Doctors, When Did You Have To Lie To A Patient Because It Was Pretty Bad? (r/AskReddit)

medical professionals of Reddit when did you have to tell a patient I've seen it all before to comfort them but really you had never seen something so bad or of that nature probably too late to the party but I had a lady come into the elicited as multiple medical problems this usually means diabetes and the issues stemming from it or maybe bleeding issues from another disease or maybe odd blood tests results at a clinic I hadn't seen the patient yet but the doctor came to the nurses station asking who had room 15 I jumped up and followed him into the room I walked in and saw what I thought was a corpse then the patient's eye swiveled over to look at me she truly looked like one of the people they found in a concentration camp I could see every bone and her body was twisted in a d quarter Kate position with her jaw locked open then the smell hit me rotting flesh death and body fluids I struggled to keep her youthful face and not gag I tried to place a blood pressure cuff on her arm and her skin just started flaking off in my hands i gagged the doctor started removing her clothes to examine her her feet were black to the ankles her hip bones were poking through her skin and were black the skin around her ribs was worn away too using muscle fibers her calves were incredibly swollen and the skin was splitting like ripped pants I removed her depends and there was fesses coating her entire genital area then the doctor went to remove a large bandage on her lower back her entire sacrum was exposed in the bones were black the skin around it was a black liquefied mass it smelled like nothing I've ever smelled I can't even describe it the doctor told her family I would clean up her ALS's and wounds in preparation for surgery laia no surgeon would operate on her I had no idea how to clean dead bone tissue and liquefied skin they don't cover that in nursing school when I went to clean her sacral area all the liquefied skin separated and is all over the bed I really struggled to keep my crap together afterwards I needed a moment in the supply closet to cry it out for a second I had no idea the human body could break down so much without dying I still think about that woman sometimes and what to her living like that it still breaks my heart in dental school I had an emergency patient coming complaining of sore gums upon examination I found a massive calculus bridge google it for pictures behind her lower front teeth she only had about three remaining lower teeth but they were all connected with a whitish brown mineral deposit that was about the size of a golf ball she had never had her teeth cleaned and she was probably 55 or so I basically performed an emergency cleaning she could speak so much better afterwards of course I had to play it off like it was normal but in my years of practice I still haven't seen a case that bad again get your teeth cleaned people even if you can't afford every six months once a year or every other year is a heck of a lot better than never five years ago I spent six months working in a small rural Zambian Hospital in the medical ward as part of a volunteer outreach program I have done mostly family medicine some surgery in my early days but decided to mix life up a bit the hospital was typical third-world a few basic medications rudimentary clinical tools a small lab on site which was usually broken no resuscitation tools whatsoever HIV TB and malaria was rife it would not be uncommon to encounter a death per day despite our best efforts on one of my first days there an unconscious person was carried in by a mob of locals I could smell him before I saw him because he had been in a house fire and his skin was cooked completely black around his chest face and over his legs he was still breathing on his own on maintaining his airway but we had no doubt he had inhaled a lot of smoke with no way to interpret or provide oxygen we merely had to hope that he didn't swell up and close off and deal with the rest of the burns while he was unconscious two colleagues who worked in the hospital came over urgently we all kept our cool externally and got the nurses to translate to the man's family that we were going to do everything we could to get him better in reality all three of us knew his chances at survival were in the single digit percentages we decided that due to the extent of his burns we were going to have to do anatomy cutting the burned skin to prevent it contracting and stopping him from breathing turns out I had the most surgical experience so despite having never done one before I gave it a go hoping for the best we got an IV into a neck vein and got fluids going the local nurses dressed his burns we gave him whatever pain relief we had he was unconscious for a couple of days but eventually came to each day we were expecting his kidneys to pack up but to our surprise gradually he got better he was with us for just over four months recovering he came out severely scarred but he had beating the odds and survived I showed up to a house for a possible overdose three firefighters and a police officer were on top of the man who was prone and naked from the waist down they immediately told my partner and I to restrain the patient's to the gurney because the patient was comparative it turns out he took something thinking it was we but turned out to be laced with something else possibly