as well plus there are patient privacy laws non-disclosure arrangements from lawsuits and a lot of other things I think malpractice is a wholly flawed concept a surgeon in the following specialties has a 99% chance of being sued in his career neurosurgery thoracic cardiovascular surgery general surgery orthopedic surgery and plastic surgery not me but my mom she just retired as a knob slash gym and she told me about a time early on in her career when well not a real medical mistake she still almost ruined the operation she was performing a c-section I think and she dropped her scalpel on the floor before she could think she blurted out oh [ __ ] as a reaction the mother thinking something was wrong with the baby started panicking it took a team of nurses the husband and the mother of the patient to calm her down edit this was very early in her career and she practiced for another 25 years without major incidents my c-section was the most traumatic experience of my life and I have been through a bit if I may say so myself complete accident on your mom's part that I felt honest panic reading that thinking of how I would have reacted if it happened during mine if that is the worst your mom did though she was a great option as a very young doctor in training i misdiagnosed a woman with epilepsy some years prior she had sustained a gunshot wound to the frontal area damaging the underside of one of their frontal lobes and severing an optic nerve to one of her eyes as well as some of the muscles that rotated that eyeball surgery saved her life but the frontal lobe was scarred and the I was blinded and always pointed down and at an angle away from her nose a few years after that she began having spells of a business sensation altered awareness a pounding in the chest and she had to sit down stop what she was doing and couldn't speak these were odd spells and I assumed she had developed frontal lobe epilepsy from the scar on her brain increasing doses of anti-seizure drugs seemed to work initially but then the spells came back a couple years after my diagnosis her endocrinologist who treated her for diabetes mellitus checked a thyroid it was super high the spells were manifestations of hyperthyroidism she drank the radioactive iodine cocktail which ablated her thyroid got on thyroid replacement therapy and felt well thereafter no permanent harm done and she was able to come off the anti-epilepsy drugs she was obese not the typical skinny hyperthyroid patient and if she developed thyroid eye disease I couldn't tell because her one I was already so messed up I see how I screwed it up but in retrospect I have never been sure what I could have done differently except test her thyroid at the outset of treatment hence a lot of patients thousands have had their thyroid checked by me since then every so often I pick up an abnormality and it gets treated the lady was an employee of the hospital where I trained and I ran into her one day she gave me a hug and let me know how this had all gone down she made a point of wanting me to know she didn't blame me because I always seemed to care about her and what happened to her I think about her and how I screwed up her diagnosis and setback her care almost every day I'm a much better darkness Titian now but I always remember this case and it reminds me not to get cocky or be too sure that my working diagnosis is correct I'm a nurse but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and feeling drowsy we start the usual work ups and this dude's blood pressure tanks we scrambled that he was dead within 10 minutes of walking through the door turns out the scratch was an exit wound of a point to two caliber rifle round the guy didn't even know he'd been shot when the coroner's report came back we found that he'd been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between there was really nothing we cold done but that was a serious what the doc just happened moment PharmD here couple different quick stories head of a pharmacist who filled a fentanyl patch incorrectly and the dose was so high that the patient went into severe respiratory depression and died they are still practicing worked with another pharmacist back in the mid 2000s when I was still a tech who filled a script for Prozac solution concentrated at his 20 milligrams per milliliters average adult doses 20 milligrams instead of one milliliter once daily he filled it for one teaspoon for five milliliters the child rots the rotten syndrome and almost died he is no longer working to my knowledge my grandmother has had diabetes for about 20 years and takes a handful of meds to help control it about 10 years ago she developed a persistent cough it wasn't bad he said it felt like a constant tickle in the back of her throat she went to her doctor to find out what was going on and he ordered a battery of tests concerned that she was developing pneumonia lung cancer etc all the tests came back negative so he prescribed a cocktail of pills to help combat it over the span of five years she had tried about 35 different meds and none helped one day when she went it for a routine checkup her normal doc was out and she saw one of the on-call residents he looked at the barrage of pills she was on and asked why when she explained he replied oh the coffee's a side effect of this one particular drug you're on to regulate your insulin if we change you to this other one it will go away I missed a gunshot wound once a guy was dumped off at the ER covered in blood after a rap concert we were all focused on a gunshot wound with an arterial bleed that was distracting the nurse placed the blood pressure cuff over the gunshot wound on the arm we all missed it because the blood pressure cuff slowed the bleeding I was doing the secondary assessment when we rolled the patient and I still missed it we didn't find it till the chest x-ray the bullet came of rest in the posterior portion of the thoracic wall without significant trauma to major organs the patient lived but I still feel like I got big-time [Music] this thread is pretty depressing so I'll lighten it up a bit a few months ago I accidentally ran a [ __ ] in tests on a patient when a card metabolic wasn't ordered it turns out that the guy was in renal failure and no one knew he was about to go in for surgery I believe it was a bypass but could be wrong but I got the results and in time to stop them from putting him under she could have been messy I'm glad I screwed up and I'm sure he has no idea that he could have died not a big mistake but definitely awkward at the time I was gluing up a lock on a 14 yo girls forehead anyone who has used dermablend before knows that stuff can be runny and bonds very quickly I glued my glove to her face her mum was in the room and I had to turn to her and say I'm sorry I've just glued my glove to her face throw away obviously I'm also going to eliminate pronouns to further D identify the circumstances this didn't happen to me but a doctor I worked with a long time ago doctor saw patient regularly for medication management patient came back for a follow-up appointment with a very telling side-effect from a very low dose of a medication and no improvement in symptoms that the medication was intended to target because this particular side effect is relatively mild early on and can also be caused by many other variables doctor was not duly suspicious of the medication being the cause of the side effect and increased the dosage of the medication patient became very gravely ill several days later and died a few days after that due to complications of the side effect of the medication it was a huge mistake and I can't help but think if I had been the doctor I wouldn't have overlooked the side effect and patient would still be alive I'm a nurse I've given an anticoagulant blood thinner to the wrong patient over the next day his red blood count drops he ended up in iku [Music]

Channel: Ask Reddit

Views: 81,697

Rating: 4.8300886 out of 5

Keywords: reddit, askreddit, top posts, reddit top posts, best of reddit, r/, reddit cringe, askreddit funny, top posts of r/, reddit stories, brainydude, comment awards, reddit comment awards, r/askreddit, exposed, top posts of all time, funny reddit, funniest reddit posts, funniest posts, tz reddit, ask reddit top posts, best posts and comments, reddit compilation, Flumpy

Id: NknA5klxr90

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2019