"Why didn't you come in sooner" moments r/AskReddit Reddit Stories | Top Posts

doctors and nurses have predict what have been your why didn't you come and sooner moments had a patient brought in by her son who took care of her when she arrived to our unit i performed a skin assessment took off her socks and found a fallen off gangrenous toe seems fake and i wish this was but it was by far the nastiest thing i've witnessed son said he had no idea when his mother's foot became that bad no words i hate this because half the time the family is trying their best and simply overwhelmed with the level of care their family requires then sometimes they visit mama once a day and say you're good and act like they're infallible i had a patient come and saying he couldn't see how long had it been going on for five days the man had been blind for five days and didn't come in because he thought it might be like a cold or something during the exam when i asked him to move his legs he said oh i can't do that question mark como i asked how long he'd been unable to move his legs or walk wife chimes in about two years never saw a doctor about it they just borrowed a friend's wheelchair and kept it rolling turned out he'd had multiple strokes with multiple risk factors he never addressed given how little insight he appeared to have into the condition i honestly felt sorry he didn't have insurance so i'm sure that played a role in him avoiding seeing anyone a and edd doctor here a farmer in his 70s reluctantly came in with his wife after falling over outside while wrangling a sheep one week earlier he did not want to be there but had been forced to come by his wife who was worried about him on questioning examining he was pale short of breath and clearly in pain all over the right side of his chest but not wanting to show it x-ray and blood showed he'd broken loads of ribs punctured his lung and bled profusely into his chest and was now very anemic i'm a resident doctor working in a heavily agricultural part of my country i've learned to become extremely concerned whenever i see a farmer especially during harvest season since being near death is usually the one thing that will convince them to come in my dad while not a farmer goes to help the in-laws at their farm every lambing season last year he came home after being down there for three weeks and said four days in one of the youth gave him a big stomp on the foot because he was trying to turn the lamb he stayed the extra two weeks and a bit drove five hours home hobbled into work as a carer and then took the guy he was caring for to a doctor's checkup doc sees him limping so checks out the guy then asks dad what happened he called dad's boss and told her to arrange cover and send someone to collect guy who was being cared for and called the ambulance out gets to hospital and they send him for an x-ray eight of those tiny bones were broken and the bruising still looked bad he ended up in a surgical boot for three months because three of the broken bones were in his toes story from myself who is a nurse young man was brought into the er he had a sinus infection that he had let go to the point that it had beaten through the skull and into this brain she was told that it had started several months before he didn't want to go to the doctor for it all it would have needed was 10 days of antibiotic pills instead he was not brought in until he was unconscious and died within a few hours children's nurse here my first week in pediatric ed we had a young girl six stroke seven come in with a really swollen jaw face poor girl was unable to move her jaw without intense pain and hadn't been able to eat for several days turns out she had only just started cleaning her teeth for the first time ever and managed to develop several abscesses and rotten teeth in the process to make it worse so mum told us she was recovering from the same procedures to remove most of her teeth because of almost the same thing they didn't want to bother the gp as they thought she was just messing about to get out of school not a nurse doctor but a lab scientist had a guy come in at the end of the day for chest pain that's been bothering him all weekend the ed dock ordered a troponin blood test which helps rule in out heart attacks if the test runs above zero zero three we consider that a sign for a heart attack and act accordingly this guy's very first drop in in was twenty one zero zero twenty one the highest we've ever had up till then was an eight zero zero the guy should have been dead ages ago but he somehow pulled through don't ignore chest pains people edit just wanna clarify that the hospital i work for is a tiny ass 25 bed rural community critical care hospital definitely not a place with dedicated cardiologists cath lab bedside assays or even a big test menu period bear basics and the guy did somehow end up surviving my girlfriend is a care worker and she recently told me that she slipped off a patient slippers and remarked i didn't know you had lost your toes to which the patient responded well i had until you took the slipper off dear sounds like something from a grim sketch show god bless anyone who can do jobs like that i used to work on a burn unit we cared for burns but also other major skin issues including frost bite there were plenty of times when patients fingers or toes would come off while i was changing the dressings you never quite get used to that my dad is the one that wouldn't go in he got a sore in the crease on the bottom of his second toe the one next to the big toe so it would be the piggy that stayed home and just kept ignoring it he would go with his wife to her nail place and have his toenails trimmed and i think that's where the infection probably got in when they soaked his feet he blew it off for a couple of weeks until the wife made him see the doc it's a good thing she did the infection had gotten into the bone so they had to snip his toe off to the first knuckle to catch it before it went any further the doc said had he waited any longer he could have lost the entire foot he's lucky to just have a stubby piggy and not a stubby leg not a doctor or nurse but worked as a doctor's office assistant a regular patient who was very sweet but unfortunately had an ongoing battle with alcoholism was brought in by his roommate and i knew instantly that he would be dead soon i'd seen some jaundiced humans in my time there but this man was a yellow i never knew was possible his roommate said through tears i've been telling him to come in for weeks and the patient kept telling rumors to relax that he was fine majorly in denial i helped him to the exam room and when the doctor entered the room he immediately asked me to go call an ambulance a few weeks earlier wouldn't have helped but perhaps the end could have been made a bit easier for him he died seven days later in the hospital hit me very hard because i'd known the guy for a few years sometimes he would be sober when he called and