PCP during his trip he attempted to cut his Don off but wasn't successful as fate would have it I knew the patient personally and tried to comfort him on the way to the hospital during the ride he became somewhat cognizant and was ashamed of himself I tried to comfort him as I held his dong in place I would be lying if I said I had seen a severed dong before I'm a nurse and I work in a pediatric ER a young woman brought her baby and to be seen for vomiting I asked her to put the baby on the scale while on the scale I notice a strong odor of bug spray so I asked about it mom a roach crawled into her mouth so I sprayed a little radom there she said it matter of factually like it was no big deal Kaew calls to the police CPS and a-11 sitter for the child in the mom when all was said and done the baby was fine and turned over to her grandmother so no worries there I have no idea what happened to the mother I don't believe she was intending to hurt the child I think she was just completely ignorant I worked as a mental health tech to get through undergrad 15 F in the adolescent Ward claims to have swallowed a staple a bill whatever as I'm taking her down to x-ray I tell her about the dime I swallowed when I was kid it happens well turns out he underestimated the number of staples by around a hundred every printout given by the therapists had been a swallow'd staple she had gotten staples from the other kids the x-ray of her abdomen looked as if it were a weird staple why snowglobe and yet somehow she was back to trying to steal psych ward staples a week later never did figure out how they removed them all never did figure out how they removed them all with a staple remover not a worst but I had a patient once with a stomach bleed in a small bowel obstruction we had to put in an NG tube tube that goes in your nose and down to your stomach to drain decompress his stomach which was pretty distended and hard I'm inserting the tube and as soon as it hits this guy's gag reflex II projectile vomits and sprays very dark half digested blood all over himself the bed the wall and the floor it's basically a scene from The Exorcist I had to dive out of the way and somehow was unscathed he couldn't stop for almost 10 minutes as we're trying to get this thing down to where it needs to go it finally finished placement and it immediately suctions out three liters of this black sludge that his old digested blood Petey was mortified and we had to play it off like oh no no it's fine it's really common to vomit during the procedure we'll just go get some towels and clean you up my coworker and I left the room and just stared each other in silent shock not medical professionals but we were the patients my daughter who was three at the time had to have a cavity filled as we were leaving the dentist told me just to watch my daughter because sometimes kids chew their gums because it's numb and feels weird so the drive home took 30 minutes and I had been talking to my daughter the entire time to keep her busy I parked my car in my driveway opened the passenger seat to get my daughter out and her entire lower lip on the left side is gone she had chewed it off down to her chin he ended up in emergency surgery but the surgeon kept telling us it would be fine and he sees this stuff all the time he ended up having multiple surgeries and when she was finally healed the surgeon told us that it was the worst injury like that he had ever seen he wasn't sure how she would heal but you can hardly tell it happened now not a medical professional but a story about my father after years of a blood disease his spleen had to be removed as it had swollen to a size that made breathing difficult apparently the surgeon had a photo taken post extraction where he is cradling my dad's 22.0 lb spleen to top it off one day into recovery when doing all of those gentle push on the abdomen type exams on him my dad sutures catastrophically failed and he let loose a spray that coated the doctor his nurse and a good portion of the ceiling luckily for dad the hospital staff was on point that day and kept him alive despite his body's best effort I heard all of this from the doctor while he was removing the line of staples that went from crotch to sternum some weeks later dad didn't like to share apparently had a patient who needed allergy study to find fix a bowel bleed to get a study done you need to poop clear mucus three days we barrel prepped with heavy laxatives and enemas he barely pooped anything he puts on the call light at 6:45 15 minutes before my shift ends he calmly says I kinda want to try and book he said it's so casually I figured he was going to toot out another gas bubble and walk back he stood from the bed took one step and the floodgates burst 3 plus days of the most rancid liquid still I had ever encountered it just wouldn't stop he left a river of stool from the bed to the bathroom coated the walls as he bent to park his bus on the toilet and continued to dump out seven people worth of poop in my nine years I have never seen that much come out of a person he was not a large man he was so embarrassed but I just kept my face as solid as possible grabbed half the linen closet in three packages of cavi wipes and sucked it up I told him this happens all the time I will share this particular story with my legs crossed motorcyclist came enough to someone left turned without checking he had gone over the hood slid and somehow somersaulted