What's Up Doc? (3 Hour Reddit Compilation)

doctors of reddit what was your how the fck did you survive that moment an elderly lady had a massive brain hemorrhage was transferred to terminal care to the health center in patient ward i was working at as the doctor her prognosis was that she would die at any moment there was no treatment she was comatose but breathing spontaneously through a tracheotomy tube a week passed with no medications no food no fluids still alive then she began to stir came conscious delirious but conscious so we started iv fluids appropriate medications and eventually physiotherapy after a few months she moved into the local nursing home lived for a few years she had profound dementia but was able to move i wonder if the air moisturizing device in the room because of the tracheotomy kept her hydrated because a healthy person would generally not survive a week without fluids not yet a doctor but i work as a paramedic and soccer events being from argentina it can be pretty freaking intense there was this time when we were at the stadium with my colleagues and three guys carry a fourth guy covered in blood and totally unconscious his pulse rate was berserk and we got kinda worried while we start strapping him to the stretcher i asked the other dudes wtf had happened and they told me he fainted fell down the stairs and as he didn't respond we gave him some seat to wake him up we rushed him to the ambulance and within the first 10 minutes the guy walks out and asks for a sandwich humans work in mysterious ways not a doctor my dad who is one told me this story once he has this 12 year old patient let's call him tim and everyone in the hospital firmly believes he's immortal tim was born with a bad heart and is constantly in and out of the iq by in and out of the iq he goes in almost once or twice a month nine out of ten admissions tim flatlines strangely tim always comes back even if you don't resuscitate him i'd say tim flatlined about 15-ish times in total it's at the point that whenever tim flatlines nobody panics not even his mom in the first three times she fell on the floor crying hey guys tim's vitals are dropping again whew the kids definitely going for a record tim's pretty chill about it too he talks about his iq trips like how a normal kid talks about a mildly eventful day at school but nobody knows how tf does tim always come back he just does frankly i'm surprised the media hasn't done a story about it bc it's freaking metal okay now i want the annual updates on tim tim reached the big 3-0 today tim's had a good year and the aiku has been awfully quiet without his resilient spirit a patient in his late 90s was admitted to our hospice for terminal care i.e to die because of untreatable multi-level bowel obstruction confirmed on ct scan and clinically obvious from his swollen abdomen and profuse vomiting the guy was however absolutely charming and completely at peace with this he did want discomfort and felt he had had a good life he was scared to eat because of the vomiting it caused if your bowel is blocked then any eating has to go back out the way it came in otherwise he was comfy enough with just a little pain relief he was also lovely to chatter very reflective and articulate in his speech and mannerisms he had been told he had days possibly hours to live by the surgeons at the local hospital and he barely drank anything and ate literally nothing this continued for two months though he lost a tremendous amount of weight and physical capability it seemed that during this time his bowel obstruction had spontaneously unobstructed we ended up getting him home the sad thing is however he had completely come to terms with his death he is now still petrified of eating and believes super strongly that his bowel is going to obstruct again which it may he just doesn't ever want to go through that experience again and i do sometimes wonder if he would have been better off dying peacefully with us carotid blowout following free flap reconstruction in an oral cancer case had a post-blowout hb of 30 no idea how she got away with it also when working at a military hospital the guy whose parachute didn't open and he ended up with just a fractured cheekbone like what i am not a doctor but when i around 23 i was stubborn and didn't go to the doctors for feeling weak and numb all the time with some blackouts i brushed it off until i literally couldn't get up to walk to the bathroom thinking it was just a cold or flu when i finally made it to the my blood count was a three regular is around 14. doctor said he didn't know how i was alive still imagine a doctor walking in all confused and being like son you don't got no blood early years in medical school i saw a surgery of a policeman who was shot in head in a gunfight the bullet went through his skull and brain with my experience in games and movies i always assumed a head shot is instant death but that man survived it and i was in shock how this can happen it turns out in many cases a headshot can be survived sorry for my english is not good your english is pretty good i understood you easily emergency physician i had a patient that was shot nine times three bullets to the head he didn't call an ambulance he brought himself to the emergency department and by that i mean he drove himself to the emergency department the three bullets in his head somehow didn't enter the cranium so his brain was just fine one of them entered his cheek and went underneath the skin to swing all the way around to the back of his head he was discharged the same day a doctor asked me this i was asleep in the back of a pickup on the way back from a rugby tournament one night and we had a head-on with a drunk driver i went through the back of the cab through the windscreen hit and bounced off the other car and ended up maybe 20 meters from the accident multiple broken bones compressed vertebrae internal and head injuries after multiple surgeries and a year in hospital i walked out at the first checkup the surgeon who i knew really well by then said exactly that seriously how the frick did you survive that my unvoiced response was sometimes i wish i hadn't i was the lucky one paramedic dispatched to shortness of breath and considering that a sob dispatch is typically bs i wasn't all that ramped up when we came on scene the fd beat us there and when we pull into the parking lot the junior ff is running out to the ambulance to get us and says we gotta get him out of here no biggie let's see how the other ffs are acting at the door the engine captain is looking stressed and says fittingly we gotta get him out of here not good but he's not a medic what does the medic think brian the medic is an absolute rock star whose judgment i trust under any circumstance brain says no crap we gotta get him out of here the patient is a 19yo male pale cool and sweaty skin massive air hunger and confused oxygen saturation is less than 70 percent we are eight minutes from the hospital if i have learned one thing in the last 12 years it's this if your patient tells you they're going to die believe them and root his hr tanked his pulses faded and his breathing slowed dramatically which as i am sure you know is bad start cpr yes but when we compress this kid opens his eyes and pushes us away doing cpr on a patient who's watching you do cpr on them is an interesting experience eventually he quit pushing us away so our job got easier we worked him all the way to the hospital the ed worked him for an hour and a half the epinephrine fluid nor ep etc briefly producing pulses before they'd again fade away there was a period of v fib and there too ugh eventually they managed to stabilize him but it didn't look good for our friend he began to seize and it looked like he was going to come out with considerable neurological deficit as you can probably guess he lived it was a big old saddle embolus or in layman's terms a huge clot blocking blood flow between between his heart and his lungs kid had a known cochilopathy that he didn't manage they told us on scene that he would joke that someday he'd just drop dead well not this time walked out of the hospital a week or so later without any deficit how i have no idea side note that was the last call of an 11-year run at that job couldn't imagine a better way to leave frick yeah if your patient tells you they're going to die believe them unless that patient is me because i'm an absolute drama queen i was screaming i feel like i'm gonna die when i was eight centimeters dilated while giving birth to my first daughter granted she was kinda stuck posterior face presentation and had been in labor for quite a while but i wasn't on my way out that's for sure obligatory not a doctor ex-nurse though this happened to my grand-in-law she was in her early 80s on blood thinners and took a nasty fall and hit her head quite a common injury unfortunately and she was admitted to hospital the amazing part is that for three days her condition worsened and the signs that she had a brain hemorrhage went unnoticed that is until she became unresponsive then we had all the bells and whistles she was airlifted to a larger hospital and i spent the day preparing my family for the worst the bleeding had gone unchecked for a long time and if she did survive prepare for her to be different that wonder woman woke up a few hours after surgery with zero impairment memory intact right up to hospital admission it was an amazing recovery that we're all very grateful for obligatory not a doctor but was attached to a hospitalist at a pretty big teaching hospital for the summer as like a clinical assistant this guy comes in for intentional foreign body ingestion he swallowed a knife about a three-inch blade and it was now lodged in his stomach the gastroenterology team got photos of it and prepped him and somehow removed it while he's on 24 hour watch to make sure he doesn't do it again he manages to get his hands on a pen someone from the gi team left in his room and swallows that too after it was taken out we had to basically leave all sharps pointy things and swallowables with the security guard before we could go into the room not a doctor so sorry but to contribute i will never ever forget a guy coming into the emergency ward with a freaking serrated combat knife sticking directly out of the top of his head he was walking himself in to this day i cannot comprehend that i read this one where this chick tripped over while cooking or something then started experiencing a bad headache she drove to the emergency room and found out that she had a knife sticking out of her head not a doctor this is a story about my dad's best friend or as he's more commonly known the human kebab so this guy decides to take his dogs out on a walk on a particularly cold scotland morning and on his way out slips on some ice unfortunately he landed on a metal pole that was being used to hold up flowers or something anyway this pole goes in through his side just under the rib cage i believe and exits through his neck after being rushed to the hospital and had x-rays and whatever done the doctors concluded that the pole had missed all vital organs veins and arteries and they basically just had to pull it out this all happened many years before i was born but it still absolutely blows my mind up vote for the human kebab glad he's okay not a doctor a family friend as a teen my friend's son had all sorts of bladder and kidney infections the doctors could not figure out what was causing them finally they did a scan of his whole abdomen to try to see what was going on if there was an obstruction or something else going on turns out he inserted a long wire up his whiner he said it felt good he lost his grip on the wire when it was almost all the way in and he couldn't figure out how to remove it he didn't tell a doctor or anyone because he was embarrassed and thought he would get yelled at he did a lot of damage up there mostly due to infections you hear about rectal foreign objects a lot but good god that's gnarly my husband was the patient his doctor even wrote him a letter congratulating him on his recovery he was jogging and had a heart attack collapsing on the side of the road a couple found him and called an ambulance he then arrested twice on the way to the hospital and had a balloon pump inserted on arrival with emergency surgery to replace a heart valve just 12 hours later to make matters even worse he then had secondary complications and ended up in the hospital for three months with a nasogastric tube in a really rough city in the us a young kid comes in as gsw to the head head and torso is completely covered with blood but he is still semi-conscious after pre-arrival for trauma code dead skin and hair are all macerated ace wrapped skull and sent to ct no brain injury grazed to the scalp left ama against medical advice from the hospital the next day after four units of blood he came back two weeks later with brain abscess due to him not taking antibiotics he lived needed a long course of i've antibiotics i had another guy who had a bad dream where he woke up and said some guys were standing over him that said take him out before his dream ended he kept on repeating himself i think i was shot in the head when he arrived i am chomping at the [ __ ] to examine him but the nursing staff have to traumatic him to be a trauma before i can examine him i don't understand that to this day but anyway long story short they called him a trauma because he was repeating himself he had bullet that was sitting off of his petrous ridge that entered via ear canal no external bleeding he didn't live though he lasted 16 hours rolled well for the tough con saving throw but failed the simple and check later on i'm the patient at two and a half years old i had a stroke i was in a coma for about eight days none of the doctors could believe it because i guess it's unusual for someone to have a stroke that young before i woke up a doctor even told my parents to prepare for my death as i wouldn't make it well i still had brain activity reacted to my parents touching me talking to me not physically but they could tell by my brain activity eventually i opened my eyes and very slowly progressed to moving i had to relearn how to walk and talk as part of my brain had died surprisingly i really don't have any side effects i'm really lucky i had to relearn how to walk and talk and got better at it than you could before i had a guy who took a ten inch long metal pipe right between the eyes when we came in the pipe was sticking about four inches out of his face he was fully conscious and could move both eyes a little pale though when we got the images the tip of the pipe was about three millimeters from entering his brain stem dude made a full recovery paramedic here dispatch to a person who fell another update said unconscious last update about a minute or two before we got there was unconscious not breathing cpr in progress this lady in her 40s is dead like for real she's cold has riga mortis pupils are fixed and dilated monitor shows a sisterly not only is she dead she's been dead for a while fire department is doing cpr but it seems futile at this point i call the hospital to talk to a doctor hey can we get orders to terminate resuscitation efforts on this patient i ask the physician on the other end now she seems kind of young and i know it's probably futile but go ahead and keep working and bring her on and was his reply that's cool no problem we will keep going we get the iv i interpret her give her some epinephrine put the thumper on her give some more ep some bicarb and holy crap she has a pulse now a week later she gets discharged from the hospital to rehab with only mild cognitive impairment basically she had to learn to use a spoon and fork again and she lost a week or two of her memory and that's the short story of how i tried to kill a lady but wound up getting an award for it so this happened in a third world country med student it's saturday evening pediatrics shift the neonatal service sends us a newborn the reason written is that they don't have enough places the newborn had very high crp an infection marker so very likely to die if he doesn't get the correct treatments he needs and this is implicitly the reason why he was sent to us they prefer to only keep the safe able patient since their air and so many places the problem is that our service was for grown childs and it's not our specialization at all neurology plus endocrinology we don't have the necessary infrastructure to help that kind of children we don't even have the necessary drugs for our own speciality so for the others xd we need those heating beds since it's a newborn without them you can give any treatment you want you will have no results so after some fingering we improvised one we took some serums and we heated them in our oven then we surrounded the little boy with them and some random antibiotics but we knew it was only a provisional solution the inevitable would come one time or another a few hours later it's eight o'clock the shift is over we can go home we ray quite sad about the little child we tell him goodbye ah and as you may have already guessed on monday he was still more alive than many of the others technically speaking it was impossible to survive this long and we were genuinely impressed those babies are really good fighters i don't know if it's a good idea to tell this kind of stories on the internet to random strangers suru excuse me if i have hurt any of you guys during my internship i was working the free clinic and the man came in i'll call him d holding his own small intestine like a baby as i was the only doc in the clinic i was pretty freaked out anyway i paged trauma right away but his organs were outside his body for too long and he became septic and sadly did not make it i still find it amazing that dee was able to walk nearly six miles holding his intestine that's incredible while being investigated for muffins they discovered a pda i was 12 and had no symptoms except mild tiredness after exercise i had surgery two weeks after the diagnosis i was also exceptionally anemic at the same time they had no idea how as i ate a healthy diet anemic with a dodgy heart and a family history of him acromatosis excess iron then a decade later it was discovered i had value regurgitation in my heart then a bundle branch block this was only discovered because i had pneumonia then another murmur was discovered this year because my echo records were missing and my gp wanted to have a listen so i got them redone i suspect if i see a gp for a flu shot they'll discover i've had three heart attacks or something surgical in turn year guy came in from a hand gliding accident where he fell when a strong gust of wind blew him out of the sky luckily maybe unluckily he fell into a grove of trees he presented to the trauma bay with a stick coming out of eye saying he couldn't see out of that eye but had vision in the other initially we were impressed that he survived a 100-foot fall from the sky but then we got the ct scan turned out the stick actually went through his eye across his skull and almost to the other side about 7.5 inches inside his head he amazingly was still conscious and talking before he underwent a 15-hour long surgery involving ant neurosurgery and ophthalmology aside from losing the one eye he made a full recovery not the doctor but had one once say that i was lucky to have survived albeit not a really exciting or dramatic story in gym class back in high school we were playing in door field hockey was supposed to have been using foam or soft plastic equipment for safety someone grabbed the regulation grade field hockey ball by mistake regular balls are solid plastic maybe with a cork rubber center i ended up taking a slap shot to the side of my head behind my eye but in front of my temple that may be a beater away tops from a kid that played ice hockey at just under national level my glasses exploded into many pieces leg fell off frames snapped at different spots lens shattered and a mild concussion not really sure how just going by the note i had to turn into my school preventing me from participating for three weeks doctor said if i wasn't wearing glasses and took that full force it would have shattered my eye socket and if not killing me by hitting my temple i read that as your leg fell off took me another read to figure it out urologist here not native speaker so a girl who is 14 years old gets delivered to us with urosepsis we get it under control and she recovers no biggie but later she came always back with acute urinary tract infections at that age it's pretty rare so we done as osteoscopy it's like an examination where we push a camera through the urethra to the bladder to look what's going there and the bladder had a few birthday candles inside you know the small thin birthday candles don't know if you have it in usa so this girl caused herself a lot of acute infections because she apparently had the hobby to push birthday candles in her urethra your english is good enough for me to understand what happened which is unfortunate pretty sure my urethra screamed when i read that doctors over at it what is the most bizarre issue you've seen a patient trying to hide or mask oh i have tons of weird stories when i was a fourth year medical student during a rotation at the veterans administration hospital the patient came to the emergency room complaining of stomach pain we did an x-ray which showed two toothbrushes in his stomach he explained to us that he had the sensation that there was something on the back of his throat and used his toothbrush to try to get rid of it and accidentally swallowed the toothbrush the same thing happened with the second one we consulted gastroenterology and the toothbrushes were removed via endoscopy he was admitted to the hospital for observation overnight the next morning he complained of stomach pain again a follow-up x-ray revealed that he had swallowed his entire convenience kit at the hospital including the small toothbrush small tube of toothpaste and even his plastic razor needless to say we called psychiatry for consultation it turns out this was not the first episode for this guy he just liked to swallow things not hidden from us but from her boyfriend came in with nine thousand dollars in cash which he had wrapped in plastic and shoved up a hoo-hoo her fatty acids disintegrated the plastic wrap and she had to be anesthetized to get it all out i hope it was in 50s and 100s i know fannies are stretchy but that much in small bills seems like it would be pushing it it wasn't the patient but his butthole relatives they came into my office to ask me to see this old guy because he had accidentally cut himself and wanted some stitches i told them i couldn't do any stitching lack of sterile equipment it would have been glad to apply some steri-strips if the wound allowed it as long as they brought the man in the office a request denied they kept insisting i see the man at home fine i loaded up my bag to go check on the old fellow i found him