sometimes he would be slurring and completely incoherent but he was always kind maggots whenever it's gotten to the point of maggots it's like 100 alarm bells that this person's living situation is no bueno maggots in the abdominal genital skin folds of a morbidly obese woman who refused to let her daughter take her to the doctor until the smell was so bad the neighbors complained saddest grossest patient issue i ever saw and she was impatient for weeks with q4 dressing changes that needed at least four people to assist awful for her awful for us i've seen a few over the years and they generally fall into the category of if it's not diagnosed then i can't have it or i didn't think it was that bad as a medical student i remember an older lady that had a breast that was necrotic and falling off it had been progressing over the last several years but if she didn't get diagnosed with breast cancer then she couldn't have it in the other category i've seen a few cases of fernie's gangrene pretty much obese male diabetics that had a pimple saw that started in the pubic region by the time they come to the hospital it's a raging infection where the treatment is basically to cut away everything in the pubic groin region down to the muscle layer that little saw didn't seem like much at first i was working as a surgical junior when my team was called down to andy to see a patient who had come in with a complication from a recent hernia operation when we came down we saw that the patient was holding a plastic bag over their abdomen when this was removed we found that their wound had opened and their intestine was visible to the air it transpired that this was not something that had happened overnight it had taken several days the patient had started using plastic bags and newspaper to dress the wound when they ran out of dressings we once had a patient who went to emergency for abdominal pain and they discovered a fungating breast wound don't image such that that she'd had for two years and hadn't gotten medical attention for a biose and a pet scan later she was diagnosed with breast cancer with extensive liver lung and bone meds this was also in australia so it wasn't a money issue just sad if you hadn't put on google search that i probably wouldn't have and went on my merry way reading f kedup stories but now i just had to google it disgusting holy geez oh so many stories here we can start with a gentleman in his 70s who was diagnosed with diabetes his doctor had instructed him that it's important for him to wear socks and supportive shoes throughout the day so this guy decides that men wear the same pair of socks four weeks and never take them off he had showered slept and carried on in the same pair of socks for weeks he came to the er because there was blood oozing through his sock and there was pain under there take the sock off he's got a diabetic ulcer that had opened and was full of maggots not a pretty sight we clarified those instructions pretty quickly not a doctor hospital staff but my grandpa ended up passing away because he waited too long before going to the hospital this was about 17 years ago he was tending to one his mules when something spooked it and he got kicked in the gut he was in a lot of pain could barely move due to the abdominal pain so decided to take it easy and lounge on the couch for a week he refused to go to be taken to the hospital unfortunately that mule kick ruptured an unknown tumor in his intestines the doc said it was huge like volleyball size huge and he may have survived if he came in sooner by the time we got him to the hospital he had a severe case of gangrene his leg needed to be amputated within a day of him being there he passed away a week later not a doctor but an army medic had a dude come into the aid station at like 2am with his arm all wrapped up took the raps off sht looked necrotic i asked him what the fck was going on turns out the weekend before we went out to the field this man went and got his whole forearm tattooed he then spent the next week wading through chess deep swamps figuring that if he just kept his arm wrapped he'd be okay i was like brother no edit oh yeah there was also that time some female lt came in with vaginal pain took a look saw one helluva infection apparently she hadn't changed her tampon in nearly a week we meaning i while the dr watched had to retrieve it once had an older lady call in wanting a prescription for pain meds because she was sure she had shingles said her neighbor had them and she was sure that's what it was she hadn't been in for an exam in almost two years so the doctor asked that she come in to be evaluated before a prescription could be given she refused and called again the next day asking for a prescription this went on all week her calling for pain meds the doctor asking her to come in to be seen she finally agreed to make an appointment it wasn't shingles it was a skin ulceration from advanced breast cancer colon open bracket [Music] i work in orthopedics a very common occurrence is a patient is told to follow up within the week we like to see fractures between five and seven days and the patient will call on the sixth day and say i broke something and need to be seen tomorrow this is frustrating because we very rarely have the ability to get a patient in next day and if they had called the day of or the day after them we definitely could have gotten them seen but my number one why didn't you come and sooner moment was getting a call from a patient who had broken their forearm two months ago and never followed up i got them scheduled they no showed their appointment rescheduled they no showed second reschedule they arrive with a very obvious deformity to their arm due to the fracture healing incorrectly if they had just come in it wouldn't have been an issue at all blows my mind that they went almost three months without care not a doctor or nurse but the patient i went into my doctor with some back pain and also brought up that my leg was swollen the doctor i saw said it was probably just swelling due to sodium intake a week later the pressure and pain in my leg was so bad that it hurt to walk i called off of work and had my husband take me back into the doctor the doctor took one look and told me to get to the hospital immediately he suspected i had a blood clot i ended up having a massive blood clot from my hip to my knee and pulmonary emboli i was transferred to another hospital for surgery and stayed in the iq had i waited any longer i would have died nad but the patient a few years ago i had a boil on my butt that i thought as mr tough guy i could walk it off um no you can't i was in so much pain couldn't sit or stand near the end i could only limp along or lay down in an extremely convoluted position i went over two weeks before it got so bad i couldn't stand it anymore i finally went to the er to get it drained and the doctors who were not really happy with me when i told them that i left this try go away without some