landing on his butt sitting up he slid across intersection mostly on his butt getting serious road rash luckily he was only a block from hospital and ambulance they pack him and bring him to the air we end up cutting off his chaps and jeans and begin the cleanup of gravel and sand embedded in his size and but when all of a sudden his testicles fall out of his scrotum he had basically sandpaper the hole in his scrotum while skidding on his butt the attending pauses grabs the saline irrigates scrotum and notes fumbles them back into place while humming I handed him some gauze to pack the wound and smiled at the patient who was under a local then I went on break went fetal and dry heaved one guy had a dong inflammation was like 14 inches long and 6 wide I could practically sense the pain a huge subset of the population we treat her a run and shoe it blue-collar low educated people a lot of smoking and diabetic non-compliance that sort of thing therefore we end up seeing a lot of what happens with diseases if you never treat them and let them run their natural course to end stage we've had so many diabetic foot and toe amputations I've lost count however one lady that sticks out had a huge area of loculated necrotic tissue on her low back usually you'll have a foul-smelling purplish black overlying tissue to tip you off this lady's back had several areas that got so gangrenous and necrotic that there were basically just large pockets down to her subcutaneous fat and muscle the appearance resembled a sponge with large holes that was filled to capacity with pass the smell was indescribably atrocious what made it worse was every time we cleaned out her pocket we would probe with a finger and it would led to another freaking pocket of pus and the smell would double up again unfortunately she lost nearly all the skin on her low back down to muscle bone in some places we slapped a huge wound vac on it and she ended up being shipped out to a specialist center took forever for the smell to leave my nostrils my aunt started a nursing career in a County Hospital which means you get all the homeless folks a guy came in with the whole of the back of his leg and but utterly and very deeply infested with maggots he just hadn't gotten around to coming in earlier he said the depressing thing is that while it was a first for my aunt it was by no means the last apparently it's more common than you think as a medical student doing my first placement in the emergency department I was waiting outside the trig to ask the nurse something I was the lowest-ranking most clueless person in the department I knew a lot about the krebs cycle not a whole lot about you know medicine a young man came up to me and said he was sorry to disturb me he just wanted to check it was just well not too few jump or anything but he wanted to check can this definitely wait for tridge he then unwrapped a towel from his hand and showed me his thumb which he had dropped a loaded barbell onto it was shattered just flattened with splinters of bone coming out I stared at it he stared at it I stared at it then I told him oh yes no problem at all he'd better take a seat and I'd make sure someone was with him right away how the Frick can you be so nonchalant about crushing your freaking thumb into oblivion I was the patient actually I was sideswiped by a car then ran over by the truck behind while cycling to work I was essentially impaled by my right femur which shattered my pelvis and shoved bone fragments into my guts last thing I remember before I got knocked out for surgery was the surgeon telling me everything was going to be fine and it was all routine I didn't wake up for months when I did I was missing the entire left leg and most of the muscle tissue in the right eye was too weak to move much couldn't talk because I had a tube through my neck and I was very uncertain about reality due to what I went through in my coma her raids of doctors came to tell me how I should be dead and it's crazy that I lived I was told over and over that my survival was very much against all odds my surgeon on the other hand never said anything like that he always maintained that he was going to get through his attitude honestly helped when I had to go back to his table a few more times before I was done but for four years I kind of blew off the people who made a big deal about my survival I adopted my orthopedic doctors attitude then I met a woman who's in the medical field I fell in love and eventually trusted her enough to let her read my medical records I had never read them because it's a massive pile of paperwork she broke down crying and couldn't read anymore she told me that the beginning of my time in the hospital was full of the type of write-ups you find in the morgue she told me that when they opened me up bits of my pelvis fell out I asked her to stop there she won't read anymore and I don't want to know anymore I now know my doctor has one heck of a poker face in 2011 I had a saddle pulmonary embolism two weeks before my scheduled wedding my quite seasoned heart surgeon seemed pretty confident that I'd be okay and he even said he'd get me to my wedding on time long story short I was in the hospital for about a month due to complications several weeks later when I was visiting my heart surgeon for a follow-up he told me he'd only ever seen two other people as sick as I was those two didn't survive third time's the charm I worked as a tech