in his bed conscious but refusing to talk with various superficial knife wounds on his stomach and a gigantic hematoma in the process of swelling up on his forehead i flipped my crap and got the relatives to finally talk they said the man had fought with his sister and decided to self-harm by repeatedly slamming a hammer on his forehead had then tried to disembowel himself with a kitchen knife they didn't call an ambulance because they were ashamed and didn't want to deal with assisting the man in a far away hospital i gave them 15 minutes to get their crap together and either call an ambulance or get the man to the hospital themselves never knew what became of him sounds to me like the sister did it to him i had a lecturer who told me about a homeless guy who regularly presented to ed claiming stomach pain he would get an abdomen x-ray which showed a bunch of wire inside his abdo he would be added to the next day's emergency theater list get a hot meal and a bed for the night before hooking it the next morning and self-discharging before surgery he had purposefully pierced his belly with a wire coat hanger and fed the thing inside himself so he could go around to hospitals and score a free hotel room for the night this is somewhere with universal healthcare so even though he was a regular in the hospital staff knew him by name they couldn't refuse treatment and couldn't force him to have the coat hanger removed either i'm kind of wondering why they're feeding him prior to surgery usually it's nothing by mouth sent a male patient into the bathroom to collect a urine sample took him much longer than expected he misunderstood and gave a semen sample i swallowed three razors on a bet after we saw how many he'd ate okay it was eight inches after visit with psych doc okay it wasn't a bet sorry because english is not my first language i'm a neurologist in spain we were brought a patient with an acute stroke in the morning asking him about how it happened he said he had gone out for an early morning jog when he fell down unable to move the left part of his body an hour later a nurse asked him the same question and he gave another different fake answer it turns out he had woken up early left his house and he was freaking a prostitute when he suffered the stroke it was this woman who called the ambulance the tough part was meeting his family had this dude when i was a medical student while on surgical service got consulted on priapism asked the dude how long he had direction etc etc and he just said yeah his dong hurts not sure why blah blah blah then examined him and dudes dong was quite literally a cauliflower of warts turns out he had hpv and hiv and didn't take his heart meds and this isn't the first time it has happened cleared up after starting to take his heart meds previously oh i've got one i had my nose straightened and septum shaved after i broke it like a dumbass i woke up after anesthesia feeling like the freaking man after about a minute of being awake i tore out my iv stood up and started walking out of my room because i was going to walk home about three miles and finish that one mission in heroes of might and magic three i walked past to nurse and she said you're bleeding haha no i feel amazing i respond i keep walking until i get to the elevator and i see my reflection in the metal my face is bandaged up with blue black bruising leaking out from under the white fabric my eyes are bloodshot and i generally look like crap no matter i wake up some time later back in my bed with the iv inserted in my other arm and i am strapped to the bed turns out i was on a morphing drip that's why i felt like superman my parents start yelling i am like what you flim in walking but turns out i gave myself a concussion when i collapsed while waiting for the elevator on the bright side that is how i found out painkillers were amazing and that they would help me survive a year of intense manual labor when i ran away from home on the downside i was addicted to painkillers one time i was in a car accident and in the ambulance they gave me morphine because my collarbone was broken and i was pale from the pain the pain almost instantly disappeared and i fist bumped my cousin who was riding with me after telling her that this was the best day ever public not a doctor on thanksgiving i had a pain almost literally in my butt but more toward my perineum ingrown hair abscess type thing went to the ear since it was a holiday and i could hardly sit when they asked what was the issue and where it was located i said in a sensitive area when they pressed further i said my perineum oh the nurse replied your taint we all had a good laugh and i had my taint lanced we did about a bajillion dollar work up for syncope fainting on a woman before realizing it her boyfriend was beating the crap out of her the smug look on his face still kind of warns me years later from a doctor friend in provincetown a man came in complaining of severe burning pain in his urethra even when he wasn't peeing doc couldn't find any reason why and the guy couldn't provide any finally asks the guy what he does he says he works at a popular gay bar where oh he does champagne shots that's when you fill your pee hole with champagne then get up on the bar and pee it into the mouths of paying customers he did dozens every night not a doctor but i'm sure the doctor would tell it tldr had an infection and had a hands-on experience i won't forget i was 12 and i had an infection in my scrotum and tried to hide it hoping tea would just go away i was walking funny and it eventually turned purpley my parents got very worried and spoke to me about why i was walking funny finally had to show my mom my crazy swollen purple testicle and we went to the doctors the next day while there i explained the situation they needed to do tests so i was given morphine and so they could ultrasound my nads there was a super attractive nurse doing the ultrasound too she got clear jelly all over my balls it still hurt but man if that wasn't one of the first rock hard erections i ever had i don't know what was i was so weirded out by the whole situation first i get an infection in my balls then i'm given morphine then get jelly slathered all over my balls then i see one of the prettiest girls in my life and she touches my disgusting morbid sack i tried desperately hard not to smirk because it still felt kinda good also being ticklish but every couple seconds i would giggle and smile but then a quarter second later it would hurt and be painful so it was a roller coaster especially for being so young it went on like that for at least five minutes don't really remember what the problem was but if i recall correctly i had a bacterial infection but it cleared right up and i was fine i think the only lasting effect from that was that women with short hair are still very attractive to me doctor and nurse if you're reading this thank you but holy crap was that confusing first i get an infection in my balls then i'm given morphine then get jelly slathered all over my balls then i see one of the prettiest girls in my life and she touches my disgusting morbid sack dude say no more well i'm a radiographer and sometimes you see those objects stuck deep inside patients i've seen a spray can a screwdriver a potato a corn cob gone way too far but the more surprising one was a woman that used a coke 33 centiliters glass bottle as a corn cob and she didn't have enough so she used another i guess she felt nothing due to excitement cause she pushed the first bottle into the uterus breaking the cervix by pushing with the second bottle when i was a med student we had a guy with a rolled up newspaper sunday's paper quite a massive thing in his rectum we stood around the x-ray laughing when another student said that he couldn't understand how someone can swallow a thing of that size he was totally earnest and probably the most naive person i've ever met the 10 inches long cucumber the male patient had placed in his rectum which was distending his abdomen on the other side pt said nothing until ct showed the mass oh you mean that cucumber not a doctor but watched them with a man while in the air guy walks to the back with a couple of towels on his shoulder looks like blood is starting to seep through his nurse what happened she starts to take the towel off her face turns from a smile to very serious calls over the doctor and others guy i was cutting some branches overhead with a chainsaw it got caught on one of the branches and came back on my shoulder by now there's a crowd around the man and they are getting ready to take him back for surgery he had basically cut into his chest with a chainsaw not life-threateningly bad at that point since he walked in i was in or to be honest i always wondered how he shut that dank thing off before straight murdering himself a lot of chainsaws have a chain break which activates automatically when there's kickback or under other conditions of recovery not a doctor but a friend is patient very hesitant with what was actually up so went for x-ray unmistakable shape of a barbie doll up is us so emergency surgery and it's removed he comes to and sees his wife at his beside he panics and when she goes to the ladies asks the nurses not to tell her what's happened she comes back in and one of the nurses brings back the crap smeared barbie doll in a small plastic bag wife glares at him i fell on it what and butthole nurse in the summer my brother and i used to spend our time in the backyard looking for caterpillars and frogs given i was four years old and did not know what i was doing i thought it would be funny to put a caterpillar down my two-year-old brother's swim trunks he didn't feel the caterpillar go down his swim trunk so i didn't get the reaction that i wanted from him so i just forgot about the whole thing and moved on later that day when my mom was changing his diaper she screamed and saw all of these spikes in his butt that he must have got from the caterpillar from when he sat down turns out he had an allergic reaction to it and we had to go to the doctor to get all of those spikes out of his butt lady presented multiple times requiring admission for systemic infection found to be a weirdo mubiasis it docks were very confused this was in the middle of a u.s suburban area she was drinking her fish tank water to get sick morbidly obese lady came into the edie altered and obtunded kept responding to narcan then getting obtunded again three fentanyl patches eventually found hidden on the undersides of her pendulous breasts prostitute with a murder kit including a large wire garrote four knives and various poisons in her handbag and of course the guy who came in from jail in excited delirium with an uncomfortably large quantity of methamphetamine hidden up his butt physical therapist here treating a patient with a traumatic brain injury post-car accident was just getting him moving when i noticed he kept picking at his beard and then putting his fingers in his mouth couldn't see anything he was physically eating figured it was some sort of tick after that bee wrote it in my note and sent it to his physician looked in the note the next day before his visit and saw that they had discovered he had brain matter and cerebral spinal fluid leaking out of his nose and he was eating it it was clear so i couldn't see when i was in the hospital there was a homeless man that was beyond drunk this guy was next level crap he had two doctors three nurses a cop and an orderly trying to keep him restrained he thought he was forming coherent sentences but the words i'm not freaking drunk came out several times along with i don't even drink alcohol i.t was rainwater they kept telling him they would sedate him if he wouldn't stop his wild behavior they couldn't because of his bowel every 20 minutes he would get riled up again and same crap all over again eventually he admitted to alcoholism and the cop left and two doctors looked after the man dude even ripped out his iv met anyone can rip out an iv what's impressive is seeing a man rip out an inflated foley catheter i did a internship with a doctor dermatologist and she told me that one day a homeless guy came to the hospital with a bandage on his foot and saying it was painful the nurses were afraid to take care of him because of the horrible smell and discover what was under the bandage the dermatologist was called and she did it herself when she opened it the foot of the guy felt off he got an infection and lava started to eat his foot sorry for my english semi semi-rotten sandwich found lodge within the folds of an heartbreakingly obese patient's peniculus during an emergency procedure count pregnancy patient arrives into a trigger she is in her early 30s and was complaining of lower abdominal pain and nausea the british trigger nurse who tells this story best says the poor woman was bent over double in her chair from all accounts she was a relatively skinny individual in order to make sure there was no emergent emerging emergency our trigger nurse has a peek at the patients downstairs she was greeted by a crowning baby the nurse bolts up and runs into the ear and grabs my attending sir she's up the duff confused a brief who's on first exams ensued before my attending and i ran in just in time to catch a healthy eight-pound baby there are several other incidents similar to this but none so pronounced mother denied being pregnant up until the moment her baby girl was on her chest tl dnr duff denied nurse pride mom lied baby cried my best friend's mother is a nurse since we've devolved in to tell whatever story one night as a joke he decides to show her one man one jar hilarious thing to watch with your mum right anyway this woman deadpans the entire video and follows it up with oh is that it okay dumb found it we ask what she could have seen that could possibly be grosser than that right she proceeds to tell us in detail about a man who stuffed a hamster into a condom then shoved the rat bag up his butt the hamster then out of suffocation chewed through the condom clawed its way deep into the rectum where it drowned in a mixture of blood and crap after shredding his colon in a frenzy like some [ __ ] south park joke she was part of the team that had to retrieve it his mom always seemed like the demure housewife but dom that lady has seen some crap i had a patient who instead of treating her choice to have artificial donor insemination as an empowerment move had everyone else convinced that he had a deadbeat dad who took off when he was born she felt that this made her look empowered because she stood up as a single mom the now school-aged kid knew but was horrible at lying when i asked him what life was like at home he said something along the lines of good just me and mom she's a good mom pretend dad ran away there was no real dad though what the frick mom sister's friend is a nurse and told the story of a man who came into ed clutching his abdomen and complaining of severe abdominal pain he was acting suspicious and kept changing his story symptoms sight of the pain etc sister's friend and a few other nurses suspected something wasn't right and after maybe an hour or so he confessed the true cause of his pain he had inserted a deflated full-size basketball note a very cheap one into his butt and pumped it up amazingly he somehow managed to pump the ball up to the point where it popped inside his butthole the popping is what had caused his pain but the kicker was this he hadn't come to the ed to treat the pain the basketball was still inside his butt and after the proper combination of pain presumably swelling and it still being semi-inflated had meant he was unable to retrieve it himself if she didn't go into detail as to how the basketball was retrieved but i can't imagine it was pleasant tl dr dude put a basketball up his butt and inflated it until it popped and he was unable to retrieve it himself there is just no way you could pop a basketball inside your butthole no way may i answer as an rph who has worked with pharmacy clinics about seven years ago just a few years into being a pharmacist our community pharmacy decided to put in one of those urgent clinics a cheaper than another more accessible than emergent care a young woman with a broken misshapen face enters my first mother bear instinct was oh god her boyfriend beat her i know i know that is a really horrible conclusion to jumpter and i felt bad as soon as i thought it but at the time what i saw in front of me was a young woman with blood streaked brown hair holding a broken nose her eyes were puffy and purple i take her to the back room and i snag the nurse and have her start helping with clean up and i wait to see if i should call for a dispatch nurse tells me a few minutes later not to bother the woman had not been in a fight she had not fallen there had been no car accident she wanted to slide down her staircase on a mattress and smacked into her front door it took four hours to find out because she refused to tell anyone and when the police threatened to put her butt in jail she confessed side note after three hours of being monitored for cranial damage the police dispatch was called they were trying to get a statement even though nothing is wrong she did not say one thing or another just refused to answer so they told her tell us all we will have to hold you for obstruction of justice i do not know the law in this sort of situation but one of the nurses told me that when it comes to public safety the cops have to find out if someone is about to ray enter a dangerous home note it and give her help information even if a boyfriend had hurt her she did not have to press charges so i do not know anything about that and cannot comment further another one at the same clinic a man came in who had decided to see how many fish hooks he could put into his skin around his hand the fish hooks were still attached to wire that his cat wanted to play with several of them ended up embedded into his hand tissue i do not think he still has the cat oh there was the woman who came in with something lodged in her ear i do not know what it was but the doctor had to go into my office to laugh number get out of here only one type of healthcare professional exists this story came from a nurse i was good friends with she worked at a metro hospital and this was her most memorable one to date couple goes to her the lady of said couple comes in complaining of a rash around her colostomy hole and she is very concerned they do a few general tests and take a bacteria sample to the lab when the results came back our friend had to deliver the news to the couple turns out the rash was chlamydia of the colostomy hull now i will give you a minute to let that all sink in here okay so this led to the following breakdown of events it was now discovered that the couple were engaging in physical intercourse in her colostomy hole beyond the normal areas of choice the lady also later checked out to not have said chlamydia of her genital area therefore leading to the discovery that her man was cheating on her and brought her home a gift from his other lover man some weird butt crap goes down in the motor city worked on an ortho trauma unit not sure we'll ever know what really happened but i have a feeling this patient was on some serious drugs at the time of his injury came in with a femur fracture after he reported running from a raccoon into a telephone pole he must have been one heck of a runner to gain enough speed to break his femur nurse report reed man vs raccoon also the 70 wyoming that fell onto the glass coke bottle up his rectum made for a cool x-ray possible new ad campaign doctors have read it what is the most how the frick did that happen to you case you've seen lady with very poorly controlled diabetes and morbidly obese came in via edie with a gaping hole on her thigh like so deep you could put your whole fist through it it was using ridiculous amount of blood so much so she had to be transfused her blood levels were rock bottom it transpires she'd accidentally cut herself when tryna to wriggle into beans meantime the wound just kept getting bigger and bigger and she attempted to just sort it by packing the wound with socks single worst thing i've seen working in there we had some interesting ones but the simplest and most intriguing one i've had was a man came in complaining about chest and side pains after a few tests to rule out heart issues we discovered through an x-ray that the man had 19 fractures throughout his rib cage when i asked him if he had been doing anything dangerous he replied with nope just dancing needless to say i'd recommend not trying to do leaping flops into the worm on repeat on concrete which is the only way i can fathom this occurring and no he didn't explain what kind of dancing well he sure wasn't doing the safety dance old paramedic here i had a 60s male found on his hands and knees quite dead he was positioned to receive a corn cob mounted to the door lifter on a garage door opener but the track was modified to run the length of a mattress powered by the one stroke two horsepower opener he used the remote button to forward and reverse the lifter with a plate adapter for a large rubber corncob he had taken a massive heart attack training as an emt so not a doctor but in the air old guy shuffles in with his girlfriend both mid-50s he is holding a member's only jacket in front of his crotch and waddling in we take him through tridge to the back and get him on the exam table his scrotum was the size a large watermelon it hung below his knees and was easily 18 inches in diameter serious hernia issue just a big oblong mass of flesh that had overwhelmed the rest of his nethers i think every physician in the hospital came down to consult on it i mean everyone cardiologists etc everyone made an excuse to come take a look this was clearly an issue he had been avoiding for years the prescribed treatment if i remember properly was to kevlar reinforce his belly and shove all his intestines back up and in they were going to transport him to her nearby by hospital for the treatment but because it was across state lines he refused to go so he slid off the table pulled his jeans up around his crotch grabbed his jacket and his girlfriend and shuffled off to the bus stop it's an image you never forgot closest thing i can related to is when hugh jackman is trying to carry the fishbowl between his legs in the prestige the human capacity to deny the undeniable is amazing as a radiologist i've seen an 80-pound ovarian tumor a hand-sized facial malignancy neglected until it eroded an underlying artery numerous neglected breast cancers eroding through the skin people will refuse to see what they really don't want to see doctor friend told me of a man with a flower stalk stuck up his dong he was trying to give his gf a birthday surprise unfortunately flower stalks have little angled hairs on them which make them easy to push in but impossible to take out saw the guy who had a pretty blunt machete lodge perfectly across the middle of