salt baths or my own wishful thinking for my stubbornness i earned myself a staph infection and a very upset doctor who let me know in no uncertain terms i brought this upon myself happens all the time because healthcare is a financial decision in america that reminds me just a student there was a patient who was self-employed and didn't have health insurance post affordable care act because of the expense she didn't have a regular doctor for regular checkups and also had been ignoring her heart palpitations eventually she fainted it turned out she had a heart condition and would need medications with regular adjustments for life while she was in the hospital they also found out she had hepatitis c there's a cure now but she couldn't afford it so she will likely get cirrhosis and need a transplant that she also won't be able to afford i remember that she was just so overwhelmed from finding out all these health problems at once she had also come to the hospital from the er and wasn't sure how to even pay for that she was in her late thirties single mother and she had just had the rug pulled from under her this happens all the time people have a big stroke at home and can't move an entire side of the body they wait several days thinking it's a flu or something nope not the flu just a large clot in the brain that could have been reversed if you came in right away i was this patient lol when i was 18 i went to the er for chest pain it was the most painful thing i had ever felt seriously i felt like the guy from alien a few hours later the er doctor released me telling me i had acid reflux and would be fine over the next two years this was a continuing problem once a month and seriously it was that predictable first saturday night of every month i would get this terrible chest pain no amount of antacid medicine would help from over-the-counter medications to prescription i tried not eating that day drinking milk sitting straight up all night nothing helped finally after i literally passed out from the pain one time in front of my mom she convinced me to see a doctor again the doctor the first female doctor i had seen by the way sent me in for a gallbladder ultrasound on a hunch and they discovered well over 100 stones in it cue emergency surgery dumbfounded surgeon and a doctor amazed i had been passing gallstones for two years on the regular not me but my brother is an emt for a warehouse he recently had a guy come to his station saying something was wrong with his toe so he asks him to take off his shoe which he does my brother was about to ask him to take off the bandage around his big toe before he realizes that that wasn't a bandage it was his skin apparently this guy dropped a 20-pound tote on his toe a week earlier and had been showing up at work anyway they sent him to the doctor the doctor sent him to the er diagnosis came back as a tissue infection as well as osteomyelitis a bone infection but wait there's more the guy come back from the er and tells him that he doesn't want to go through the er doctor and would rather go through his own insurance my brother explained to him as best as he could that as it stood he was already likely going to lose his toe and if he waited any longer to get it treated he ran the risk of losing his entire leg not sure what happened after that i just hope he got the point i'm that person though i'm embarrassed to admit it but my daughter's teeth were rotting due to a heart condition we had to save for months for the surgery to extract the teeth we are in u.s and it was seen as an optional surgery not covered by insurance so it was close to 7000 when they brought the extracted teeth to us they were so rotten you could see the root i cried thinking about how painful it was for her to eat we had always brushed but a mix of antibiotics and pain medications from an early age six months made her teeth basically mushmash it was horribly embarrassing and explaining to the doctor and dentist that we knew but didn't have the money they just looked at us like we were horrible parents elderly woman fell at home and broke both femurs son thought she just needed to rest so he carried her to her bed she laid there in her own filth for three days before anyone called 911. the son lives with her and there's family next door as well how why this is one of the worst responses to this question that i've read that poor woman i hope she didn't have to go back to that house after being treated medically nurse here there's plenty but the latest one that comes to mind is this woman who came in for abdominal pain thing in five days before admission she had fell and hurt her head it got ignored through ed because while look closely at an open head wound and straight up to our floor where we decided to clean her up after cleaning up some of the blood it seemed like the wound was moving surely f king enough maggots ended up cleaning them out but i raised both the question of why would you wait and wait you didn't even come in because if this double quote nurse here had a diabetic who couldn't afford to fill his oil tank during the winter he was young too early 40s anyhoo had neuropathy in his feet so couldn't feel that they were becoming frostbitten he had also been wearing his winter boots 24 stroke 7 for warmth his sister went to check on him one day after she realized his phone was shut off by she brought him in because she thought he seemed off the dock asked me to take his boots off one of his toes came off with the boot no joke he ended up having a below the knee amputation to one leg and a transmetatarsal amputation to the other end on iv antibiotics for weeks diabetics this is why us nurses always preach check your feet when i was training to be a nurse i got paired with a play specialist for a few weeks a mum came into andy with a little boy of about four or five doc requested we come and entertain distract little man while he examined him and left it at that he was happy chatty and a picture of health from the shoulders up his belly however looked like he was expecting very soon this was a shock to both me and the other girl who had taken the usual toys we had little baskets for each of us to take where needed we trailed this little guy while he had a multitude of tests and he was extremely brave letting the docs do what they had to mum was asked how long it had been going on and she said three months he had a tumor and the surgeons managed to remove it but the poor kid was so embarrassed after surgery because he had saggy skin and stretch marks he often plays on my mind even more so since having a kid of my own hope he's doing okay now last term medical student here for part of your surgical rotation we had patients selected from the er to be student-friendly in regards to the symptoms they were seeing healthcare for an elderly man had a lump in hoss groin and was then selected to see me went in and talked to the patient as well as examined him the lump had trembled him putting on his pants