india for a while and had a woman in her forties present with burning and pain down below discharge and a bad smell I got the carp set up for a vaginal exam got her vitals blood and urine she couldn't be because of the pain she said all the basic jazz you do when someone comes into the air I process my samples and let the nurse know everything is done and she goes to talk to the woman and it essentially goes as this no she hasn't had any trauma no no assault no she doesn't know what's going on but it started about three weeks prior long story short we get the doctor as the woman refused to let the nurse take a look and we are all in the room when the doctor turns the light on under the drape and immediately asks if she's been using any medication vaginally there's clearly a lot of irritation and swelling as well as a very strong odor and she hadn't even inserted the speck yet the woman says no nothing at this point the nurse goes to get some saline and I'm left to hand off tools and handle any swabs the first swab handed to me was literally tinged a pale green clearly infection I'm capping it in the woman smells the odor slowly filling the room finally in starts apologizing well I had to say while trying not to gag no no need to apologize I've seen much crazier things just relax and we will get you all fixed up well the nurse comes back with saline and the doctor starts essentially flushing this woman's vagina trying to clear out all this discharge and infection so she can see what's going on and all of the sudden she stops and asks if she's sure she hasn't been putting anything in her vagina to treat any medical condition even something not given by doctor and that's when we found out for about a month this woman had been douching with a bleach and water mixed to try and cure a yeast infection because she read that in hospitals we wash down with diluted bleach to kill germs and thought it would work she was riddled with chemical burns and infection and was immediately transported to a bigger hospital so yeah that happened I mean yes Monistat is uncomfortable but that's a heck of an alternative genital warts the size of grapes aren't the guys dong quoth he the ladies never complain I'm an oncology nurse the other day I had a patient who had a nosebleed that just wound not stopped I gave him an extra infusion of platelets vitamin K and multiple doses of Afrin nasal spray which for Saucon directs it would stop for maybe 20 minutes before it would start bleeding like a faucet again through the families pinching fingers the whole time I was nosebleeds are common it is the dry air from the heater wrecked I ended up personally holding his nose for over an hour while straight we waited from someone from nth ears nose throat to show up to packet he lost so much blood he need a blood transfusion my arm was so sore and the patient looked like he had been murdered twice over from all the blood on his clothes not a medical professional but my mom is an RN and boy is she had some stories over the years yet one in particular stands out she had a male patient coming with a ahem extremely swollen dong like the size of a Pringle can swollen she said it was the biggest song she every encountered in her decades as a nurse he claimed he broke it during intercourse she had to put a catheter in the guy I was freaking out and she had to reassure him that this was a walk in the park for her but she was seriously questioning how to get the catheter in she called in her co-worker to help steady his dong well also so someone else could just witness what she was seeing while she gave him every painkiller she was legally able to give and stuck the catheter in but got it in the first try thankfully she still doesn't know how she managed to get it in but was thankful she did eventually it came out that he hadn't broken his dong during intercourse but actually masturbated after cleaning his fish tank without washing his hands and got an infection from it when you empty a fish tank you use a suction hose of functions eerily similarly to a dong comp and I bet that is the real story I am a surgical tech I got called in on a Saturday for a lady who had an infection from a component separation basically they put a giant piece of mesh in you for hernias I wasn't prepared when we lifted up her gown the smell wafted and I have never almost puked before until that moment about 20 centimeters circle around her arm bilikiss was black and necrotic it was absolutely awful we basically removed the entirety of the necrotic tissue all the way down to the peritoneum but just gray and black slimy mass of fat and skin the worst part is that I had to measure the necrotic tissue and it requires me to lean in a little close to it the surgeon was laughing because I was green when I got back to the surgical field I had to see an orthopedist oncologist because I had to sarcomas one in my left thigh and the sciatic nerve and one in my left pelvic my surgeon said he would get both out in the most I would get would be a drop foot where you can't lift up your foot on your own I went back two years later and my doctor told me he thought he would have to remove my leg because of how the sarcomas were in meshed in my bones muscle and nerves I honestly thought the whole time that it was an easy out although the to 10 hours surgeries may have been a clue that it wasn't so simple these days I have a limp as I'm missing half my left pelvic bone and