his skull but the angle was unusual and it was like perfectly along so that caught my attention turned out the guy had unsuccessfully tried to murder his wife with the machete and later regretted it so he hit himself in the head with it he held it with his hand sharp side front and gave himself a whack perfectly in the middle of his skull thankfully the machete barely made it into the skull and since it was along the middle it didn't touch any brain tissue work in a burn center for three months in a row we had three different people come in because they tried to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire with gasoline i cannot imagine what brings someone to that point to think that's a good way to go out those burning monks protesting the war in vietnam come to mind not a freaking peep while they sat there cross-legged i don't know that i understand human i have an amazing how the frick did that happen to story end of nursing school did the rotation internship in the or large urban hospital get a call that the hello is bringing in a 17-year-old with a severe spinal injury call in the specialty surgeons and they get to work on this kid he has c3 through c5 fractures from a diving injury docs work on him four hours with very little hope that he will regain anything below the neck once the surgery is over we are all exhausted but the surgeon wants to see what will happen if we wake him up with respiratory standing by we bring him out of a seizure he starts breathing on his own he opens his eyes and responds to his name holy crap awesome for some reason i was near his hand i saw a small movement i said nothing i grabbed his hand and squeezed he squeezed me back holy freaking crap mind you i'm just a nursing student but i yelled the surgeon's name and said he just squeezed my hand surgeon called bulls until he saw the kid raise his arm the entire all was silent this kid should have been a quad for life but by some miracle he was moving the feeling of seeing that kid's arm move i is something that i will never forget i tried to keep track of his progress but the last i heard he was killing it at physical therapy and had regained almost total control of his upper body just last week i had a guy over 400 pounds bmi 60 he was a hoarder and kept getting cellulitis in his legs because his house was so cluttered he kept hitting his legs into things and getting cuts and infections when he came in we had to remove his socks with scissors because he hadn't taken them off in over three months his socks had embedded into his skin and somehow become one i didn't learn in medical school how that happens i once had a patient that got pregnant despite never having freaked she had severe vaginismus and was not able to ever have anything go into her fanny but her significant other ejaculated onto her and apparently one little swimmer found an egg had a lady come to the morgan pieces for several days she had fallen off a catwalk thing into an industrial fan that had no guards due to a cleaning being performed on that area in a factory they were having trouble finding all of her it wasn't explained to me until three days after the first piece showed up so i thought there was a serial killer out there for a bit i didn't see morgue the first time i read that and was very confused back when i was a medical student on a urology rotation we had a guy come in after butterflying his dong with a fillet knife this occurred after consuming a lot of sea it was his third time doing it all three in a fit of c induced psychosis you'd think you'd steer clear of the old bolivian marching powder after the first two times comma butterflying his dong with a fillet knife i don't know what that means but holy crap do i not want to know nurse here had a patient coming due to pain in her chest four months after having a mastectomy when we changed her dressings the sight was so infected that i could see her lung inflating when she took a breath but she died a week later still don't know why she didn't come in earlier ro i can't even begin to imagine how painful that had to be heartbreaking that she died had a lady in the uh who had a celeb in her rectum she was extremely embarrassed but came to the department for removal we took an x-ray she had pooped it out and didn't even feel it come out got a bill and mortified sar only put toys with a fled end up the [ __ ] you'd cavity to prevent this exact situation a pa i work with saw this patient with an external fixator normally these rods and screws outside the body holding a fracture stable until swelling or whatever you goes down so they can operate and internally fix the fracture they're normally on for a few days cut to this guy's office where a patient walks in one day with an x-fix on his leg that has been there for three freaking years the guy lived a normal life and just thought it was the way they fixed legs how he never got an infection i'll never understand i've heard surgeons refer to the trauma unit as relentlessly working directly against natural selection use your imagination they've seen a lot of darwin award candidates not a doctor post-surgical nurse had a guy with necrotizing fasciitis flesh eating bacteria on his scrotum had a wound vac that kept leaking i had to change it was not pretty by the end of it we were both traumatized i'll never forget the agony that poor guy had to go through but on a good note he healed up eventually this is often called fernie's gangrene and as you may imagine it's pretty bad work in the ed as a medical student had a guy the other day who let a leg infection get worse for years and when he finally came in his infected leg was at least four times the size of the other one and was draining copious amounts of foul smelling pus if the infection had been seen earlier he would have just needed antibiotics because he waited so long he's going to lose the leg if not his life not me but a nurse friend guy comes in complaining of pain sitting down pain in his rectal area she goes to take a look and this man's anus is so infected it was almost gangrenous the infection wasn't just around the anus it had traveled inches deep into his body literally using pus one nurse had to excuse herself and almost passed out due to the smell i was told but no idea what caused it or whatever happened to the poor guy probably injecting drugs swamp of dagobah style 70 yo guy came into the va clinic for a bad cough and admitted due to temp of 104 f he was mine and i found lumps on his neck on exam he had tuberculosis scrofula so why does he have tb in the us we do hiv test and he's and been with some prostitutes he also developed some other complications and was finally discharged after four weeks poor guy got a cough from freaking my cousin is a paramedic in a large city and had these stories one victim is a power lifter with a home gym tries to squat too much weight and on the upward push herniates his sphincter when he got there the man had six eight inches of his small intestine coming out of his butt apparently the medical street slang for this is red socking yourself two victim is a man with a flashing fetish late in the night he walks to a 7-eleven waits until the female cashier turns her back and then opens his jacket so his erect member is lying on the glass countertop by the register in a panic the cashier grabs the first thing she could find a can of tomato soup and in an adrenaline rage brings the can down on his erect dong he said this apparently almost entirely severs the man's dong which fully erect is moving a lot of blood through it he said the man nearly bled to death and the 7-eleven looked like a murder scene when they arrived a three victim is a morbidly obese man completely naked masturbating with a can of soup lubed with honey he is shoving up his butt in the process he stimulates his prostate nerve too much has a heart attack and eyes that's what he responded to a naked sweaty morbidly obese corpse with a honey lubed can of soup halfway up his butt he mentions they had to make efforts to keep the victim small dog out of the room as the dog was quite drawn to the honey please don't think about doing ems unless you're willing to see some truly horrifying crap not a doctor but former psychiatric nurse i have seen all manner of weird and wonderful things yet the most perplexing was a young girl we nursed in piku with history of pika when we took her for x-rays due to her complaining her stomach was hurting we found a belt buckle a full-size spoon and butter knife as well as an assortment of batteries as far as i recall as it was some time ago now they had to operate immediately to remove and again if i recall correctly it was the batteries they were most concerned about as if one exploded started leaking it would have caused irreparable damage i have never seen a set of x-rays like it and seeing was believing incredible how the heck she managed to get them in there but never underestimate the willpower of psychosis disclaimer i'm not a doctor i'm a paramedic my first week on my internship we responded to a fairly rural gas station for a male patient complaining of an altered level of consciousness when we arrived on scene the patient was sitting in a chair in the dining area of the gas station i introduced myself to the patient and was crouched on the floor in front of him trying to get him to answer my questions but he wasn't really giving me much i looked down and noticed a small white worm making its way across the floor i thought well crap sir i said i'm going to remove your shoe and i did as i did so a cascade of maggots tumbled onto the floor the entire soul of his foot was being eaten away by maggots the patient was completely unable to tell me about his medical history or how his foot had come to be a buffet for corpse fauna i double bagged his shoe along with several dozen maggots because i didn't know what else to do with it his blood sugar was fine and he didn't appear to have a history of diabetes and he had full sensation in the parts of his feet that weren't being chewed on i still wonder about that guy the only thing the patient was able to tell me was that he lived two states away and thought he was still in that state the most alarming thing to me about the whole situation was that he had gotten in his truck and driven two states over with no memory of doing so moreover how did you let us get this bad and not come in sooner patient came in friday and 12 30 it's always friday afternoon when they come in because why wouldn't you come in during the week before the busy friday rush because suddenly you realize you don't want to go the weekend with something happening so he comes into my clinic saying his eyes hurting it's been hurting for a few months feels like pressure on the right side behind his eye and he's had a headache on that side that has been worsening his vision is also worse than it used to be and things seem dimmer my staff member remembered what happened a few months ago with a similar situation turned out to be angle closure glaucoma that needed surgery like two weeks ago so she comes to me and asks me if i can see this guy because he's in pain and scared and doesn't want to wait the entire weekend to be seen somewhere else on monday okay sure i take him back and we go through everything vision is reduced he's seeing distortions in letters but everything looks fine from the outside i dilate his eyes and take a look at his right eye right smack in the middle of his central vision is a huge elevated white lesion we take some pictures and scans i had to sit down with him and have a hard talk why did you wait so long this has been going on for three four months now he's got history with colon cancer from a few years ago i had to tell him it's very likely a choroidal melanoma i sent him off to a specialist i don't know if he'll lose his eye yet i suspect he will if he's lucky he'll live and just have to deal with having only one eye if he's extremely blessed and lucky it will be treatable and he won't lose the eye good story but our guy have such sensitive eyes reading that has my eyes watering at the thought of it my mother is an emergency nurse and a while back a 90 year old woman came into the department complaining of pain in her leg below the knee after an examination my mother suggested an x-ray x-ray comes back and it turns out the leg had been broken several months prior snapped clean across both the tibia and fibula and she had somehow ignored what must have been excruciating pain and continued about her life and then the bones had healed but not straight the top of the bones were to the left and about two inches below where they were supposed to be and they had fused to the lower parts at the side like that in the end there is nothing that could realistically be done as to sort the leg out would require a breaking it dang i didn't know human bodies could do that i'm not a doc but a medical technician still in college but you see some crap nevertheless there was a guy who had a car accident damaging his cervical spine our reciprocal surgeon did an amazing job so after a long process of recovery the man was able to walk using only a cane another problem he had was some neurologic muscle illness not sure if myasthenia gravis or something else which made it hard for him to do any fine motor movements although he had all these health issues the guy insisted that he is independent so he did all of his daily activities on his own the problem occurred when he went to his beach house on a vacation and went to take a bath he lied into the tub and turned the water on then he turned on the hot water and realized that the faucet isn't the same as he had back at home and because of his motor skills being bad he didn't manage to turn the hot water off result two three degree burns on the left side of his body from head to toe as he was laying on his side he almost cooked himself to death i don't even get in the tub in my own house without testing the water first it's just not comfortable even because you're sort of wet and cold my doctor was very confused how nine-year-old me managed to completely rip my big toes nail out at 3am i tripped running down the hallway on the way back from the toilet causing no monsters and slid along my carpeted hallway the friction between my toe and the carpet ripped it out omg i think i just shaved three years off my life by reading this a very tame example but here's one mum an ex-nurse told me one day a patient came in who had basically no social interaction whatsoever so he looked like a complete mess with hair nearly down to his hips as the nurses cleaned him up they noticed his hair was quite thick around his head and they couldn't cut through it it turned out the guy had been wearing a beanie for the last 10 years and his hair had just grown through it and over it wow i wish there were pictures on this one nurse here a girl came into the air with a retained bottle cap over her cervix that had been there two years two years sounds like at home contraception gone wrong i'm an rpa patient tried to kill themselves by slitting left wrist patient was unsuccessful as they miss the deep anatomy and arteries but certainly cut bad enough to cause a heck of an infection fast forward a few months without seeking medical treatment and the necrosis had eaten up the vast majority of the forearm exposing a large amount of bone and tendon when i asked if it hurt patient used an index finger jabbed the exposed distal radius and said right here shudder there was a patient in the hospital where i work and one of his legs had gotten so infected it split open and maggots were living inside of the open wound and he called them his pets that sounds like a good reason to request a psych eval doctor multiple incredibly advanced cancers mostly breast head and neck cervix and anal one or two vulva cancers that was particularly bad as well worst non-cancer case was during intern year morbidly obese man comes through ed so large he had to have two beryatic beds pushed together he wasn't to be my patient but he had a lot of anxiety and embarrassment with female doctors for some reason we just had a connection i really felt like he just needed to talk talked about his situation home life all of it he had this calm and peace about him despite his health he passed away two days later at first it was hard to comprehend how life would come to that yet in the end i understood i'm sorry man i wish things had been better frick i'm glad i'm getting help i just hit 500 this year and i refuse to go any freaking higher i'm not dying in a hospital bed at 600 pounds see my neighbor was an ex-emergency room nurse whenever we would ask her about strange cases most answers were you don't want to know the only story i have is really strange one day a morbidly obese woman rolls into the emergency room her legs couldn't support her weight anymore and complains about mild stomach pain after letting several people with mild ailments get treated before her she sits up and rolls to the staff only water cooler behind the counter my neighbor tells her about how the cooler is only for staff and she starts to go away midway she stops and from under her skirt a baby falls on the floor apparently this woman was pregnant and didn't notice because of her weight how the heck didn't she feel giving the excruciating pain of giving birth wtf edit the baby lived and apparently she just had intercourse without protection and was stupid enough to believe she wouldn't get pregnant i'm not really sure if she kept it or not but i'd like to think so doctors were surprised when little thread greater me was brought in with a lacerated spleen and lungs gradually filling with fluid i tripped and fell off of an eight-foot bridge into a creek on my dad's property and a rather large rock caught my fall hitting my ribcage just right my dad thought i was just being a pee and told me to sleep it off but eight hours later my mom found out they were divorced and rushed me to the hospital thankfully spleens are very good at regenerating and i made a full recovery with some physical therapy so my top moment of how the frick did that happen was i was on my internal medicine wards rotation i had this guy in his late 60s come in via told me it was an admission but they were stupid vague so whatever i go in and i notice on his left hand was this golf ball-sized blood clot with a bruise that extended to his elbow now i want to make sure this image is clear there was a black purple golf ball-sized oozing ball on the back of his hand still with me i like with all patience ask what brought him to the hospital well you see i went to my psychiatrist cause i've been having problems sleeping i wanted a sleeping pill you see and i immediately stop him right there and clarify so you are here for a sleeping pill he says yes so i'm my psychiatrist that don't want to i stop him say haha no you are here cause of your hand what happened with your hand he kinda ignores me wanting to just blow it off i refuse to let him talk to me about anything else till he tells me about his hand long story short he was on a blood thinner cold warfarin there is a measure of how the blood clots called the inr normal people are around 1.0 people on warfarin are often aiming for a 2.0 3.0 inr his was freaking 9.0 and the mother wanted to leave when i told him that i had to put him under a legal medical hole to fix it so that he didn't turn his head too fast and have a brain bleed by the end of his admission he admitted to like taking all the random otc herbal crap online cause he read it was good for him serious military docs what are some interesting differences between military and civilian medicine army surgeons in early days of iraq got quoted in it saying major diff between military and civilian patients is the troops are in perfect health up until the moment they are injured in combat it makes for easy almost textbook perfect surgeries nobody has other chronic problems that would complicate matters other thing they mentioned was that if they requested medical equipment it was flown in 24 36 hours later no questions asked they'd never seen operating rooms with so much redundant equipment all of it state of the art but no need to delay for a few hours a medical procedure until a facility or piece of equipment was available medics learn a lot of stuff on the job that they would never be allowed to do on civilian streets suturing injections etc i'm vietnam vietnamera and rotated through several hospitals in germany doctors were happy to teach oh and i helped with several deliveries traditionally military dentists can work freaking voodoo magic with amalgam for dental work in the civilian world we just use resin composite the tooth colored stuff with a bonding agent the reason i say voodoo is that amalgam silver fillings don't actually bond to anything it's a held in with physical friction and structure you have to drill the tooth a certain way to make sure it doesn't fall out and i've seen some work on veterans that are over 20 years old and i have no idea how they made it stay in place in the first place i found the opposite i'm currently several thousand dollars into fixing the questionable dental work i was forced to get in the military they wanted to replace a couple of childhood fillings i had somehow i ended up needing surgery to repair my jaw four caps and two root canals there is no confidentiality or rather it is very limited if a patient tells you they used drugs or did something against regulations that impacts performance you're obligated to report it but it's more than that i haven't been on a military base for some time but back in the day it was common for people to check the online scheduling system via chcs to see which co-workers had appointments with certain doctors unlike epic there was no record kept of these searches so what would happen is a boss or clique at work would treat a person differently all of a sudden and it would be a sign that they checked chcs it's not fair but in the military being active duty and seeing a shrink is not viewed compassionately it led to a lot of resentment to us in the mental health clinics which i can totally understand we were trying to help but even stepping foot in our office would endanger their career to be fair administration would do what they could but ultimately changing the culture and the computer programs takes a lot of time and effort the patient population tends to be much younger and healthier the flip side is that they tend to be much more reckless so self-destructive behavior like smoking and engaging in risk-taking activities is rampant there also tend to be either massive over-utilizers or underutilizers of healthcare the over-utilizers go in for minor aches and pains because there's no copay and it will get them out of work or certain aspects of their duties they find undeservable the underutilizers are the young men and women who try and tough things out or fear consequences if they seek medical care so they tend to avoid docs another huge aspect of military medicine is the career