for a couple of months he hadn't shown his wife or no one else i could instantly see that it wasn't a hernia i suspected but a giant tumor with several lymphatic metastases found around five t cell lymphoma it turned out don't know if he lived or not as students we don't follow our patients for very long the thing i'll never forget is the fact that he'd come straight from work had a badge with his picture on it and it looked like another person it was like he was a husk of himself his face was so skinny p.s swedish mid student edit added space since it turned into wall of text not a doctor but medical physicist about 12 years ago i was asked to look at and give advice on a lady who had a very slow growing tumor on their nose a basal cell carcinoma usually not much of an issue as if caught early can be cut off with surgery and that's it or a short course of radiotherapy turns out this lady was quite vain and as soon as the lump had started to grow she hid it under a scalp she ended up hiding it for 20 years by the time it was seen by any medical professional the tumor had taken over most of her nasal cavity had crushed one eye deformed her whole face and grown in between all the nerves and blood vessels it was inoperable and there was very little you could do with radiotherapy without doing a lot of damage to everything else such a shame as it would have been so easy to fix 20 years ago please get lumps and random bleeding checked out i had a patient in the er who struggled with alcoholism she'd been having dark stools for some time and then had been vomiting up blood and clots for a few days she ended up coding and had either esophageal varices or a massive dissecting aortic aneurysm i don't remember which if she'd come in earlier in the week they probably could have saved her in surgery it was sad especially to see her family say goodbye also the patient with diabetes who had wounded caked leg sores for years that smell may never leave me super nice lady i felt awful for her emt here had a lady calling at 5 a.m for a gi bleed it took several minutes to get into her yard because of her 12 plus large dogs but when she collapsed through the screen door of her porch we just went in kicking we got hurt in our truck and just as we started hooking her up she seized and went into cardiac arrest we got her back we kept her back but she eventually passed if she had called just an hour earlier maybe we could have saved her or at least given her a better chance guy came in with a dead leg waited until it turned black and then decided to head to the er they tried an angiogram to open up blood flow but it was way late for that guy had several clots in his lungs and legs undiagnosed at real fibrillation he couldn't believe we were going to amputate kept asking me what else i could do go back in time a week ago and come in kind of around when it turned blue i am an emt and have some pretty gnarly stories one of the worst things i've seen mostly is because of the smell is gangrene due to lack of control over diabetes the call came in as extreme lower limb pain we pull up on scene i examine the wound to see a man's metatarsal exposed yes the bone and maggots were eating the wound long history of diabetes and of course did not do anything to control it he eventually had his foot amputated the smell is something that has stuck with me and probably will forever just take care of yourself get help when you need it i once worked in a dermatology and rheumatology ward and while the patient themselves didn't wait too long they came from a nursing home they were admitted the night before i came on and they had a bed sore on their sacrum just above their ass that was so large you could fit your fist inside it and not touch the sides i'm talking up to your wrist they also had bed sores on the hips heels and shoulders we had to order in a special sci-fi herb for them to try to help them the only time in my life i've seen that machine be necessary it is as cool as you think by the way they were in so much pain that they were kept sedated at all times two it was a nightmare trying to fix them but eventually we managed to get them down to minimal wounds and they were discharged back to the nursing home within a month she was back and they were worse than before she died in hospital if they'd actually cared for them properly or admitted her to hospital earlier she'd have lived not a doctor just a customer from a grocery store i used to go there every day at the same time to buy bread and the owner of the place usually worked around that time of the day one day he got a nasty cut on his hand he was old so he just dipped his finger in chlorine from a recipient they used to clean the cutting tables anyway some days later he got a dirty cloth over the wound it was really painful for him anyway two weeks or so later he wasn't working and one of the guys there told me he was on the hospital next time i saw him he lost his hand to severe necrotic damage years ago as a nursing assistant on an oncology floor we had a guy admitted because he had had an erection for several days and had lost the ability to pee his bladder was close to bursting and his poor junk was think microwave hot dog really bad but none of that was as interesting as the fact that this guy had untreated skin cancer on his nose for several years it had over time become infected developed mrsa and spread across his face he had no nose no cheek and no eye on one side of his face and was starting to lose his other eye you could see part of his f king skull i don't know why he chose to leave it and treat it and i have no idea how long it took to get that bad but i will never ever forget the smell and texture of his rotting face on the upside we were eventually able to convince him to have reconstructive surgery he ended up getting a skin graft that covered up his eye nose and cheek so if you ever meet a very grumpy dude with nothing but a mouth and one eye know that this is way better than the alternative guy had been having ball pain for two days didn't want to come in due to covered 19 fear and lockdown we found out he had a testicular torchson unfortunately that's two days is far too late for salvage i don't know how he could have tolerated it usually people come in a sap cause it's that painful maybe for some it wasn't as painful him or he has better pain tolerance it's not nice to say why didn't you come and sooner to a patient though cause circumstances are tough as it is my favorite story psych np i was called to a suburban er to see a man who said he had a horrible stomach cancer and needed to lose weight in order to get better he insisted that he'd been diagnosed by a very prominent gastroenterologist with barrett's stomach which isn't even a thing it's an esophageal problem i guess i got called and because the story was bizarre and the staff didn't know what to do with him he eventually disclosed that he'd shot himself in the leg a few days previously and was waiting for