most of my gluten thigh muscle but I got to keep the leg a patient with rectal cancer with an exposed colon and rectum I could see her tail burn and in the head of the femur and whenever she would book it could collect inside this open cavity and had to be flushed out when I was a med student on the trauma service there was a gentleman who decided to end his life using a shotgun aimed at his heart unfortunately the first thing that comes out of a shotgun when it is fired as a gust of air which changed where the gun barrel was pointed when the shot came out the shot pellets ended up hitting everything but his heart lungs ribs spleen stomach liver pancreas and large and small intestines in the or the attending surgeon told me to put my hand on his beating heart because that will likely be the only time in my medical career that I would touch a beating heart I did it was cool he survived though he was on the trauma service for the entire month I was there and was in the hospital for a long time further not my story but my soul was in training as a nurse's aide on her first internship she was assigned to the year at a trauma center the first person on her first shift of her first internship of three was an older homeless man complaining of his foot hurting after the medical staff took a quick look at the foot they didn't initially see anything wrong so they tried to remove his pants to examine the leg the pants didn't move they were fused to his skin from the middle of the hip all the way down to his calf they had to surgically remove his jeans by basically cutting the skin around the point where it was fused at the moment the scalpel made the first incision she described it as as if Slimer from Ghostbusters bath'd out of his leg apparently there was enough gushing green fluid filled with maggots that had covered the floor in the small examination room and the nurse ran out of the room gagging after getting over the initial shock they managed to peel a good amount of the skin off with the pant leg and revealed that his lower leg had basically rotted all the way to the bone and was full of maggots apparently that's the moment when she knew she was meant for the job even the surgeon was having a pretty hard time keeping his composure but she was fine more fascinated than anything and apparently not affected by bad smells as most people are they had to tell him his leg was going to be okay he was severely mentally ill and might have freaked the heck out despite knowing he could die from the infection apparently he survived and they managed to save the leg which is beyond incredible fourth year med student here on my rotation a couple months back I walked into the IDI and was immediately asked to help a nurse and resident put a catheter in a patient now a catheter placement is usually a one-person job so I was pretty confused as to why they needed my help I walk into the patient room and I'm immediately greeted by a disgusting rotting flesh smell worst thing I've smelled in my life the patient has to be pushing 400 pounds and has the worst edema soft tissue swelling from congestive heart failure I've ever seen his scrotum and Don are about the size if a small watermelon and the foreskin had swollen completely over the tip of his dong the nurse had a speculum tool OBGYNs used to look inside bags inserted into the man's foreskin while the resident took the catheter in a hamas dirt pliers type thing and jammed it into the man's pee hole for 20 minutes they finally got the catheter in and took the speculum out it was covered in a thick brown discharge that looked like fermented pee crap I still don't know how he let his scrotum and dong swell that much we comforted the patient the whole time and kept telling him we had done it like this before total lie no one in the IDI had ever done or seen anything like it obligatory not a medical professional but a first Heder I was doing a duty at the finish line of the London Marathon as I have done for many years I've seen enough chafing dehydration and blisters galore someone always is the worst of the day that had happened so fast that you can hardly mentally tally whose nipples were the most raw until I had a runner come in covered in blood complaining that her nipples had completely gone she had shapes so bad that her nipples and areolas were rubbed too nothing and the worst part was that she had her nipples pierced and the piercings had embedded themselves in her exposed breast tissue I had to talk her through sterilizing the wounds while trying to assure her that it happens to everyone the image of the nipple bar peeking out off red raw breast tissue will haunt me I was a fat little ten year old with a slide on a float in the middle of the lake we had a bucket on a rope to pour water on the slide before you went down I missed a spot my right nipple very literally was burned off by the hot plastic it took years before it became somewhat normal again you have been visited by the ingenious Joe comment brain so you always see the glass half-full like and subscribe you magnificent person 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Keywords: doctors, doctor stories, worst doctor stories, worst things doctors have seen, medical, hospital, emergency room, nurses, doctos, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, 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

Id: d6jlFe5kRPs

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020