implications you can impose on someone as a doctor in civilian practice there's little issue of giving someone a diagnosis however putting certain diagnosis in a servicemember's record can be a career killer imagine being in 17 years three years from retirement then some doc puts fibromyalgia in your chart and now all of a sudden you're being looked at for medical separation medical was underutilized on the ships i was on because the solution to anything wrong with you was to get put up in your rack for a day and drink lots of fluids so now you're stuck in your rack all day but you still feel like crap and nothing was actually done to solve the issue it depends on if you are in garrison on base in your home country or deployed in garrison medical procedures are rather complementary to civilian counterparts it is when you are deployed that you have a more carte blanche method of medicine i was a 20 year old corpsman doing chest tubes and pericardial synthesis pyricadiocentesis tyudochevok on marines and civilians in iraq with no doctor supervision however in those cases it is purely about stabilizing the patients so they can make it to the next level echelon of care as a former soldier who knew quite a few medics i'm going to just assume it was both when you find a person who you need to help according to military medicine up a check for massive bleedings first but in civilian medicine we check for clear airways first because in the civilian life the chances for having something down your throat is more likely than being shot and bleeding out i was the combat medic who did urgent care after the army the biggest change to me was demographic treating solely athletic young males can make you blind to sign symptoms and treatments that might be dangerous to people with more variant sex and age one example is you can cause neurological damage to an older person if you infuse them too quickly with an iv something to so with hypotonicity and damaging myelin which can be reduced in the elderly or that smaller people are more prone to air embolism from a quick and dirty iv that would be harmless to a soldier medics are trained mostly to stop bleeding and trauma but you also pick up plenty of non-emergent stuff along the way working for pas and physicians most procedural stuff i got yelled at for doing wrong when i first moved to clinical from military i later found out from a former emt now physician wasn't wrong but more commonly seen by emts you do hire a former medic though because they are very versatile and usually can handle not only emt clinical and lab based work but also the logistical stuff like supply and management because in the military all of those jobs are filled with medic oh except receptionist didn't know crap about how medical insurance worked when i first got out my dad was stationed in texas for his military service as an orthopedic he said every now and then someone from the special from the special forces would come in presumably from south america somewhere and he would drop everything to do surgery on them first there would be no paperwork whatsoever and then the person would be shipped back out also military doctors receive a heck of a lot more respect than civilian docs respect thing is probably bc when deployed you only got this one doc to help you while you can just go to another hospital in civil they're more protected from medical maltreatment or whatever it's called all private jeremy can't sue the doc if stuff goes wrong interesting i work in the uk myself and rarely see malpractice suits although i hear it's much commoner in the private sector the thing is there are so many safeguards that doctors use to make sure they are on the right side of the law most of the ones on the news are just examples of gross negligence i'm not a doctor but i'm a career submariner the docs on u.s submarines are not actual doctors but independent juti corpsmen they attend a one-year school that's basically a crash course they learn two years or medical school in that year once the sub departs that e6 or e7 as the only guy capable of keeping the crew alive should something happen i've seen them do some amazing stuff they are truly the unsung heroes of the sub force i got told this by a friend who was submarine officer he said maybe put its best core man on subs with the [ __ ] ups getting assigned to the marines i'm a civilian emt but in the national guard i'm an mp in army basic they teach every pvt regardless of their mos how to do interventions like the needle chest decompression something myself and my colleagues are unable to legally do in the civilian world until we are at least paramedic level yep i was a clerk typist but i learned how to bandage a sucking chest wound and basic training i used to be a doc before transitioning to a civilian urgent care what acceptable levels of cleaner when i got trained on ivs the doc teaching me literally held it in his mouth while situating everything the gloves are a good part of medicine too but it's more of a suggestion in the military also the amount of expired meds we carry around is ridiculous we very rarely get new stuff and so you're supposed to make it last in our defense though needles don't really get less sharp with age but still i watched a sergeant spit on an npa to jam it down a guy's nose yesterday in a civilian hospital i watched staff throw out a whole heap of meds because they were a day out of date your priority in a combat zone fortrig is to figure out who can still shoot when you play someone with trauma to their lower limbs on a litter leave their arms unrestricted just because your legs don't work doesn't mean you can't fire their downrange my dad knew a dentist in the military who said it was boring as heck it was all young healthy men who'd already had any major problems fixed so he just ended up doing a lot of feelings he quit the military when he could just so he could do more interesting civilian cases medics also have a few specialties i was an army medic orthopedic specialist the scope of practice and experience is dependent on how knowledgeable and competent the surgeons feel you are on deployment it was essentially no holds bar as far as what what procedures we were allowed to do a benefit to no insurance or liability this included actual surgery on wounded and routine cases on active duty military personnel yes that is cutting and suturing under the watch of the surgeons it is a little hard for me to remember but as other people have stated we were definitely doing things that would only be done by a physician in the states you can have immense responsibility as a refi sergeant if you are up for the task that includes being responsible for ordering and fitting millions of dollars of equipment striker der oil casting supplies etc you can be the the casting clinical supervisor and when the orthopedic clinic supervisor goes on leave you're in charge of that as well other responsibilities can include key custodian msds book making sure everything is sanitary jcaho compliance etc basically jobs that would be done by multiple people in the civilian world done by one soldier you can also side train and work with prosthetics physical therapy and occupational therapy to ensure the continuity of care the surgeons i worked with in the military were great including hospitals and clinics in germany walter reed and brook army medical center on a side note the va care i get is amazing front line treat is backward from civilian life if someone with a broken pinky and another person with a sucking chest wound come through the door at the same time we're fixing the broken pinky first that way you can hand him his gun and send him back out the door to win the fight lest we all become casualties it's back to normal once you're away from combat but in the heat of battle the immediate concern is to get people back into action as soon as possible my dad was an ophthalmologist in the air force he mentioned how there was a big difference between the civilian practice and military mostly the culture of it all it was doctor last name not major last name as a military doc you're normally treated like a civilian more than any other officer and you get big bonuses for retention it's because it's more cost effective to pay bonuses to the less common medical specialties to stay in and work when they are paid 2 3x less than a civilian counterpart than to send patients off base and deal with trick or paperwork the payoff is the preparation though typically you come out of a commitment without school debt especially if you hit 20 years you can say things bluntly to your patients like look sucker of course you're not getting better because you're doing nothing i freaking told you to as some people have stated a major difference is that certain diagnosis can change your entire career however i personally never saw anyone's career ended by a diagnosis i saw many people unable to get a proper diagnosis because it would end their career i worked on a submarine and the nuclear weapons personnel and nuclear engineering personnel had some of the most strict medical requirements in the military additionally their communities were all critically undermanned fleet-wide the only treatment any of them ever received for anything not life-threatening was mega doses of ibuprofen fractures second-degree burns torn ligaments a panoply of dermatological problems here's a bucket of ibuprofen non-nuclear personnel with the same problems would receive much more thorough treatment and civilians with the same problems would receive much more thorough treatment i work in an impatient ward on a military base coming into the air force i had no idea we even had those i take care of older veterans i wipe butts help feed bathe and dress them i sometimes forget i'm even in the military since i only wear scrubs sometimes we get younger active duty patients but they are usually there to recover from surgery in the air force all of the enlisted medical technicians are emt certified yet they can work anywhere from a ward a clinic or front desk martarin and water cures everything in the us army headache drink water take martyrin sick drink lots of water take martyrin twisted your ankle here's a bunch of martyrin now go drink some water gunshot wound apply martyrin directly to gsw and then pour water on top same for the navy marines on the emergency trauma side tourniquets are a huge no-no for civilians for medics and corpsmen a tourniquet is often the very first intervention wife was a military clinical doc and is now civilian in the military her department had eight doctors and two nurses sometimes one of the nurses would be deployed so there would be one nurse for eight doctors in civilian practice each doctor has their own nurse in the military rank was sometimes more important than ability she had occasions where a high-ranking patient would want someone else to see him since she was only a captain never mind that the colonel he ended up seeing spent most of his time doing administration and saw very few patients i think the biggest difference is that in military medicine people will come and for the smallest things stuff that they could handle on their own with just a little common sense and every time we say something about it it's always the same response why would i pay for it i'm only an e nothing i don't have money to spend on meds listen buddy if you can't buy four dollars worth of dayquil you seriously need to re-evaluate your budget we also couldn't just call in sick we had to go to medical army bh provider here having worked both in and out of the active duty hospital setting and field environment and done internships in the civilian world the biggest difference i'd say is accountability for quality of care in my opinion in the civilian world because of how insurance works your doctor has financial incentive to want you to like them you're a consumer you can theoretically take your money elsewhere in the military you get what you get don't like me too bad file a nice complaint to make yourself feel better unless i break the law or provide some type of an ethical treatment neither me nor my civilian counterparts are going anywhere other than the fact that i truly give a crap about my patients i have zero motivation to provide anything outside of the bare minimum of standard of care i want to do right by you you're the reason i come to work every day your hurt drives me to be better to do better and one day between meeting my army obligations and additional duties on top of the sheer number of patients i see in a day and the administrative bulls and sheer amount of time i spend writing an 18-page note in your medical record i might burn out and i hope to god that at that moment i have the insight to see that i'm starting to fail you and i do us both a favor and drop my refrain packet or maybe i won't notice and i'll become that typical army provider you all are angry at having to come to see that pushes pills and says see you next month and you file that ice complaint that no one will actually give a crap about i could do whatever was deemed necessary to a military personnel civilian side i had a license and i could get a revoked find or possibly even go to prison if i performed an intervention that was not on my license even if it worked also military is habc army medic and now civilian nurse scope of practice is a big one in military medicine for the most part you can do what you know how to do so the scope gets pretty wide if you put work in and learn stuff in civilian medicine your scope is pretty strictly what your license certifications are as an army medic i could and did do ivs intubation ng tubes push all sorts of iv drugs etc in civilian medicine a ton of that is paramedic rn even md level so you can't touch it unless that's what you are mom having me in the air force saluted the doctor was in the hospital four weeks with preeclampsia and still had to get up every day and make her bed mean nurses mom having my sister after the air force everything done for her no making the bed nurses were nicer the only people that do good shoulder instability surgery are military orthopods and sports medicine fellowship trained surgeons my dad said he went from opening up people in shape to opening up obese people he said the military was much less work haha the scope of practice for non-doctor medical folks as a civilian i am only an emtb barely qualified to drive an ambulance as an army medic i have assisted in chest tube insertion and removal emergency trauma surgeries i can carry and administer major narcotics and basically anything that my medical practitioner says i can do the ability to operate fairly independently in the field is something you won't see as much outside of the military this probably won't even get seen but from a patient standpoint one difference i know of first hand is military docs pick and choose what they want their patience to know i took my husband to omaka while he was still active duty because he thought he was having a heart attack we find out it's a really bad anxiety attack after he gets an ekg and nothing is physically wrong with him fast forward three four years and i'm going through his medical documents after he has been discharged because he's now in heart failure and i find the ekg from that a visit clearly listed is the two heart diseases he's recently been diagnosed with by a civilian doctor in my husband's heart failure and even possibly his open-heart surgery could have been avoided if the army docs had told him what was going on and didn't put his body through so much physical and emotion stress that his heart couldn't handle he's now 100 disabled and doesn't trust doctors at all i worked labor and delivery early in my navy corpsman career now that i'm out i am no longer in medicine so this'll be a bit more of what i've heard about the civilian world of labor and delivery but i've seen posts about people getting charged for skin-to-skin contact after birth and other ridiculous things in the navy as long as everything was okay we encourage it i also really focused on getting the dad involved and making it a great experience memory for example helping me clean the newborn getting prince showing him how to make a newborn burrito etc to me it seems that we had a lot more freedom in the civilian world it seems that there are price tags attached to everything if you work civilian labor and delivery let me know if i'm wrong another thing i've experienced and i imagine is not acceptable in the civilian world is how we get to practice it wasn't uncommon to find a room full of corman practicing ivs or blood draws randomly docs and nurses also let us try things that were probably a bit outside our scope which was all way awesome and helped us become more well-rounded i think the military patience we have also makes it easier to be allowed to practice and learn very rarely did i bring a new guy in and have a patient lose their mind and demand someone more experienced more often than not they either encourage the trainee or tease them with me as they were nervously trying to find a vein as a purveyor of military medical services for the last 18 years and counting i can say almost for sure that military doctors care more about ensuring you can deploy than they do your actual health i literally have to lie my butt off symptom wise to get anything more than martyrin and to take a few days off from doing that thing that bothers you speech i could have cancer or who knows what else i will never know unless i see actual doctors what is your worst case of i googled my symptoms i had a grade school kid tell me he had a brain tumor turns out he put a dried bean in his ear and forgot about it this is the best thing i've read on this thread so far not a doctor but i had a co-worker come into the office with this one he was having nausea fatigue frequent urination and decided to webmd that crap we're chatting in the office one day and he says something like yeah i've been feeling like crap lately and it sounds like gestational diabetes but i can't find any cases of men getting it i just slowly lowered my head into my hand and asked him do you even know what gestational means he did not paramedic student here last week we had a call for an imminent delivery pt started having abdominal pain that would last a little bit and stop and about two three minutes later would start again she googled her symptoms and everything she found was saying she was in labor she called her husband and he told her to call nine one one we walked in as the baby was crowning she had no idea she was pregnant not a doctor but when my fiance said he was having chest pains and when he breathed it crackled i googled and all of the symptoms led to serious illnesses such a collapsed lung thought nothing of it diagnosed it ourselves as an allergy and didn't go to a doctor till later in the day it was in fact a fully deflated collapsed lung not a doctor that worked at a hospital for a while one of our doctors came back to the nurse's station laughing because someone was fully convinced they were diabetic because they were craving water and webb said that makes them diabetic but turns out they are just human and required to live people are funny just last week a lady came in with shoulder pain after examining her and comforting her she told me that she was afraid it was cancer since she had been googling shoulder pain man wtf google actually i'm a doctor but this story is from medical school i had a patient who correctly diagnosed herself with mastitis although she was very worried that she had inflammatory carcinoma of the breasts to be fair they can look similar another time i had a patient correctly diagnose a lump in her breast as a fibroadenoma i was very impressed if you are a breast surgeon with that username my day is made i'm not a doctor but i'm a medical assistant and i room patients for the doctor this is in the occupational health field and we had a young gentleman come in who was pretty sure he had a groin hernia according to his google search he said he'd been lifting produced crates and experienced sharp overwhelming pain in his groin the doctor came back out after seeing him and was clearly fighting laughter by the time he got to the desk turns out the kid had chlamydia which had caused things to become swollen and just happened to get symptomatic while he was at work poor guy had a patient come in and tell us she is having vision issues that are new okay let's have a look oh looks like you placed a contact over a contact 27 times not a doctor but in 2013 i was feeling awful shaking puking dry heaving shaking excruciating and debilitating pain went to the air had blood work done that i never knew what it said and the doctor told me it was a gallbladder attack gave me pain meds and sent me home three days later i was even worse couldn't eat couldn't sleep the only relief i felt was when i was in scalding hot bath i finally went back to the ear and they did more blood work and told me my gallbladder was septic and my pancreatic enzymes were 6500 and rising they should have only been 100 150 and i was dying i was admitted and when they did my gallbladder removal my gallbladder was solid black and had 80 stones and a two-like substance from sepsis come to find out the first time i went to the my enzymes were 2 000 i should never have been allowed to leave the hospital my brother is both the doctor and the patient in my story around two months ago he had started to feel really tired and ill like really ill he had said to his partner that he felt like he had leukemia which was of course just kind of shrugged off because why how would he have leukemia he had been suffering with a throat infection for a few weeks and was given antibiotics by a gp of his practice after a week or so it hadn't helped and he was tired and slightly breathless whilst walking the dog one sunday afternoon the next morning he registered himself as a patient and took his own bloods after being prompted by his receptionist parents doctor friend and sent them for testing unfortunately he had been completely correct and when his results returned he saw that he did have leukemia acute myeloid leukemia to be precise he saw the results and knew immediately as he went to confirm them with the gp next door the specialist hospital had already called and asked for the patient to be brought into hospital immediately unfortunately his hemoglobin levels and general cell count were so low and he was in a really bad way many transfusions and one round of chemotherapy down and he is determined to be this horrible disease there's a long long way to go but he won't give up and neither will we i love that guy so much and wish i could trade places with him there's potential that i may be used as his bone marrow donor i hope i can be because anything i can do to help i want to do it's not too likely to be me but i feel so helpless right now so it would be good to help i guess anyways no google but turns out these doctor guys are pretty damn good at their jobs even when