gangrene to set him he believed that the resulting amputation of the leg would allow him to lose the required amount of weight thus curing his cancer i excused myself to let the er staff know that they should probably examine the leg and to call the county psychiatric service which was protocol at this particular hospital i'm not sure whatever happened to him but that was a very impressive manifestation of a delusion my dad works as a nurse in the er a man had been doing mechanic work all night in the middle of winter he came in complaining that he couldn't feel his fingers because they had gotten so cold they weren't just pale or purple they were literally black his fingers had gotten so cold that they literally died and had to be amputated i am a doctor and while working in a andy we had an older chap possibly in his seventies who several days prior to presentation had a sudden onset severe chest pain and vomiting while loading the car with shopping he ignored it and struggled home the next day he started to lose the use of both legs and by the time he came to hospital had been crawling around his house for several days because he thought it would get better he had had a major cardiac event developed a clot which his heart had pumped out it went down his body broken half and blocked off the blood supply to both legs he literally had dead legs i don't know what ended up happening to him but there was no way to save the legs and i reckon the outcome was very poor if not fatal my grandparents lived in a remote corner of wa state an hour away from the nearest piddley small town hospital grandpa had been recovering from bladder cancer and became dependent on pain medicine grandma and my aunt were doing their best to care for him at home they told the doctor about the issues with his pain meds and they tapered him off after a few weeks he began asking for more pills again the complaining got worse and worse grandma assumed that he was just trying to get more drugs it took a month or two of telling him no before they gave in and brought him back to the hospital turns out the cancer had returned aggressively he did develop a dependence on the pills but he had also been in agonizing pain the whole time he'd been at home by this point there was nothing that could be done and he passed away very quickly there was a tremendous amount of grief in the family nobody blamed grandma and my aunt they did the best they could in the circumstances but they felt a lot of guilt and there was probably some underlying resentment toward them the family has really not recovered or even gotten all together since except for grandma's funeral not an md or nurse but when i was receiving a treatment for my myopiata clinic there was this little girl who fell down on some wires which pierced through her face and one of her eyes and it was all bleeding so her parents thought it would be fine to just wash her eye and press some cotton pads would do the trick and waited a whole freaking day to bring her to a hospital so as a result poor girl lost one of her eyes doctors got so mad that they started to yell at the parents asking what the hell is wrong with them some nurses and patients were crying for her she was a cute little girl i was shocked by the level of neglect i mean poor girl had a freaking bleeding eye and they were like i have to work today so we'll see a doc tomorrow and that was their actual explanation freaking work why people even make kids if they are not going to prioritize them my dad is a doctor and he once told me a story where a woman came in to see him her problem was that she had a potato lodged inside her vagina the why didn't you come in sooner is that the potato had sprouted roots and growths around it meaning it had to have been in there for a while this one seems to come in with every one of these threads it's always my friend dad uncle etc was the doctor and the woman has the potato in her vagina it's like the granddaddy of all urban legends why would any woman even put a potato up there in the first place i think the original that i read back in the 90s was to keep a uterus from falling out so this one has been around for a very long time and won't seem to die patient here when i was 15 or so i was horsing around with my little sister and her friends i ended up accidentally kicking the very solid coffee table the pain was unbelievable i hobble into the kitchen and sit on the floor holding my foot with tears pouring down my face my mom tells me to walk it off and implies i'm being a bit dramatic three weeks later she finally takes me for an x-ray and lo and behold i've fractured several bones in my foot the doctor asked why we didn't come in sooner as they could have given me a boot crunches and saved me three weeks of walking around on a fractured foot luckily everything healed okay but the doctor did scold us for not coming in sooner and scared the living shti out of my mom with all sorts of horror stories about what could have happened years later i still bring that up to my mom if she implies i'm being dramatic patient here when 11 years old mom took me to emergency room because my thumb was infected with big pus bubble below the nail i remember doctor and nurses telling mom that it was a waste of time to bring me in that i should just soak my thumb in warm water and fisa hicks over the counter antibacterial soap four hours later family was shaking me to wake me up and i had red streaks up my arm from blood poisoning it took three months before i could straighten my arm my tooth has been hurting for a couple of months my face started swelling a few days ago it became hard to swallow last night and now i'm having trouble breathing double quote guy had ludwig's angina he couldn't be intubated because of the swelling and had to get an emergency trash when he stopped breathing and his o2 stats plummeted iv antibiotics for two weeks admitted to the hospital for four weeks easily could have died all because of a dental infection see your dentist boys and girls i'm a dentist and saw this when i was on call during my hospital residency i prescribed contacts desert storm infantryman home for furlough you left them in how long double quote nine months sir they didn't have any water over there double quote had a guy come in with his pregnant wife in a wheelchair the baby's head was hanging out of her and we asked why she didn't go to the maternity ward when she was four one one he said that the waiting room was busy and he wasn't waiting because she had some pains and they were only there to shut her up she ended up delivering around 20 minutes after she got taken back and i'd read what could have happened if he refused to wait the a and e times too had an older female patient come and for abnormal labs secondary to extreme diarrhea her potassium was critically low and all of her other labs were out of whack turns out she had been having at least five totally liquid stools for six weeks before she sought out any treatment three