These Medical Nightmares Are Unforgettable
For most of us, the dim halls of a hospital are a completely different world—and a terrifying one at that. These stories prove that, even for doctors, a day at work can quickly devolve into a medical nightmare. From patients with unbelievable diagnoses to scores of surgical mishaps—these Redditors recount the gory details they'd rather forget.
1. Toughness In The ER
This little girl, probably six or seven years old, had some form of spinal cancer. My mother had talked to her a couple of times. On this particular day, she was excited because her dad was coming home from a business trip to Bali.
This little girl was so happy because he was bringing her back a toy. The next day, the Bali disasters occurred, which caused her father to pass.
She was distraught and spent the next four days just crying with little bits of sleep in between. Her mother spent most of that time with her daughter. Then, about two months later, fate decided she would suffer even more—her mother passed in a car accident while driving to the hospital to visit her daughter.
So her grandparents got the duty of care for her, but she passed two weeks afterward from cancer. The poor girl suffered worse than I could even fathom in her last two months of life; losing most of what was important to her before dying herself.
I hope no one goes through anything like that again. My mother thinks she just gave up after her mother passed, but this little girl lost everything just by some form of poor luck.
2. Thar She Blows
I was NOT prepared for the day a patient exploded in surgery and splattered all over the entire operating team. Basically, a watermelon-sized tumor was being removed from the patient. It turned out, the tumor was more of a giant cyst.
The surgeon didn’t open up the belly wide enough to facilitate the thing, so imagine someone trying to dig out a giant water balloon from an eight-inch incision with their hands.
The pressure on the tumor caused it to erupt out and upwards, spraying its contents on everyone and everything in the room. On the positive side, this made the removal of the thing A LOT easier.
I do recall a lot of people screaming when it happened though. The patient came out fine!
3. Let Me Go
I had a 94-year-old woman who had been beaten by her niece so horribly that she had to be intubated in the ICU. The woman was in pure agony and her family claimed they wanted to “do everything” for her. I later came to find out their horrible secret—they were keeping her alive to collect her social security check. One time, while I was cleaning her, she grabbed my arm and held it tight.
Huge tears welled up in her eyes and she mouthed over the ET tube: “I want to die...Please let me die.” That night, I sobbed the entire way home. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened to this woman.
That was one of my last days in the ICU—I was a young nurse and I could not emotionally handle working there. That, for me, was the last straw.
I started having nightmares about being at work and trying to take care of patients. I would wake up in a cold sweat and see my husband laying next to me, realizing the sounds I was hearing were him snoring and not a patient who was on a ventilator.
It sounds silly, but it’s horrifying if you actually think you're in that situation. I wish as nurses we were able to talk about what we experience on a daily basis but, because of HIPPA, we aren’t allowed.
Years later, I am now an ER nurse and I love it! I see awful things quite often, but I have a better way of coping with those experiences.
4. Heartbreaking Experience
As an ICU nurse, I've seen the decisions of some doctors result in death. Families oftentimes don't know, but it happens more than you'd think.
It usually happens on very sick patients that ultimately would have died within six months or so anyway, though. Procedural wise, I have seen a physician kill a patient by puncturing their heart while placing a pleural chest tube.
It was basically a freak thing as apparently, the patient had recently had cardiothoracic surgery and the heart adhered within the cavity at an odd position. I'll never forget the look on his face when he came to the realization of what had happened.
You rarely see people accidentally kill someone in such a direct way.
Heartbreaking.