it's certainly not their specialism i so so hope he makes it also hope you can be the donor not a doctor but i deal with migraines i would not be surprised if someone experienced a big rain for the first time google their symptoms while they still had the clarity to do so and went to the air thinking they are having a stroke i had a stroke and thought it was a migraine so this problem totally goes both ways i had a ut because i had the symptoms and googled it day of doctor appointment it was just a regular checkup but i asked for a ut test since i explained how i was feeling convo went like this could it be possible to request a ut testing i've been feeling the symptoms of burning when i pee and some discomfort how do you feel now any pain well no not at the well if you did have a ut the symptoms wouldn't go away you are fine two or so days later i get a full blown kidney infection from a who would have guessed a ut sent out a complaint frick that be doctor i always ask for a test if i am suspicious of anything and i have them documented if they say no from now on that was a horrible experience edit i am so sorry so many of you experienced similar stuff but hey glad we made it thanks for the upvotes i went to a walk-in two weeks ago cause i couldn't get an appointment with my doctor i said i have a ut they said okay pee in this cup yup you have a ut take this pill for five days and you should be good i didn't need to plead my case this confuses the frick out of me when i go to a doctor they specifically ask if i've done research about whatever like they expected awkward position cause if i have researched i feel like an idiot using dr google and having medical student syndrome if i haven't researched i get the distinct impression nice disappointed the doc ever since we studied multiple sclerosis in euro i'm convinced i have it despite my only symptom being perestis funny feels in my legs at night if your legs just feel weird word at night and you have literally no other symptom it's more unlikely just restless leg syndrome it can feel like an ache or pins and needles and makes you feel like you need to move but moving doesn't actually help usually happens at night or early in the morning it's pretty common not a doctor but my friend once said a guy came with a backache and wanted to get operated cause he thought he had kidney failure i can't decide if i actually want to know how he got from point a to point b edit i accidentally read headache and now feel like an idiot time xd not a doctor but throughout my childhood and teen years i had these weird episodes where i would suddenly have really bad deja vu and get very nauseous for the next few hours afterward i would feel like i was in a fog and my memory would be crap eventually i googled my symptoms and learned they might be minor epileptic seizures i went to a doctor and he laughed it off and told me it was probably just having panic attacks related to the normal emotions of being a teenager i was so sure he was wrong that i opted to go get an egg turns out i have a mild form of epilepsy and google was totally right sounds like you were returning to last checkpoints to me not a doctor but the brother of the patient and worst being on the money my older sister diagnosed herself as having symptoms of systematic heart failure her new primary doctor agreed and gave her some basic guidelines of what to do and had her visit her cardiologist the cardiologist pooh-poohed her saying there was probably nothing to worry about and scheduled a test in a few days just to be on the safe side one of the things her primary had a looking out for was sudden weight gain and when she woke up two days later suddenly six pounds heavier we went straight to the emergency room who ran tests including an echocardiogram her injection fraction was 12 and they immediately sent her to the biggest hospital in the area where they ended up saving her life from congestive heart failure she had had at least two silent heart attacks due to the amount of damage they found tldr i still have my sister because she's self-diagnosed correctly ejection fraction rather than injection as in how much of the blood is pumped out from a cardiac chamber atrium or ventricle but typically ventricle with each beat measured in percentage 12 is bad i hope your sister's condition is well managed and good on her for her catch not a doctor but i was having horrible debilitating headaches for a while googled my symptoms and they ranged from stress to brain cancer ended up being sinusitis i had that i got horrible headaches and toothaches i thought something was in my head like a cancer that was pushing on my brain and teeth turns out i had stress and vitamin d deficiency not a doctor i had an insect bite basically next to my nipple it was itching like crazy and my usual bite cream said not to be used on nipples so i decided to google what else i could do to relieve it found out that apparently no one else has ever had an insect bite on their nipple but that what looks like an insect bite on all right next to your nipple is almost certainly inflammatory breast cancer phoned up my gp we used to be neighbors so i kind of knew him and was in a right state because i thought i had this incredibly aggressive form of breast cancer he listened to me for a minute asked a couple of questions and then said it's an insect bite come back to me if it's still there in three weeks oh and try deodorant on it the deodorant calmed it right down and it had gone by about five days afterwards daughter said she was worried about her medicine because she read on the bottle it causes down syndrome i told her you must have misread and she cut me off because she was sure of it get home and read the bottle may cause drowsiness not really related to this topic but i am a medical student and recently got star in my eye star is usually self-diagnosable but i called up my cousin who is a doctor just to confirm anyways when i was telling this incident to one of my friends he started scolding me saying as a medical professional i should set the example of going to the doctor and getting proper medicines and treatment and all i could say was dude i'm becoming a doc i know how doctors are doctors especially when they know your medical student tend to over diagnose or pretend as if we have medical student syndrome but anyways got the meds and my eyes healing not a doctor when i talk to doctors i say google told me blah blah blah is that accurate usually helps establish that i've tried to do research but trust them more than google i had two separate doctors tell me that i was having panic attacks when in fact i was having simple partial seizures caused by a line-sized cancerous tumor in my brain i got so much xanax though i got so much xanax though you have 239 new messages waiting not a doctor nor was my brother despite him thinking his google foo is a degree but a couple years ago my brother decided that since i had been laid off and needed to borrow some money from him to tide me over that it meant that i was utterly depressed and suicidal thus he deduced that i needed to be institutionalized and took me to a doctor he lied and said he wanted me to just get a normal checkup since i hadn't had one in a while i was i believe rightly p off and embarrassed but since i needed the money i went along with it so he decides to just come into the psychiatrist's office with me while she is trying to ask me some questions and see how i am he starts throwing out terms like maladaptive coping and how i am suicidal and needed treatment if she finally tells him to leave and i speak with her for a bit now i was a bit morose because i had lost my job and was embarrassed about asking for help but i wasn't suicidal and the psychiatrist agreed stating that i just needed support and not google for quackery i hadn't turned to drugs stealing or any other illegal destruction activities to deal with my depression just that i was a bit withdrawn and down because of my recent low tldr laid off needed some financial help brother googled big sounding words and tried to act like a doctor to an actual doctor no longer interact with that clown and my mental health is quite improved because of it how is your relationship now the health care system where i live is broken someone i know didn't have a doctor had been looking for one for seven years and started having worrisome symptoms the erin clinics wouldn't order tests because follow-up appointments would be needed and they didn't do that she finally went to her and stood her ground saying she wasn't leaving until they did tests google suggested she had a brain tumor or a hyperactive thyroid they reluctantly did the tests and she had to fight for the follow-up turns out it was a thyroid disorder for which she was in bad need of treatment without google she didn't have much ammunition for the fight i'm not a doctor but i went to a doctor because i was certain i had delayed sleep phase disorder he told me i couldn't have a sleeping disorder without being depressed and made me take a depression test it said i wasn't depressed so he said obviously i don't have a sleeping disorder i went to a sleep specialist a few months later and they diagnosed me with delayed sleep phase disorder and helped me get it under control i'm way too late to the game but mine is funny not a dock but was in a car accident a few years back and while chatting with a paramedic still in my rolled over car i told her that i had sharp pain in my right thigh and couldn't move my right arm or right leg assumed i had broken my femur and dislocated my right shoulder she agreed wasn't until they got me into a ct scan that they realized eyeglass had taken a chunk of my right leg out and i had broken my neck in two places and i really had damaged the nerves on the right side of my body oops at the hospital in my town there was a kid who came in saying he had knee pains the doctor said it was from playing basketball and five months later at a different hospital they found that he had knee cancer and it was too late to treat him he died a few weeks later really sad story i had a friend who's 11 year old kid presented with similar pains in her knees and thighs the doctor told my friend she was probably over exerting herself at basketball it was rhabdomyosarcoma she died a year later edited to correct the spelling obligatory not a doctor but the patient went to the doc several times as a teen complaining of being extremely lethargic i slept like 13 hours a day extremely pale cold all the dang time etc all classic signs of anemia from what i had looked up but the doctor said i was overreacting and just being a teenager and refused to even check well guess who ends up back at the doctors like a year later after an emergency blood test showed my hemoglobin was at like 6.2 just being a teenager my butt not a doctor but once back in fourth grade during winter break i had some sort of illness that made me throw up sleepy all the time and a few other symptoms i can't remember so i was at my mom's computer and i decided to google my symptoms since my mom wasn't there turns out i had mono or also referred to as the kissing disease so after that i was crying to my mom hacking my guts out while my mom tried to calm me down and to this day legend has it i still don't know what i had and i have never had it again obligatory not a doctor i was the patient i googled my symptoms of hearing loss tinnitus vertigo i focus issues and headaches i was fairly convinced i had an acoustic neuroma a rare benign but if not treated potentially life-threatening tumor on the eighth cranial nerve the end was convinced it was sinus related but sent me for an mri on the very slight chance there was something else going on at this point i mentioned that i had read about the aforementioned tumor and she looked to be stifling and i roll it's always a brain tumor when we google our symptoms right the morning after my mri i received a call from the end and she sounded shook not only did i have the tumor it was as big as a golf ball and pushing against my brain stem i'd say about three stroke four times a year i get a new young male that has googled their symptoms and determined they need a smear test yes you read that right a few men look for advice for their symptoms online and will end up on mumsnet or the like and see women saying get a smear test without them actually knowing what it is i always have to leave the room to excuse myself whilst i have a laugh a friend of mine when i was younger had been having chronic migraines the doctors brushed it off telling her to take some pain meds and you'll be fine keep in mind she was only in middle school in the middle of class one day she collapsed aneurysm ambulance rushed her to the hospital turns out she had a brain tumor the size of a peach had chemo radiation the works finally able to have it removed so they cut a large part of her skull out to remove the tumor and had to wear a cast helmet for months six years later she's fine now took my 92-year-old grandma to her because it was saturday told them i suspected ut doc didn't listen finally she had to go potty and they brought her potty chair in after she was through the nurse when to empty it she took one look at how her urine looked and went out and almost made the doc right order for test of course it came back as ut it can be difficult to diagnose a dementia patient because they lose ability to tell doc what's going on they also become afraid of doctors because they think they will put them in a nursing home or such a ut can actually exacerbate symptoms of dementia too edit thought it best to add the source i'm a clinical support worker and a part of my job involves dipping patients urine samples for evidence of a ut i learned the dementia bit from one of our review team paramedic here at the worst instance i can think of was a young fit woman who decided she was having a stroke after and openly admitting she had googling headache i correctly diagnosed myself with dyshydrotic eczema the pictures i saw matched the issue i had then i read that there are often chemical triggers then i thought about all of the stuff i had done recently then i remembered the lake in my backyard is full of chemical fertilizer runoff from the surrounding golf course and i was in it about a week prior then i did it again because i'm stupid then i got a really bad case of the eczema then i never touched the lake again the end my stepfather was working in the garden one day and came inside complaining of feeling hot tired nauseous and his legs hurt we didn't google his symptoms but assumed he'd had too much sun he went to bed and woke up several times and his symptoms were no better my mum called an ambulance when he woke up at 1am vomiting uncontrollably he was dead less than five hours later from septicemia i think my doctor thinks i'm a bit of a drama queen for googling symptoms and coming in to get stuff checked now but i'd rather err on the side of caution not a doctor but my girlfriend was feeling a strong sharp pain around her stomach in the middle of the night i googled it and in my opinion it was a kidney stone or maybe something gynecological related i wasn't sure of anything but i had acquired enough knowledge to know that it might be bad and we had to do something so we go to the hospital we wait hours and hours until we saw a doctor and she asked her can you rate your pain in a scale from 1 to 10 she responded seven and then she looked at her for a second and said while laughing a bit well no your face doesn't look like a seven and she left another doctor concluded was just a gastroenteritis and give her some paracetamol after we had waited a full night at the hospital and then we left but she was still in a lot of pain maybe more at this moment i gave up in my opinion a gastroenteritis shouldn't cause that much pain but i trusted the doctor diagnosis because he is a doctor and he had years of study and practice behind him unlike us but two days later she pee a huge kidney stone from her urethra while screaming at the top of her lungs she had never felt so much pain in her all life some say it's more painful than giving birth we saw a lot of different doctors during the whole night and no one had listened to my suggestions so yeah i get it there's some annoying patients who wrongly self-diagnose themselves and felt more educated than the doctor they are facing but on the other side they also are some crappy doctors who don't listen to their patients when they should so i can understand that some people prefer to do their own research and doesn't fully trust their doctor not a doctor but i am currently in med school when i was about 12 years old i felt a painless lump inside my nipple i thought this was something of low importance so i continued to live my life a few days later when i was in the shower i felt another painless lump inside my other nipple i thought this was weird so i decided to google my symptoms i thought about male breast cancer and i knew it was a low chance of me having it but i decided to look up some signs of the cancer and there it was in my exact words symptoms of breast cancer include a painless lump in the breast i was terrified i informed my parents and i was in tears i didn't know what my future would look like and this thought shook me even more would i ever become a doctor i then searched for treatment of breast cancer on google and it said the only treatment was to amputate the breast i was even more torn the next day my mom showed me an article about my breast cancer and it turns out that i was just going through puberty and this was completely normal to this day my family and i still laugh about the incident if you know how to do a proper search on the internet and discern balls from truth you can actually get pretty far i helped my doctor diagnose my issues by providing him the information i'd found from people similarly experiencing my condition without my searching the doctor would have just sent me home with antibiotics again not a doctor but work as a health advisor for nhs 111 and a teenager once phoned probably like 13 stroke 14 because he had a bruise under his fingernail he'd google it and thinks it could be cancer turns out he knocked it a few hours earlier but had just completely forgotten not a doctor but my family aziz were travelling in india my sister 13 started experiencing stomach pains of course we assumed it was delhi belly three days later she still can't keep down food and is pretty much bed bound mum starts to get worried and hits up the old goggle symptoms line up with appendicitis and there's a touch of panic we called the doctor and he sent us to the hospital saying worst case scenario is appendicitis my sister gets out of bed to go to hospital and she instantly turns white breaks out in a sweat and becomes unresponsive once she comes right we head to hospital and they originally say she's just getting her period nope takes them a few hours but she has a ruptured appendix we spend mum's birthday in dodgy hospital in india whilst my sister is in surgery she's all good now medical professionals have read it when was someone self-diagnosis surprisingly accurate saw some warner she had a runny nose and was insistent that her cerebral spinal fluid the fluid that surrounds your brain was leaking through her nose and causing her to have a runny nose this is usually pretty unlikely especially without a history of trauma order a ct of her head but doesn't show anything and she otherwise looks fine so she sent home she comes back the next day with a jar of this fluid she had collected saying this isn't snot ran some more tests and turned out she was right i'm glad she was persistent i naively didn't even know this was a thing until reading your comment yet i shall now forever presume every cold or onset of allergies is an indicator of brain fluid leaking from my nose super poor woman's husband drags her to her repeatedly four weeks on end with a bizarre variety of neurological symptoms she'd seen a neurologist and was told it was all functional mri showed a rapidly growing brain tumor she was having seizures her husband was 100 right my blood turns cold just typing this poor woman poor family had a guy come into the air he handed me a paper on brucellosis saying that he had an infection with brucella turns out he was a large animal vet professor at a university and was working in a lab studying the disease he was right something like hey doc i'm one of the lead researchers on this disease i know how to treat it here's a list of all the tests you need to run and what drugs i'll need to get better i know how to treat it but i don't have the script pad just the other week had a 60 year old guy reeking off cigarettes coming for upper endoscopy camera to look at the esophagus stomach and part of the small bowel he was describing food getting stuck mid-swallow in the middle of his chest i think it's esophagus cancer he said i was thinking that too but didn't say anything sure enough that's exactly what it was my husband had an issue with the food getting stuck mid-swallow for like a year or so he said he just chalked it up to getting older but when he was scanned after a motorcycle accident doctors told him he had an eight centimeter mass in his esophagus he had it removed thankfully not cancerous obligatory not a medical professional but i have a funny story about self-diagnosis from when i was in a motorcycle accident it was a head-on collision and i had to go over the hood and windshield of the car that hit me and skidded through an intersection was wearing a helmet boots leather jacket i absolutely had a massive concussion but wasn't aware of it at the time i was not in pain i felt disoriented and insanely thirsty but no pain i sat up and took off my helmet and there was a crowd of bystanders trying to get me to lay down but i just wanted to go home the thing is no matter how many times i tried i could not actually stand when the emts arrived i was sitting upright on the ground and i helpfully informed them that i thought my leg might be broken because i had tried to stand and found it was not weight bearing one of the emts scoffed and said something like you think or no crap i very sincerely insisted my leg might be broken at which point he got serious and asked me if i had actually looked at my leg or not i hadn't thought to do that bear in mind i had one heck of a concussion i looked down and there was my bone sticking out from my skin and through the denim of my beans there was blood everywhere oh i said yes your leg is definitely broken said the emt gently well i said reasonably i mean how do we know yet i mean we should probably get an x-ray shock is a helluva drug when trauma patients say am i going to die right before they lapse into unconsciousness or get tubed for surgery they are usually right and they know it hydrator knight is separate eva recurrent severe skin abscesses she came in saying that she was worried she had it because she's had some abscesses in her armpit nine times out of ten it's