days of that nonsense and i would have been in urgent care her poor poor butt totally red and excoriated every time i had to clean her up i could only think of the scene in p and r where chris says stop pooping in the mirror or rn was on call on a friday night got called in for an exploratory laparotomy some late staff had gotten the case ready and patient in the room when i arrived i walked into the room to see the patient's testicle was bigger than a basketball two people holding it up to prep it the guy had a large part of his bowel in his lft testicle and his bowel had ruptured due to the pressure we suctioned poop out of his abdomen for over an hour apparently the week before he lifted something heavy and felt a pop hadn't urinated in two days because it was so swollen his penis was not visible that's why he finally came in he couldn't pee although his testicle had been slowly growing for a week unfortunately he didn't make it he lived through three abdominal surgeries but sepsis did him and from the ruptured bowel sitting here is the patient had a couple of seizures at 2am thanks to what turned out to be a silent duty my parents answer to this because i was a little out of it was she complained of pain last night but it didn't match the symptoms isn't she too young for a ut double quote nope i went through two full bags of saline before i got released i got through a full 32 ounces cup of water as well in the 20 minutes from the hospital to home i was pretty out of it for the next few days but recovered by the next week just in time for covered lockdown i have the worst luck sometimes nad german paramedic got a call maggots falling out of the shoe he was a guy with a government supervisor because of mental health who had worn the same sock for about four weeks because a little wound dried blood into it it hurts to try taking it off after two weeks it seeped into his shoe so he kept that on too for the two weeks until we got cold luckily i had a cold meaning block nose we didn't do anything just a trash bag around foot and leg and off to the hospital the head nurse took one look at the trash bag foot and directed us to the operating room if the governor guy had directed him to his normal dock early on he'd still have both feet at least my colleague got to tell the gov guy that this was his responsibility in which he failed and that's spectacular former medic here called to a patient who had cut their leg while chopping wood about a week prior and now it was really itchy old gentleman didn't drive lived alone got to his house unwrap the ungodly swollen leg to find that he'd tried to superglue the wound closed and maggots had commenced to growing inside the itching he was feeling was the writhing maggots under his skin not a doctor but close bracket my dad felt lousy for two weeks or so one december he didn't know what was wrong he just figured he'd gotten a bug somewhere and after a couple of weeks he started feeling better again yay less than a week later he started feeling terrible again and this time it was bad enough his girlfriend took him to an urgent care the people at the urgent care told them to get to the emergency room or sap like get there yesterday so she took him to the er they started checking him in and he died it turned out he'd been leaking stomach acid into his abdomen close bracket not a doctor or nurse patient here was having problems with my arm going numb general fatigue like i could literally sleep 20 hours out of 24 lay back down and sleep some more then back pain finally went in to see my doc and my bp was 190 over 101. yeah i got a dressing down from my doc for that one was still working all that time was told i was lucky because if it had gone up more i could have stroked out would have been a disaster if i'd been driving i'm a mail carrier imaging guy here i have a million of these i work with vascular patients and wounds had a guy whose foot was completely broken sideways at the ankle he had it still wrapped from where he left the hospital he would use the stumpy parts to move around on his wheelchair and leave little blood sponge prince on the floor another guy with bad ankle and foot wounds decided to stop going to wound care and was afraid to take the wraps off even after his foot started to stink by the time i saw him his skin had kind of liquefied earlier on in my career i saw a guy with necrotizing wounds to both legs that had eaten to muscle in multiple places below the knee i asked him how long they looked like that and he said about two years next time i saw him he was bilateral above knee amp stump wounds just stump wounds take care of your feet people if you're diabetic and can't feel the bumps and scrapes please check your feet regularly had a patient older guy poorer farmer who had been in the hospital about two weeks before he showed up in the er came in late at night doubled over holding an old coffee can turns out he had been discharged from the hospital with a urinary catheter in place and was supposed to follow up with his md's office to have the catheter taken out obviously didn't go to his appointment turns out after a few days at home the catheter bag he had tore on something so being a do-it-yourself kind of guy he just started letting the catheter drain into an old coffee can needless to say he had probably the worst urinary tract infection i'd ever seen his urine was essentially just pass my gran was the patient i can't remember now what had happened that prompted the hospital visit but the doctors diagnosed her with cancer and reckoned she'd had it for about two years she knew something was wrong but didn't want to stress or worry us any so kept it to herself doctors gave her about two months telling us she wouldn't see her 80th birthday but that wee woman stuck around for her birthday two of my cousin's birthdays and my birthday before passing away a whole three months more than the doctors originally gave her had a ptv bac at home and then came to the hospital with the baby when we asked what the hell was she thinking she stated she took some meth had to poop popped out baby then called ms she didn't keep that baby and also had to get transferred to ccu cause of a massive infection she got having a baby in a meth out bathroom not a doctor but this is pertinent i set up group health for a company and i was helping the employees pick out his health plan he informed me that he hasn't been able to go to the doctor since he got off medicaid at 18. for 10 years he's been walking around with a split skull and you can stick a penny in the crack and it'll stay there he knew a big cyst had formed in his forehead and he told me he had been randomly going blind and blacking out for three years and it was getting worse lately the guy worked on top of buildings doing construction and drive a work van for the company and they had no idea some days he wouldn't come in and they thought he was just passed out drunk or something no he was out with migraine blindness i told the guy to go immediately the next day and not wait for his f king card to come in the mail neither doctor nor nurse but i worked in an er for several years a patient dropped a piece of wood on his toe and the nail lifted up a bit he didn't see a doctor and instead let his wife bandage it he came to this a few weeks later because he showed signs of infection i sat next to the doctor when he took off the bandage and guess what was under his nail maggots a lot of maggots why didn't you come in sooner was one of the many questions that were asked erp here the worst i ever saw was a man in his 50s who was an alcoholic and had anxiety problems who was brought in by his neighbors for a facial infection turned he had squamous cell skin cancer that made the left side of his face look like the batman villain two face the ct of his face and neck revealed that it had spread into his lymph nodes and mandible the skin on his face was literally sloughing off as i spoke with him and the smell was absolutely horrible and i smell terrible things all the time i have never almost vomited in a room except for him just due to the smell i asked him why he waited and he said he was just terrified of doctors and hospitals and i believe him he was extremely anxious the entire time he was in red his neighbors were saints they said they had been trying to get him to the hospital for months but he wouldn't come in we transferred him to a tertiary hospital with ant and cancer specialists when i checked his chart a few days later they basically said he was terminal dental hygienist here i see a lot of bad cases due to many americans not having health insurance i was taking x-rays on a patient once when suddenly one of her lower front teeth fell into her lap she hastily picked it up and put it back into her jaw it was only being held in by hard and up pluck and had been for over a year she had to have all of her teeth extracted due to advanced periodontal disease had a tall lanky patient come into urgent care with chest pain and shortness of breath after smoking weed literally textbook for a pneumothorax collapsed lung i asked him how long this has been going on and he said two days i thought there was no way the guy walked around for two days with a collapsed lung but sure enough after the x-ray we diagnosed him with a severe pneumothorax straight to the emergency room for a chest tube i read medical records for a living older man develops a sore in the cleft of his butt cheeks ignores it he ignores it until he can't sit anymore and must lie in bed on his stomach all day he gets weaker to the point that he can't get out of bed alone he and his wife just keep thinking it will pass eventually she's half carrying him to the shower and bathing him while he stands the wound is massive now and black chunks of it fall off in the shower he doesn't care anymore he just wants to go back to bed his wife complies finally when he becomes minimally responsive she brings him in three weeks later he dies never having left the hospital again i remember reading that wondering if she had a low iq or if she wanted to kill him how can you watch chunks of a person fall on the shower floor and still think things will get better on their own piku nurse here known diabetic 15 year old told her parents she wouldn't go into the hospital for high blood sugars all they would say is over 300 since she knew she would be in the hospital for a few days and wanted to be out of the hospital for her sweet 16 a very long story short she went unresponsive on the way to the hospital after passing out she went into dick and when she was allowed to pass she had 10 l of blood products that were not hers we tried everything we possibly could for eight hours patient here i tore a tendon in my arm in late august and went to an urgent care when i could no longer rotate my forearm they took an x-ray said nothing was broken and sent me home in a splint my gp said to see an orthopedist which i finally saw two weeks after i first injured myself she took more x-rays that came back normal and i asked for an mri my mri done seven weeks after the injury showed i tore a tendon in my wrist a week later my orthopedist confirmed it and has set me up to consult with a surgeon my appointment just to see the surgeon isn't until thursday i'm fully expecting to hear why didn't you comment sooner the consultancy the surgeon will be exactly nine weeks after the injury not a nurse or doctor but i work in a diagnostic imaging department had a guy come into the er because he was having trouble drinking and eating not because he couldn't keep food down or swallow but because the dude had a ref king hole in the underside of his jaw that literally went straight up through his lower jaw into his mouth he had an infection that he just let run wild that ate a huge disgusting hole on his lower mandible the man literally looked like he had a vegina hole below his chin that traveled up under his tongue apparently he'd had an infection for a while and just ignored it doctor here might be a bit late and will probably be buried but had a 65 year old dude who was diagnosed with lymphoma 8 months before we saw him he lived an hour out of the city and didn't want to drive in for treatment so decided he wouldn't get treated at all and stayed on his little remote place in the country by himself essentially because it didn't get treated it spread along his skin and his neighbors called an ambulance when popping in on him it had spread so far that it essentially went from his head to his knees it had started to invade his eyes and mouth membranes he couldn't drink and could barely see his skin had started to slough off and he was so severely dehydrated because he was losing so much excess fluid from his open skin that we had to treat him like a severe burns patient and had plastics involvement the consultant said if he had received treatment there was a chance he could have recovered instead he died three weeks later had a kid that had a really bad sinus infection because of family stuff the kid didn't want to complain about being sick so just put up with it for a while long enough to form an empire on their brain which is basically an abscess the kid had to have a drain placed above their eye to drain it and we had to flush it periodically to get the puss out literally could have killed them or taken out an eye i'm not a doctor but a patient does my story count so for a long time i've been feeling out of breath doing physical activities and i thought it was because i was out of shape then at one point i started coughing a lot and i continued to ignore it until i started having chest pains i went to the doctor and they did an x-ray and the entire left half of my lung was filled with fluid there is a lining outside the lung called the pleural lining and the space in between is called pleural space a condition called pleural effusion can occur where fluid fills up that space usually it happens due to injuries to the