because of shaving with a dirty razor which is what i told her i'll be damned if she was right ended up having five plus abscesses that formed tracts requiring surgery they recurred a few months later sent to dermatology who confirmed the diagnosis worked in there when a lady ran in screaming that her husband was dead in the car staff walked out to see i asked if they should hurry and they said no because people exaggerate those things turns out dude was dead based on the smell and bloating had been for three or four days she was a junkie and was living in the car half a days before she noticed he had odd i mean technically they still didn't have to hurry when i worked as a camp counselor i woke up one morning with severe joint pain i'd slept on the ground the night before so i chalked it up to that when it didn't go away after a couple days i went to the camp nurse who diagnosed me with dehydration after downing a 12-pack of powerade i'm still surprised i didn't pee blue i still had the joint pain a bunch of the other counselors were convinced that it was stressor that the fluid in my joints had dried up then i went and did the one thing you should ever do i logged onto webmd and searched my symptoms and right after cancer was lyme disease it made a lot of sense but i'd never had any rash or notice any tick on me so i went back to the camp nurse and she had me leave camp to get a blood test and i ended up going into the air because there wasn't a clinic available the nurse gave me a shot in the bus for the pain drew my blood and an antibiotic on an empty stomach just in case turns out i was allergic to the antibiotic so i got hives and i threw it up i received a call the next day that yes i did have lyme disease dried up joints my butt disclaimer i worked part-time in trij at the air so i'm not sure if you'd call me a professional that being said i don't remember a single person who claimed they had a kidney stone who was wrong the only person i ever had who didn't have a kidney stone and wasn't seeking unfortunately had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy i diagnosed myself with an adrenal tumor my primary care doc kept telling me my symptoms were caused by lifestyle choices i went to my gin who took me seriously when i showed him my research it was a cancerous bioactive adrenal tumor the size of a grapefruit that was over two years ago and i'm still fighting this cancer i developed either recurrence or mets a few months after my initial surgery and i've been dealing with liver and lung meds ever since i won the argument with my primary care doc but my prize was cancer sad trombone not nearly as dramatic but apparently scabies literal heck on earth is hard to diagnose i noticed the symptoms pretty quickly and thought my childhood eczema had come back to haunt me when treatment for that only seemed to make it worse i figured out that it had to be scabies all the normal problem areas itchy at night etc the problem was i couldn't get the lotion to treat it without a doctor signing off i went to the doctor and she immediately starts diagnosing me with everything besides scabies while i'm telling her multiple times that it's most definitely scabies i went three four times and the last time i left when she refused to allow me to get the treatment cream and wanted to say i had allergies instead i told her i was not putting up with this torture while she keeps taking my money and misdiagnosing me and she goes well i'm sorry you aren't getting scabies treatment without a doctor's note and i really don't think you have scabies apparently she never heard of amazon i went home ordered permethrin sp 10 off amazon 5 is what's used for treatment mixed it with a thick lotion and crap cleared right up i was so tempted to call her and let her know but she probably would have said one of her earlier attempts at treatment finally worked dude get a new doctor not a doctor but a patient had pancreatitis a few years ago around 2014 always had stomach problems but no idea why until that day two years later in 2016 i had the same terrible pain tried to wait it out for five or so days but broke down and went to the air i said i think i have pancreatitis was treated like a drug seeking alcoholic and i stopped drinking in 2014 because of the pancreatitis doctor tried to tell me it was indigestion when i asked why i was in constant pain even when i haven't eaten in three days was when the doctor completely changed her attitude and pretty much told me we're not going to help you about three months later my lip ace levels were high enough to be considered an attack so i was admitted and was diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis not alcohol related i still think about that doctor and it makes me so angry i wonder if my life could have been a little better if they took me seriously and found it out sooner 2017 has been rough that's super rough i hope you're doing better and that 2018 is a much better year for you i'm not medic but one of my co-workers is his best story once a woman came to hospital to prove herself diagnosed diabetic blood test proved it doctor asked how did she know it she answered that her urine is too sticky and it makes sense high sugar level can affect urine too after hurting my knee and having to ice it all the time i found i kept breaking out in hives after the ice i went to the doctor and told him i thought i had cold induced urticaria allergic to cold my parents scoffed at it the doctor had never had a patient with this so it was dismissed after it kept happening to me i got them to send me to an allergist my parents thought i was crazy until the doctor confirmed my diagnosis and handed my parents information on anaphylaxis but at least now i get a handicapped parking pass in the winter and don't have to shovel the walk i live in canada not a medical professional but i got hand foot and mouth disease back in my senior year of high school i knew it was that because we were working with the virus that causes it in my biotech class doctor told me that there was no way i had it because only children get it and it rarely occurs in the winter so he ordered a couple expensive tests and sure enough i had it by far the most miserable two weeks of my life i got it last year i was 23 doctors denied my claims too since it's so rare in adults they tried telling me i had chickenpox number i was right hfm caught off my kids patient not doc but i was almost as amazed as my pcp when i was right so i'll share my dad had been diagnosed with afib and arrhythmia a year prior he was told that most people are not diagnosed until they have a problem my dad took me and my kids to the science center where they had an exhibit all about the human body there is a section all about the heart they had several things that would monitor your heart rate including a drum that would beat along with your heart when you touched sensors everyone else had nice steady heartbeats show up on all of the little things that they had but mine kept acting funny and so did my dad's the thing was i didn't have any symptoms and i felt perfectly normal so i didn't think that it would actually mean anything it's basically a toy right i told myself i'd feel dumb if i didn't mention it to my doctor in case there was a link when i suggested that i thought i had arrhythmia because a science center gadget didn't pick up my heart rate the same as everybody else my doctor looked at me a little funny but ran the tests sure enough they found it and did a few more tests to establish a baseline for comparison later on in life a fib is scary cause you can have it for years and not even know apple is actually using the built-in heart monitor on the apple watches to run a crapton of medical studies on situations like afib to both help catch it early and monitor it idk if you have an iphone but if you do look into it i went to my doctor because i thought i had appendicitis he agreed and sent me to the hospital they ran tests said i was fine and should go home i refused called my doctor who called them and made them re-run the tests with someone who knew what they were doing they came back to me and had me in surgery within two hours i had a dude come in the air the other night and tell us he thinks he was shot he absolutely nailed that one but in all seriousness it was gsw to the head and the mri was gnarly everyone with the mri question most bullets are composed of non-ferromagnetic material but yes it is a case-by-case call careful consideration of risk benefit is therefore recommended in all patients there is an mri screening done by an on-site rad if one isn't available the screening goes to a telerid facility to okay the go-ahead this is all post ct my stepfather is a doctor and told me two stories one was an older irish woman who correctly predicted that she had a tumor in her left lung roughly the size of a golf ball she has never smoked or done anything that made her a risk but she insisted her very mild cough was the result of a large tumor and demanded to have it checked out she was dead on and claimed she saw a person on tv with the same symptoms and when she fell asleep a dead husband in her dream told her to go to the doctor and her she was the second was a guy who said he felt like he was stabbed and thought something went wrong with his surgery when they removed a cyst from his lung he was half right the surgery went fine but he had a thin strip of metal sheesh cabbage him through the chest because he apparently plopped onto his bed without removing some junk including a large six-inch receipt spike his bandages covered up the new wound in other words it felt like he was stabbed because he was stabbed bonus an old lady told a roomful of very alarmed doctors who thought she was ridden with very dense possibly calcified tumors that they didn't need to worry also those dots are probably from the time a crazy guy shot her with a shotgun when she was 15 but it's okay now because she forgives him as it's god's job to judge you no they had two of the pellets removed as one was sitting on her heart and another was pressing into a blood vein but easy to get to and left the other 25 in weirdest thing my stepfather says is that she made it to 80 years old without ever getting an x-ray of anything but her foot so there wasn't a single word of it mentioned anywhere he apparently plopped onto his bed without removing some junk including a large six-inch receipt spike why why would you put that on your bed not a medical professional but fourth-grade me mid-1990s had a terrible shooting pain in my stomach it got to the point where i couldn't walk the doctor told me on the first visit it was probably a stomach virus and gave me some meds i was staying home from school due to the pain and was watching full house and jesse had to go to the hospital and get his appendix removed i was so freaked out i made my parents take me back to the doctor the next day i was crying and told the doc i think i had appendicitis he did some checks and confirmed it surgery same day after surgery they told me if it waited another few days it would have burst full house may have saved my life i caught whooping cough border telepathosis and literally begged the doctors to run tests weeks and weeks passed and they just told me it wasn't whooping cough but i was catching back-to-back flu cold bronchitis girlfriend also caught it and we again begged them to run tests to which they told us they don't want to because by now they can't treat us anyways so it made no difference i explained that as they told me it was just a cold i'd been going to work for weeks while sick i hate this too but i wanted to keep my job so i went and two colleagues have newborns so it would be good to warn them in case they catch it off me they ran the tests and diagnosed us but such a pain in the butt i watched the episode of grey's anatomy where there was a patient with severe migraines and eric shepard can't figure out where his pain is coming from mark sloane comes in looks at him and shoves a pencil up his nose diagnosing him with a deviated septum for years i had suffered with migraines and headaches and recently stopped breathing fully out of one side of my nose stuck my finger up felt bone went to the doctor a few days later my general doctor didn't believe me i went to an end and told him what i thought was wrong and by golly i was right severely deviated septum had surgery a few weeks later my wife sobi jin was out of the country when she started to go into labor her blood pressure had been high but we were monitoring it in the hospital it was through the roof i looked at her chart researched everything online and told the doctor on call that she has hellp he ignored me said it was fine when the delivery was almost done her blood pressure dropped to nothing a nurse shot her up with something because the doctor was busy eating lunch and she recovered but i will never forget holding my wife's hand thinking that this might be the last time i see her alive when her ob gyn got back to town she confirmed the diagnosis i gave independently we live in a small town the doctor avoids me i can imagine for good reason too i would have a few fists to say to someone who nearly cost me my soul's life on the goddang birthing table once while i was working as an emt we ran a call for a guy who had gotten s faced and fell flat on his face on the sidewalk outside his apartment cutting open his forehead at the hospital he was told he would be breathalyzed to obtain a back and loudly proclaimed i'm feeling 0.308 he promptly blew a 0.308 and the whole a team applauded these are the best kind of drunk people the ones who know how fricked up they truly are my gran was having chest pains and thought she was either having a heart attack or indigestion from a pastrami sandwich so she went to the doctor while she was there her bp was 210 stroke 90 the doctor said that she was obviously having indigestion and that the pain she was having was gas pockets and prescribed her and antacid and a higher dose blood pressure medication than she was already taking she took it and her pressure bottomed out i took her to the hospital and found out she had been having a heart attack for the past two days she died that night i'm still bitter 18 years later the best worst part is no lawyer would take the case against him because she was old and was going to die sooner anyhow but that's still medical malpractice head desks dang lawyers my son came home from iraq with a weird skin lesion that the army doctors diagnosed as psoriasis i didn't buy it i did some research online and suspected it was leishmaniasis an infection transmitted via sand fleas i took him to a private dermatologist and presented my research the dermatologist sent a biasy to the cdc and got the official diagnosis the army still insisted on labeling it a non-specific skin irritation they didn't want to pay for the expensive drug regime i hired a lawyer the army gave in and paid for the treatment sure it cost us about the same to push them into it as if we just paid out of pocket but it was worth it to force them to put the proper diagnosis into my son's records oh man finally a spot to post this story i'm a navy corpsman so i've heard my fair share of interesting stories and self diagnosis from marines this one is probably the only one that has ever truly caught me completely off guard though a young lady comes in and asks me in a low voice if she could talk to me in private before she made her appointment usually that meant one of two things an std check or some sort of feminine concern genitalia symptoms wanting contraception pregnancy so i took her to a quiet semi-isolated area and ask her what's wrong i have worms coming out of my anus and i think i got it from my cat my initial response was okay um what makes you think that she describes the worms and why she thought that for the record her symptoms were an itching and the anus worse at night and she had seen felt little wriggly things when defecating her cat had been diagnosed with worms and slept with them in the bed and her husband was also showing symptoms i take the history as best i can go to my provider explain it to her she is just as confused as i am but says well if she says it's worms let's get a freckle sample and lo she returned two days later with a feckle sample that tested positive i have a couple other stories i'm happy to share but this one was the most off the wall one when i saw got it from my cat i was worried where that story way is going i correctly self-diagnosed a blood clot in my leg i went to the air with excruciating pain in my calf and told the doctor that i suspected a blood clot the doctor assured me that i was young and healthy and i wasn't at risk for a blood clot he diagnosed it as a pulled muscle offered me some painkillers and sent me home fast forward two or three weeks i still had excruciating pain in my calf and i started to develop severe shortness of breath i went to the urgent care clinic this time the doctor at the urgent care clinic immediately suspected a blood clot and sent me to there for some tests the doctor did an ultrasound on my leg declared that i didn't have a blood clot and sent me home the next morning someone from the air called me and sheepishly admitted that they had misread the test the night before and i did in fact have a blood clot it turned out that i had had a blood clot in my leg all along and the clot had broken off and traveled to my lungs thankfully i've made a full recovery despite nearly being killed by the incompetence of multiple doctors very sad case a young woman obsessed with breast exams and mammograms because she just knew something was wrong obviously written off by lots of doctors because the mammograms always came back clean until one day they didn't she was diagnosed stage 3 when someone decided to finally take her seriously two years ago i started having a short sharp pain in my head like i had swallowed ice cream brain freeze every morning when i stood up out of bed and when i stood up after my first morning pee i didn't think much of it it was like this for a month and then started to become more frequent whenever i stood up the head pain gradually started coming out of nowhere like when i laughed or sneezed and lasting longer and longer then one day it came out of nowhere so intense like a freight train in my head i was screaming in agony it was unreal and i thought i would die way beyond a migraine that's when i figured out that literally as soon as i hung my head down the pain would completely go away until i lifted my head back up if i waited with my head down long enough around an hour the pain would be gone for a good while so from then on i started just going upside down or laying down with my head over the couch whenever i felt the pain i also then figured out that taking massive amounts of caffeine made the pain go away the pain was still unreal every time but i had a super easy way of making it go away unfortunately it started to interfere with my work obviously because i have a desk job software developer and i had to take long breaks and hang my head i actually started a new job at this time and on literally my first day i was hit with the pain and my new boss grabbed a trash can for me to throw up in it really became clear i had to do something so i googled head pain when upright or something like that found out about intracranial hypertension and from there chiari malformation i figured out that hanging my head made my brain go back up and give csf some more room to flow in and cushion my brain that's why it helped my husband drove me to the air i said i think i have chiari please do an mri they didn't saw chiari and severe intracranial hypertension got sent to a neurosurgeon and two weeks later i had brain decompression surgery from what i read chiari usually takes five years to be diagnosed it took a year and a half of recovery before the pain mostly went away but it's all good now i'm a nurse but these are me as the patient stories when i was in high school i started feeling very run down it started with a cold then a bad sore throat i started sleeping a lot more and didn't eat as much at that time i was a walking garbage disposal my dad took me to urgent care they did the typical strep test which was negative my dad asked if it could be mono the doctor laughed it off said it was an upper respiratory virus take some tylenol for pain and i can can continue my normal routine week later we're back at urgent care as my condition only got worse i lost 10 pounds and was ridiculously pale for mid-august my dad demanded a mono test and guess what that's what i had the doctor then changed his tune to i need a lot of sleep and fluids frick you doctor hermaine next my first year as a nurse i started feeling off i would forget mid-sentence what i was talking about and entire conversations i started getting too tired i was sleeping 16 hours and that didn't feel like enough i was always freezing cold aside from the normal ohio april and at random intervals my arms would either get numb or get pins and needle feelings got myself a primary care physician went to my appointment i told the woman i'm pretty sure i'm anemic she argued ordered a pregnancy test negative tried prescribing me antidepressants saying that was the issue i got p and demanded blood work to be done my lab work comes back another round of mono and anemia the doctor who called to tell me my results apologized profusely and we had a good laugh about maybe that's why i'm so tired tl dr frick lake health i had a patient coming once because he noticed that morning that he was blind in one eye yup easily confirmed he had lost all sight in one eye gradually over years likely and fifty percent of the vision in the other first eye examination ever my wife suspected based on the hcg levels from her tests versus how far along she was in the pregnancy that she was carrying twins the doctor thought she just tracked her cycle incorrectly even said we were having a singleton during the first ultrasound during the second ultrasound found the second baby were now parents of twins nurses and doctors have read it what is your day never taught this in school moment this one was fun patient and it gets a standard urine drug screen positive for ethanol alcohol patient insists he does not drink alcohol test is repeated positive patient is very upset he does not drink alcohol blood test is drawn it's negative we checked everything we could think of did we have the right urine the right blood it should be impossible to test positive on urine and negative on blood meanwhile i finish his regular urinalysis high white blood cell count and really high glucose elevated white cells means you need to look at it under the microscope because they probably have an infection it's loaded with yeast the man was diabetic obviously and had high glucose sugar in his urine along with a yeast infection of the bladder the yeast was fermenting the glucose to ethanol within his bladder he was the man who peed beer so that's how bud