ribcage pneumonia tb cancer etc but the doctor had not seen something as serious as mine and called his colleagues to come take a look and use me as an example of a severe pleural effusion i was sent to emergency a ct was taken and they discovered a bunch of tumors in my pleural lining then i had a biasy and turned out i had stage four lung cancer i was 33 yes in the initial surgery they drained out two five liters of fluid from my left lung imagine having two five 5l of fluid in your lung that's bigger than a big bottle of pop and not going to the doctor not a dr or patient but friend of an idiot my husband's childhood friend d just had a massive heart attack at the age of 26. don't know all the details but he apparently had a pulmonary embolism and his lung was so riddled with blood clots they were going to have to remove it apparently the dr asked him a question he didn't like so he checked himself out of the hospital filled his script for the pain meds and went home my husband was so mad at him that he basically said do whatever the fck you want you're an idiot and got off the phone we haven't heard anything good or bad at this point so we hope he went to another hospital tough old lady from a rural area she finally came in with an enormous fungating breast malignancy because she got sick of it bleeding in the shower sad trombone sound not a doctor or a nurse rather a paramedic we got called for an unconscious person as my partner and i walk through the door we are convinced there's a core in the other room because of the foul odor turns out our pt was not dead only just extremely septic due to the fist-sized necrotic saw that formed on the top of their head i mean you could see the skull definitely should have called sooner my mother was one of those holistic medicine types who preferred to treat her chronic illnesses with herbal supplements she could buy off of the internet she had chronic constipation for months and a persistent sore on her abdomen that would not go away no matter how much manuka honey she smeared on it long story short my brother finally convinced her to go to the doctor for this sore that wouldn't heal and they discovered that she had a tumor the same one obstructing her bowel that had eaten through her viscera and through her abdomen she lived another six weeks stop diagnosing yourself on the internet friends edit unnecessary quotation marks and grammar patient had a small cut on their leg and had asked their family doctor for medical maggots to help heal the wound family physician obviously denied patient went home open up a can of cat food and left it out until it was covered in maggots you can see where this is going came in several months after beginning self-treatment with maggots with an insane infection never found out if they were able to cure it or amputate the leg my husband almost died this summer aged 36 from a dental abscess that was so badly infected the thing was everyone in the ed said why didn't you take care of this sooner he had been to the doctor six times and the dentist four times over six months who couldn't find the issue until he ended up in the ed it was amazing they all thought he was one of those guys who didn't go in i was working at a cbp facility assisting migrants with emergency screening healthcare needs i get this patient who can't be older than 50 that i'm talking to he's part of a larger group and i'm checking them all out for scabies and etc this guy nonchalantly goes wanna see me feet in english naturally my curiosity rises and i oblige he wasn't in any visible distress and his gait wasn't altered in any way so i'm not expecting any surprises he's wearing these boots covering everything below his ankle he sits down on the dirt and takes them off revealing that his feet were gangrenous and eaten down to the bone he wasn't in any pain because it ate all his f king nerves i was flawed and was unsure why he or anyone else in his group didn't tell me immediately wild hope he's all right i had one guy who had been just pouring essential oils over his bandages to mask the smell of his horrible diabetic foot disaster specifically to keep his wife from noticing how bad it was unless she had no sense of smell it did not work smelled like rotting death with a hint of lavender needless to say i promptly removed the leg he did well after that and i had the diabetes educator go spend some time with him i'm still just a nursing student but my professor told us a story of when he was an er nurse an elderly 80 something year old woman came into the er and as he assessed her he noticed her oral temperature was normal despite her neck being extremely hot to the touch he decided to take a rectal temperature which ended up being like 103 or something crazy while he was down there he noticed something peeking out of her vegina and proceeded to remove it it was an old sock she said her uterus had prolapsed months before and she was using the sock to keep it in they began treating her for tss immediately but sadly she went septic and died later that day tongue-in-cheek he told us she died of toxic sock syndrome as nurses have to use dark humor to cope my brother was up a ladder next to a two-story building which slid all the way down with him on top he landed on his feet and the ladder hit the backs of his ankles it was below freezing and early in the morning and his boss told him to sit in the van for the rest of the day he's hobbling around for two weeks occasionally asking me to gently rub his feet to get the circulation going they were black and blue i kept telling him he needs to get checked out but he kept insisting he was fine eventually he had breathing difficulties and he ended up in hospital with blood clots and they found he had severely broken feet ended up in a wheelchair for a while probably not learned his lesson i cannot tell you how many patients come in with advanced cancer where they've been in denial about otherwise obvious symptoms it's extraordinarily sad because denial is a powerful defense mechanism and the later we catch a solid organ cancer the harder it is to cure it if we can cure it at all most recent one that comes to mind is a lady with a breast mass that was taking up maybe 75 of her breast and ulcerating through her skin she was trying to manage the pain with tylenol and ibuprofen at home until the pain got too much [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Keywords: reddit, r/AskReddit, ask reddit, askreddit, updoot, toadfilms, sir reddit, reddit jar, askreddit funny, askreddit dumb, reddit ama, reddit ask me anything, r/askreddit, reddit stories, reddit story, askreddit scary, askreddit stupid, scary stories, askreddit new, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, askreddit top posts, subreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, askreddit stories, best of reddit, reddit best, funny askreddit, storytime with reddit, memes, r/

Id: 31zOunQ9DCE

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020