light got started i was in my first year out of family practice residency the specialists like to sneeringly refer to us as jack of all trades master of none i was on call from the air abnormally unshakable the doc was beside himself had a very pre-term mom in active labor and fog wouldn't let us fly her out he was the only a doc and the transferring facility wouldn't take her in transport without a physician on board probably not legal but we needed her to be at a hospital with aniku and l d so they called me in root i was trying to coach her to breath through the contractions but she felt something coming out i looked and saw a foot so we're in the back of an ambulance delivering a footlong breech preemie we delivered about a minute or two hour of the hospital they were expecting a mom in preterm labor not a micro preemie we were met in the ambulance bay by one nurse she took a look at me holding the baby with a blanket and oxygen and said follow me we ran through the hospital to l d and turned on an incubator peds wasn't in-house and the baby's heart rate was low so i proceeded to interpret her that was 12 years ago she survived and is doing great i wrote my program director at 4am that morning when i got back home thanking him for all the training i think i used 100 of my training that night i'm in a lot of preemie support groups and this scenario sadly is very common we need niku stabilizing capability in every hospital moms call an ambulance and the ambulance takes them to a hospital without an eq and a viable baby dies all the time oh my gf walking into a patient's house home health and almost being knocked unconscious by the smell of cat pee the lady housed 25 feral cats but didn't let them outside because she was afraid the coyotes would eat them walked into a trailer house connected to a camper only to see the floor start moving realized it was cockroaches not the actual floor i'm a professional organizer same a patient being treated for hiv purposefully tried exposing staff members to his fluids that was a sobering experience nurse here a very panicked nursing assistant came running to the desk one day saying you have to come see this i don't know what this is the na brought me into a patient's room where she was giving a bath and points to an area on the patient's buttocks what is that i lean in for a closer inspection when the patient starts to turn back around and says is that my eye sure enough i didn't receive and report that my patient had a prosthetic eye which at some point came out of the socket and became suction cup to her buttock i left the room and had never laughed so hard in my life shame it's totally unethical and unlots of other things a pic of that would have been sensational but i mean totally wrong of course nearing completion of an air contrast barium enema on an extremely elderly patient out of nowhere she starts saying call rochester funeral home i'm dead call rochester funeral home i'm dead she repeated it no less than 10 times took care of a young man with a gunshot wound to the abdomen he had many complications he was in the hospital for over a year he had an ostomy bag for a while but when they finally removed it he was so nervous because he hadn't pooped in so long his call light goes off and he says go look in the toilet you are never going to believe this i go in there and there is poop in the toilet his first solid poop i had seen in over a year i walked out and gave him the biggest hug he was so proud of his poop i walked out of his room with tears in my eyes nursing school never prepared me for crying outside of a patient's room because i was so happy they had pooped i really like this one small victories when my mum was fresh out of nursing school in the 80s she got a job at a hospital that had a high concentration of geriatric patients one particularly frail man took out his dentures before sleeping then passed away in the night during her shift his cheeks were so alarmingly sunken in my mum and another nurse tried to put them back in so as not to horrify the family however rigor mortis had already started to set in she said nursing school definitely didn't prep her for that nightmare bro so many things i think one important thing that was never taught is how to deal with a patient dying for the first time i couldn't stop picturing his last breaths the yelling of his family all of it played through over and over hospice is tough but it still is one of my favorite jobs i've ever done oh man i don't know how you did it i have a lot of respect for you my grandma screamed the worst scream i have ever heard in my life when my grandpa died in hospice i'll never be able to get it out of my head i had to leave it was overwhelming i don't think i could deal with that on a daily basis how to put a fake eye back in a patient came in from a not so nice nursing home with a multitude of problems one of which was a disgusting draining fake eye that had to be removed for treatment upon discharge we had to put it back in simple enough we thought but we have no idea how and struggled to figure it out i suppose that is why the nursing home staff never took it out to clean it this was decades ago fake eye technology is probably much better today how to react when a patient's bowels pop out of their incision this happened when i was a brand new nurse but off orientation quite a learning experience but came in handy because a few years later it happened to a different patient and i knew what to do you have to keep the bowels very moist cover with sterile gauze and patient is rushed to the ore one of my favorite patients at the emergency vet little spaniel chewed out her spay incision and her owners found her playing dragging her intestines through the leaves brought her and wrapped in a garbage bag a whole team of us spent a long time in surgery just rinsing it all off she got a ton of antibiotics and did great when i was a student i accidentally degloved a patient from the elbow down they were incredibly sick probably already brain dead and had one of the worst case of 10 toxic epidermal necrolysis i've ever seen anyway i'm in there holding this lady's inside-out arm skin like an idiot with the family standing in the corner horrified and i just froze my first thought was to kind of slide it back on but thankfully one of the senior nurses rescued me and snipped that crap off women will pee and poop during labor ribs crack during cpr and it feels really weird there is a market for amoxicillin amongst iv drug users according to my patients it's very common for somebody else to put c in their urine and fentanyl as a sexually transmitted drug respiratory therapist here how to act when we unplug the ventilator to let go a patient especially when the family is around to their defense they do want us it's going to happen but it's never until you actually do it that you realize the weight i like to talk to my patients even if most are already brain dead at this point although i did have to unplug conscious patients that was hardcore to say the least this gives me a sense that at least if even a small part of their consciousness is still alive at this point they know they're not alone i tell myself that at least from now on they won't be suffering anymore l d nurse the other day i had to give a steroid injection to a 27 week pregnant woman who was going into sepsis here's the thing the steroids would develop her baby's lungs in the event she needed to be delivered but they could also make her much more sick definitely the most intense shot i've given in my life last i heard she was doing better and still pregnant thankfully student nurse here how to hide looks of shock when something very surprising or awkward occurs i remember one time a doctor grabbed me when i was in the hall to hold something for him while he was putting a patient's prolapsed rectum back in awkward digital disimpaction i can only imagine the partnering instructions for that no one poop for two weeks then come to class and buckle up the dead people can still fart middle of the night all alone with the body and you hear that scared the heck out of me i was cleaning a recently deceased client once and her arm twitched whilst she moaned frightened the life out of me they never really tell you how to cope with being berated by family members patients and even co-workers as part of being a nurse means that you realize you are dealing with people at their most vulnerable at the worst time in their lives and you know this in the back of your head but being an emotional and sometimes physical punching bag for days at a time requires a certain mental toughness that you can never really prepare for had to comment because this is so true and a good explanation of why the burnout rates for nursing medicine is so high how to sit in bed and hold your patient as she profusely vomits and delivers her 16 week old dead fetus yes they teach you that compassion and empathy are the backbone of nursing but absolutely nothing can prepare you for this type of situation i heard this story from a slp always keep a clear exit she was working with a stroke survivor set her at the workspace and walked around to the back of the table with her back against the wall and facing the door suddenly the little lady says i know who you are you're the lady who has been sleeping with my husband suddenly this lady has lunged across the table and is legitimately trying to kill the slp luckily lots of other people came when she screamed code blue she couldn't think of anything else at the moment but i mean code blue works even though that really should have been a code grey all those things you encourage your patients to do eat well exercise get enough sleep etc also apply to you i know too many nurses who don't take care of themselves mentally physically or emotionally in a very draining environment self-care is incredibly important and sometimes we'll lose sight of ourselves and trying to take care of others but we're of no use to anyone if we're running ourselves ragged from former boss how someone looks at you when he tests positive for hiv after his wife died of aids because you were her doctor and you treated her for years you were also his doctor you knew she hadn't told him and you knew that she was still having unprotected sex with him wtf on behalf of my husband no one tells you how many low-income women will go to the air complain of abdominal pain go through an exam and have different tests ordered because they can't afford a home pregnancy test not only this but women who know they're pregnant do this because it's the only way for the health of the baby to be checked what to say to a family watching you code a patient for 15 minutes and pink frothy sputum is exploding out of their e.t tube while you're doing compressions i was never taught about sun down syndrome until i was working with the elderly in a hospital setting as a student nurse i had the sweetest elderly patient in my care until about 4 pm that day he suddenly became possessed he started screaming and hallucinating and was not the man i had been providing care for earlier i was so befuddled when the nurse i was shadowing told me he had sundowners and explained it to me now it's your turn to explain it to us please number one most memorable cardiac massage for 10 straight minutes while a guy was bleeding to death from multiple gunshot wounds had to stick my fist up though someone's left lung to locate the heart and to directly give them cpr literally pumping this dude's heart so it can keep circulating blood felt like i was doing a fatality move in mortal combat it was surprisingly small and very squishy they never teach you to expect the unexpected i got floated to the aiku on a slow day they immediately gave me a patient who was violently hemorrhaging out of his mouth while all of family was inside freaking out with me he died an hour later had two different patients coming with thighs big kitchen knives deeply embedded in an eye socket they were both awake and talking enema parties are a thing inflatable penis implant surgery is pretty shocking but also amazing opening up a tumor cyst to find fully grown teeth and hair inside of it the day a patient exploded in surgery and it splattered the entire or team and room with this brown fluid there's an alarming number of nurses and doctors who don't know what the frick they are doing i've learned so much more but those are what i can immediately recall wait wait wait i'm gonna need your to elaborate on the exploding person so many things here's what i can't think of off the top of my head one sugar is used to put someone's prolapsed rectum back in sprinkle it on and let it sit drawing some of the liquid out of the tissues of the rectum and just kind of push it back in that was fun on the job training two how to put someone into a body bag with dignity especially if they're tall and or in an awkward position three fernie's gangrene one day i was actually precepting a patient care tech when i was a nurse in the year and had a patient ask me to help him dress his wound this was not why he was in the hospital thinking this would be a great teaching moment i called my tekken to learn how to do some wound care she learned that day how to maintain an excellent poker face 4. never block your own exit out of a room with an actively psychotic patient 5. how to comfort an inconsolable baby using a combination of low shushing in their rear a somewhat aggressive swaying motion and some humming six how to interact with patients and their family members on sometimes the worst days of their life how to hold someone's hand when they've just gotten terrible news about their own or their loved one's prognosis how to celebrate the often few and far between wonderful news we get to tell patients and then how to leave that room where you may have just told a family their loved one is dead collect yourself and go into another room with another patient and care for them like it's just another day nursing is a profession where you have the sacred honor and ability to be there for people on the best and worst days of their life to be able to hold a life that is merely seconds old and hold the hand of someone during their last seconds on earth that's not something that you can be taught in school patients having sex and or shooting up in the bathrooms people coming in oh deed and then bouncing out the door as soon as they are conscious to come in odd again a day or two later then repeating the cycle every week or two but somehow never dying patients who fake symptoms to get admitted for attention or to get a day off work or get hopped up on goofballs or whatever thing they're after delirious old ladies telling me to get out of their living room or they will shoot me any kind of self-harm patients coming in next to dead because they've been neglected in the prison system if you have a patient in labor or in any painful procedure who wants to hold your hand only let them hold two fingers they can't squeeze them too hard and break the bones they still get the comfort of human touch i've had patience and labor pinch me pull on my clothes and squeeze my two fingers as hard as possible some are just panicked but some seem to be angry and want to hurt someone i calmly ask them to stop with the pinching or pulling on my clothes because that isn't helping them these are often people who have refused an epidural because they are afraid of needles and i understand that i just am not going to be black and blue i always teach the new nurses or students the two-finger trick this reminds me several years back had a couple in for delivery asked what method of pain control they preferred they looked at each other giggle then he said she bites me i asked for clarification and apparently during her first two deliveries when the contraction pain became unbearable she would take his hand and literally bite the freaking crap out of his knuckle they were both hip to this plan and oddly proud of it fast forward a couple hours and labour is getting well advanced i look up from a vaginal exam in time to see her clamp her teeth on his kalas knuckle she appeared to be biting with full pressure he made a bit of a face but not a sound and thus we ushered their youngest into the world contraction would start she'd take a lung full of air and push to the count of 10 while biting the heck out of her man it worked for them so who am i to judge but it made me somewhat uncomfortable that two fingers idea is smart i was working with this tiny girl that was in pain from stretching muscles and i had her squeeze my hands to help with the pain i assumed that since she was so little it wouldn't hurt but then she could squeeze it really put into perspective how much pain she was in from what seemed like a simple stretch book world and real life nurse world is completely different i'll play along they never teach you that your psychotic dementia patients will try to hit you they don't teach you how to react or don't to a patient or family member or physician yelling at you they also don't cover how to handle your mostly non-verbal elderly male patient inviting you to hop on and take a ride yes he meant his penis as a sonographer i have to keep a poker face a lot of times when i am seeing something very alarming or sad on the screen luckily most people have no idea what i am looking at so that's a plus i'm not allowed to give any results to patients doctors deliver the bad news so i have to stay neutral it's really hard had a patient with horrendous teeth m user couple of teeth fell out during intubation so they sent him up with them in a denture cup that was a real awkward conversation when he woke up anytime there's something up the butt that time 100 year old grandma broke her hip falling out of bed but not her bed on a more serious note the your loved one is dead phone calls this is usually done by the doctors as i feel it should be but sometimes nurses do it rn here for me the most surprising thing has been seeing firsthand how peaceful it is for a patient to be able to choose when and how they will die i was present for the first medical assisted suicide on my unit the patient had his loved ones surrounding him and we all watched as he said goodbye and shortly after took his last breath in my area of nursing patients get better and go home i always viewed my work as a means to make people better it has taken me a while to process his decision it was beautiful and peaceful and really made me look at nursing in a different way i care for people to help them live but for this man i was able to support him through death emt here sorry to intrude they teach you how to handle death they tell you you're going to have dead patients you're going to see the ugly side of death that doctors and nurses don't have to see because when they get the patient most of the ugly is handled by you so we need thick skin but when you have to hold the hand of a kid less than 10 years old who says i don't want to die and next watch him slide into a no waking up sleep it's freaking life-changing freak me i didn't want to cry tonight enough for a did for today i hope you're getting therapy or something that's some heavy crap to carry sexually harassed by an elderly patient the guy is 80 and frail was i grossed out yes was i threatened number but they don't teach us how to respond to impotent harassments from hospitalized patients do i get a new doctor for him what if that doctor is a woman too should i put up with it i treat rude abusive buttholes every day why would this be any different still trying to figure out what i should do this they don't teach you how to deal with sexual harassments from patients and it happened so much they also don't tell you that if a patient physically assaults you there's really not much you can do apparently pressing charges on a patient is tricky if you hit me in the air because you are drunk i can't do anything about it yet if it happens at a bar you can get arrested as a nurse's aide we are just supposed to say i'll get the nurse for you when you get a real stumper but when a dying patient or their family member cries to you they don't want to die you can't get someone else to help them you have to find the exact words to find in the middle of serving dinner and five cool bells ringing off your hip probably the hardest situation in palliative work my mother was a nurse who cared for elderly patients in a very rural part of england here's a few her favorite stories one was a lady who decided to help clean the windows she used the food from her dinner as soap and napkins there was a fun mess to clean up another was three gentlemen who spent the night calling out for their wives one was named edie one was named emma the other was named ellsbert she said that was one of the longest shifts ever finally she said most of the elderly men were completely clueless when it came to ordering their dinners they would always say something along the lines of that's my wife's job she used to just order them the basic meat and two veg option and rarely got complaints whatever your grandad would like usually was the safest bet my grandfather was a farmer they never teach nurses how to express manage expressions in unexpected or poor situations i personally have no trouble hiding everything but watching people around me and the people patience themselves tend to ask me what's wrong with that nurse doctor me being able to keep such a straight relaxed face and expression helps everyone around normally being able to explain something bad without a panic expression is an invaluable skill which can definitely be learnt taught though nothing can prepare you for some situations i can say i can't remain relaxed with i see a high risk person self remove the trash tube when your patient has a crap the size and shape of a football stuck in their butt and you have to use your finger to delicately scoop it out when the doctor comes along and tells your patient they are dying of cancer then walks away and leaves you to pick up the pieces when your patient is 90 years old has dementia diabetes cancer and comes to hospital with pneumonia they are 30 kilograms soaking wet nothing but a bag of bones who doesn't recognize themselves in the mirror yet their family insists they are for cpr omg that last one is the saddest thing doctors and nurses offered it what was the craziest example of someone stupidly making their condition worse had a patient come in and had accidentally stuck a chainsaw in his leg the day before he managed to cut the fibula i think and partially cut the tibia he put some diesel on it and wrapped it in duct tape and kept working the next day he steps off something and it snaps the rest of the way through came in the front door with his leg flopping bending whereas shouldn't be and to top it off he rated his pain at six stroke ten tough old man we admitted him to ortho to clean out the diesel and necrotic flesh the six stroke ten part made me laugh honestly i can't decide whether to believe him or not surgical nurse here had a patient return to the or who had some hardware plates and screws put in their elbow for a fracture or the hardware was causing them discomfort so instead of talking to her surgeon they decided to try and remove one of the shoes with a knife and screwdriver i got the case for the wound clean up and replacement of said exposed screw one of the strangest ones i've had yet i saw this young guy in the year once who had gotten into a drunken brawl with some guys at a bar when he woke up the next morning he started getting some vision changes he said that it was like a black sheet coming down on his left eye this is a textbook symptom for retinal detachment picture an incredibly thin delicate membrane on the back of the eye slowly peeling off because of trauma it's an emergency in ophthalmology because if it fully detaches you get permanent vision loss you basically need to immediately go for surgical repair and then be extremely careful with that eye for weeks afterward you even have to keep your head down most of the time for the next couple days to help the reattachment process take so naturally this guy goes and rides roller coasters all day at the local theme park with his buddies he first presented to our two days later with permanent vision loss in that eye six flags was not worth it poor guy they should stamp no carnival rides in indelible ink on such a patient's forehead it should last as long as need be male patient was in for dehydration and other very routine issues he had an indwelling catheter placed now an odd thing about some men is that they cannot wrap their minds around not standing up to pee so even though he couldn't feel any urge to urinate he stood up to pee felt the catheter forgot why it was there and promptly ripped it out now he's incontinent another patient was in recovering from surgery i think it was knee ankle something that required to use a walker while recovering she decided not to do that and test her leg she fell onto the tile floor and broke her hip my wife nurse has seen on more than one occasion a person on oxygen for emphysema blow themselves up with a cigarette she said sometimes it's funny like quality coyote funny and they're not injured but sometimes the injuries are quite severe my 84 year old grandma did this last fall i thank god and every other power that she was mostly fine first degree and mild second-degree burns especially in and around her nostrils and some bad memories to have nightmares about complete with a big black burn on the hardwood floor to remind her had a patient with stage zero breast cancer decided not to get the lump taken out and instead pursue traditional chinese medicine came back a couple years later with metastatic breast cancer everywhere another patient treated her breast cancer with coffee enemas spoiler alert it didn't work a woman who i was taking care of in labor was having heartburn and she was sucking on a quickies to get rid of it however she was also sucking on the gas and air at the same time for pain relief and she sucked so hard that she choked on the cookies and we had to call a code blue because she couldn't cough it back up we eventually sorted her out and she was okay and went back to laboring she did literally exactly the same thing 10 minutes later had to call a code again this was one of the times i really wanted to be able to tell a person that they couldn't take their baby home because they were too stupid to be allowed to have children i was a nurse for 20 years but this is a story about my husband the man has a very high pain tolerance and is always hungry so one day when i met him for lunch i was worried when he wouldn't eat and said his lower abdomen hurt i talked to her doctor friend and husband was sent for an immediate ct scan husband was sent home to wait for the results so being him felt better and ate two chili dogs with fritus of course when the doc called and told him to get to the hospital now because his appendix was about to rupture husband had to be kept in a holding pattern for 12 hours because he'd eaten a big meal i may have shouted at husband a little bit that day i am in awe i've seen my cousin screaming for mercy and or quick painless death when his appendix got infected shouting was well deserved i have a patient with autism whose mum tells him she can heal him with crystals and he has a demon inside him whenever she tries to visit him it's messed him up so much he makes himself vomit so she leaves it's super effective also patients who let their dogs lick wounds like ulcers because they think it'll make it heal quicker it does not i used to work at an oral surgeon's office a patient came in needing a tooth pulled and bc the root was near the jaw they needed to remove it under anesthesia the patient did not want to pay for the anesthesia 350 so he decided to try and take it out on his own he used plaster ended up breaking his jaw we had to go and fix his jaw and wire his mouth shut ended up costing him nine thousand dollars instead of five hundred dollars doctors have to treat you of you don't have money dentists don't teeth are apparently not part of your body obligatory not a doctor i'm an optician and optometrist and so many semi-blind people refuse to get glasses because they don't want to spoil their eyes they come back six months later with migraines and complain about not being able to drive in the dark or read and get angry because their eyesight is not getting better although they're always training their eyes it doesn't work like that nurse here the condition was not worsened by the patient himself but his choice of life partner certainly did not help a patient what utterly ravaged by advanced cancer several doctors have told him and his wife that his condition is terminal patients seemed to understand when he was lucid wife said she understood as well he was in hospice for comfort one night he had trouble breathing as the dying tend to do wife called 9-1-1 against patients wishes thus began a three-week pointless and painful painful ordeal that involved life support dialysis at least one round of cpr on a man whose bones were riddled with metastasis and diarrhea wife was adamant that he will get better through holistic medicine on top of being a denial she was dumber than dirt she filled the intensive care room with all sorts of new age shots like inspirational pictures and rocks she even refused pain medicine because it would like dim his chakras wife left a crystal geode on the bed crystal worked its way underneath patient's hip patient developed a raging bed saw that never closed was nearly always soaked in faces and was a beater dress on a patient who wanted to die and was in already excruciating pain this was years ago still i can honestly say i hate that woman the healing crystal pressure saw threw me over the edge poor guy patient here i got an itch in my eye one night and figured my contact had dried out i went to remove it but the dang thing was stuck on my eye so i started pinching hard trying to get it off and then my vision went all wacky and my eyes started to really hurt gave up and went to the air cause i couldn't see turns out my contact had fallen out before the whole process started and i'd been scratching the crap out of my eyeball had to wear an eye patch and put in some very unpleasant drops for a week or two oops i had a client with a stroke who received tens treatment in rehabilitation really low electric impulse to stimulate muscles and nerves after rehabilitation he was offered to get one of the things for home use completely free of charge costs he refuses because filling out the paper one page was too much work he decided to just use what he had at home and tried using a transformator transistor for this therapy that completely destroyed the small amount of nerve function we had archived in rehabilitation and screwed up his condition a lot do not try this this hurts a lot when i was on medicine wards in med school we had a patient with a zinc as diverticulum it's essentially a weak spot as his esophagus kinda makes an out pouching where food and liquid gets stuck he can then regurgitate the food and aspirate leading to pneumonia and other bad stuff we were the primary team and serg was going to take him back to the ore on friday thursday night he eloped and no one knew where he went he came back monday to the ed and got readmitted when we asked where he went he said there was a big food festival that weekend that he didn't want to miss so he went instead of getting the surgery he needed he left to go eat fatty and thick fried foods which literally could have killed him my mom's current bf has oral and throat cancer guy literally has a stoma and no tongue was still smoking around three packs a day until recently mill got diagnosed w stage three lung cancer quit smoking and drinking for a couple of months as soon as doctor said her condition was improving she went straight back to smoking and partying only took a few months for the cancer to get to stage four and spread to her liver kidneys and brain she smoked up until a couple days before she died and even then only because the brain cancer caused her to lose control of her limbs and she physically couldn't hold a cigarette anymore it was so sad to watch i'm incredibly proud of my husband though he quit smoking with her to help support her and never started again even after she did said he never wants our girls to have to go through that with him not a doctor but i had a stress fracture in my foot that had to be surgically corrected i was given a 60-day supply of vicodin but my now ex-husband was a recovering alcoholic who had me convinced that i was going to become horribly addicted if i took them for more than a couple days so i began taking a leave because it was stronger than tylenol and i only had to take one a day my foot was very slow to heal like a couple months go by instead of the usual six weeks i had to get a ct scan and i was very worried because this small little fracture just wasn't healing my doctor asked what i was doing for pain and i told him about the aleve turns out nsaids interfere with bone healing i cut out the aleve and my foot healed a few weeks later your ex obviously produced a peer-reviewed study researching word comp adjuster here had a claim and completely disappear after a surgery was ordered fast forward two years and he gets an attorney who demands the surgery be approved now after months of back and forth we approve the wrist surgery two days post-op the police find him walking down a county road blasted out of his mind on him ripping out his stitches apparently he went on a rim binge and just tore apart his surgical site doctor dropped him his attorney dropped him the state basically closed his case the last i heard was he got out of jail grabbed all his meds from home and disappeared again but never followed up with the doctor i cringe to think what his arm looks like md here had a patient who was found unconscious and taken to our hospital turns out he was diabetic unbeknownst to him and went into a coma we got him straightened out and sent him home with insulin fast forward a week or two and he comes into the air for vomiting dehydration and blurred vision he hadn't been taking his insulin since only really sick people need insulin well he's technically right we see a lot of people who get a common rash like eczema or some other unspecified dermatitis who very sadly convince themselves that they have bugs or worms or other creatures in their skin they dig at their skin pour bleach on themselves several times a day or even cut themselves into the skin to try to dig these non-existent parasites out in doing so they hurt sting itch and suffer more some isolate themselves from family and friends fearing they'll spread a non-existent infestation it's sad not a doctor but my sister and i go christmas shopping she's newly pregnant i can tell she's in pain and it's getting worse she claims it's just gas she thinks all stomach pain is gas i offer to take both carts to check out while she sits for a bit at this point she's vomiting i'm pretty worried and tell her i think we need to go to the hospital she insisted it was gas and she had a doctor's appointment the next day so she'd mention it next day she has ultrasound before ob appointment five minutes and she calls me and says she doesn't know what's happening but they told her to get dressed and not to move she hears them call an ambulance ruptured ectopic pregnancy with internal bleeding she's fine though ended up pregnant again two months later with my nephew but she still doesn't learn after weeks of her sick and looking like death i convinced her to go to her doctor last week she has pneumonia she was probably in denial about losing her baby glad she got pregnant again but i'm sure she still feels that loss but also she does just sound kind of stupid about her own health you don't just miss pneumonia homeless man came in the air with a small cut on his scalp doc stitched it up but he went back to sleeping in the gutter never came back for his checkup a week later six months later he showed up with an entire colony of maggots living under his scalp no uh nurse here had a patient with a relatively treatable cancer failed to tell us about a herbal cure that his son bought for 300 a bottle he was taking it while getting chemotherapy he wound up basically shutting down his liver and kidneys hospitalized for weeks and delaying treatment ca the cancer spread system to weaken to resume treatment he's dead and all because of the snake oil cure sad that families spend hundreds to thousands of dollars out of desperation and wind up causing more harm death but holes that promote these cures for profit need to be sued not stupid but just plain confused grandpa admitted for pelvic distension pyelonephritis and ut secondary to urinary retention a urologist places a foley catheter in to relieve his bladder and drains three gallons of urine in one sitting grandpa gets a good day's rest and all goes well until one night we find him standing butt naked in the middle of his room with his penis using a pool of blood at his feet in the catheter with the balloon still inflated clutched in his fist but he had a very calm what are you all looking at expression as we reacted in horror his nurse quickly calls the urologist again and he places another foley catheter with orders for continuous irrigation and to transfuse a unit of blood kept him longer in the hospital than he really needed to be nope stop my penis is now a raisin i'm an animal nurse vet tech and had a chihuahua coming that had been limping the owners had been giving him ibuprofen inside of pieces of chocolate it was certainly a self-inflicted condition old guy in for rehab after some kind of orthopedic surgery taking warfarin for dvt prophylaxis his inr a clotting time test basically was coming back out of whack time after time despite dose adjustments and nobody could really figure it out went in his room on some routine task and saw a large pill bottle on the dresser turned out to be an herbal supplement containing among other things garlic ginger and if i recall correctly ginseng all of which interact with warfarin to make it more effective guys wife took pills home guy lectured on please run even otc meds passed your doctor cause you absolutely did this to yourself labs normalized geez i have to stay away from herbal teas because of warfarin what an idiot contact lens wearers please do yourself a favor and take out your contacts when you're told to i had a patient who came in and she thought she scratched her eye taking her contact out when we looked she had a gigantic ulcer on her eye yes like a canker saw that you get on your mouth can be on your eye ulcers if deep enough will eventually scar depending on where the ulcer develops will determine if there is any long-term damage done i would say if the ulcer was about 0.5 mm to the left the patient would have lost some of her central vision she already had five ulcer scars in that eye and eight ulcer scars in the other this was not her first rodeo turns out she sleeps in her contacts every night and throws them out about once every three months to save money a year supply of her monthly contacts was 120 that one office visit alone was about one hundred dollars plus about two hundred dollars for a tiny bottle of medication to treat the ulcer not to mention a copay for her follow-up visits of course she has no backup glasses and obviously can't wear the contacts with an ulcer so she also had to pay to get a quick pair of glasses made about another 400 setback contact lens where time is not set to make more money for the idocs your eye will literally develop a sore to tell you that it needs to breathe please help out your eyes i don't know how anyone can sleep in their contacts it feels like when you wake up and your mouth is so dry not even the tears of jesus would quench your thirst except it's your eyeballs i had a little old lady come in complaining of coughing up blood she was spitting up huge clots of blood every few minutes and had pain in her throat i asked her if she had done anything for the pain she told me well i smoked some crack i asked her if she normally smokes crack she said no i'm a drinker but i thought it might help moral of the story crack will not help you with anything iq nurse took care of an 18 year old who got into a fight with his mom about not letting him borrow the car that night he got so mad he rammed his head into a wall giving himself a brain bleed he woke up out of surgery and his mom had to prompt him to acknowledge the neurosurgeon who saved his life all he said was appreciate it i caught him taking pictures throwing up gang signs in his craniotomy cap just so dumb not a doctor or nurse but my sister was diagnosed with acute hemorrhagic pancreatitis when she was 16 causes crappy genes she cannot eat anything with fats when she was discharged after an almost one year stay in the hospital she sneakily ate a small chunk of fried pork goddamn we were immediately thrown back to square one thankful that miracles happened twice nursing student here female patient had an indwelling catheter to help void her urine she had fluid overload from heart failure i was at the nursing station giving my co-signed nurse a report when i saw my patient walk up to us and start speaking to us in greek it took me about two seconds to realize that she didn't have her walker with her another two seconds to notice she didn't have her catheter with her either i walked her back to bed and saw the catheter attached to her bed post with the balloon still fully inflated i'm going to go wash my brain out with soap now and maybe sit on an ice pack or two my bits hurt just reading that it you just have to keep reading in order to purge the previous stories that made you recoil eventually you'll get to a point where you come to a story that doesn't make you flinch as much as the others quit then thanks for the checkpoint i'm getting out of here not a doctor or a nurse just the niece of a man that after having a surgery performed on his gut and being told not to eat anything for the next 24 hours decided to get chili cheese fries at wendy's on his way home from the hospital he went right back and his condition worsened also my fiance's mother is a nurse and told us that a man came in once with a tiny guy to sneak up his urethra it had been there for weeks before he came in because he was too embarrassed to admit he let the snake go exploring on purpose before it got stuck and died inside of him so he promptly died of septicemia i have had enough of this thread i had a patient the other day come in totally altered with the blood pressure of like 73 stroke 45 turns out he took his blood pressure at home and seeing that it was elevated decided to take his blood pressure medications the thing is he had never taken these medications before one being prescribed in 2016 and the other in 2017 by different physicians who didn't know about the other prescription after we got his pressure up and he started talking since he started complaining of a terrible headache i told him well yeah you have a headache you just under perfused your brain for who knows how long you should be thankful you don't have brain damage moral of the story always tell your physician all the medications you are prescribed whether you take them or not woman came in the order to get her foot amputated she got into the ore and cancelled the procedure because the walls were green rn take my advice if you are a fragile diabetic with end-stage renal disease don't do c just don't mid-twenties female with a less than stellar outcome she died i spent literally years putting her into aiku because of her own crappy decisions she was a frequent flyer in maya so it was only a matter of time until she put herself into a hearse i mean i feel doing c is unhealthy regardless of whether you're diabetic or not but yeah no don't do that he had chest pain so he took some see he may or may not have been having a heart attack before he did the coke but he was definitely having one by the time i saw him c puts a lot of stress on the heart and can cause heart attacks even in healthy people this guy ended up okay but he either gave himself a heart attack or he turned a small heart attack into a much bigger one even when i was in active addiction i never used c because i heard it could cause your heart to explode in hindsight it was probably a good thing i never did coke and also got sober because i found out shortly after that i have a congenital heart defect and had spent most of my life in heart failure i don't consider this all that crazy but it happens a lot so i want to warn people against it i used to work in the ed and would occasionally see patients who had had a bad fall several days prior and had hit their head rather than go to the ed immediately they usually choose to treat their ensuing headaches with a painkiller the older generation seem to prefer aspirin the thing about aspirin is that it is a blood thinner so what would have potentially been a small concussion was then a life-threatening and often life-altering condition don't treat pain with aspirin recently had a patient with diabetic neuropathy numbness tingling pain in your feet because unchecked diabetes ruins your nerves with time pour hot honey all over his feet because he thought it would help he ended up having third degree burns all over his feet requiring multiple skin grafts needless to say he still has neuropathy 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

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Keywords: doctors, medical, hospital, doctor stories, medical stories, doctors reddit, reddit doctors stupidest patients, reddit doctors worst stories, #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 reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2021, sub, memes, updoot everything, updoot reddit, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: VZ6_h6oqrKo

Length: 192min 3sec (11523 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021