Everyone loves a good medical story, and doctors, nurses, and other members of the medical profession are the ones on the front lines who get to witness humanity at its absolute dumbest. These medical professionals have shared their most outrageous tales of the stupidest patients they’ve ever had to treat. Proceed with caution, as some of these stories are not only dumb, but are also extremely gross.
1. Cup of Broken Water
I work in the ER. We had a patient who was very pregnant come in because she needed stitches down in her private area. It turned out she was a realtor and didn’t want her water to break while she was showing a house, so she put a glass cup in her underwear to “catch” the fluid. Instead of using a pad or an adult diaper, she chose an actual glass cup.
She sat down while showing the house, and sure enough, it shattered and caused some pretty serious cuts.
2. Half-Diet Soda
I was working at a clinic and talking with a patient who has diabetes that isn’t well controlled about her sugar intake. She told me she drinks a 32 oz. soda every day. I asked if it was regular or diet, and she said, “It’s half-regular. I let the ice melt first, so there isn’t as much sugar in it.” I had to bite my tongue, but that’s not really how it works.
3. Smuckers Jelly
I once saw a young woman who kept getting urinary tract infections, and they started after she began seeing a new partner. She didn’t have any STDs, and we went through all the usual questions to figure out what might be triggering them. Eventually, we found out she’d been using jelly as lubricant—not KY Jelly, but actual Smucker’s. The mix-up was literally the same joke from the TV show *House*.
It took some effort to keep a straight face, but we got it sorted out, and she stopped getting UTIs.
4. Fart Attack
A woman comes rushing into the ER screaming. She’s all dressed up, and so are her two grown daughters. The three of them are panicking, yelling that their mother is going to die. As I walk past, I almost get knocked over by one of the daughters’ husbands. “Save her—she’s having an embolism!”
A bit startled, I examine the woman and ask where she’s coming from. A wedding, which explains the outfits.
Turns out she just ate a little too much of the potatoes they served at the reception. After a shot of pantoprazole, her “embolism” was suddenly gone. It was really just a bad case of gas.
5. Dehydration Therapy
I once had a patient who was a very non-compliant diabetic smoker and had his first heart attack at 45. His blood pressure was also extremely high. But instead of taking his blood pressure medications, he started going to the gym. While there, he would sit in the sauna for a long time, sweat a lot, and bring his blood pressure down by dehydrating himself.
6. Fast Food Treatment
A patient had low blood pressure. Their plan to treat it on their own was to eat more fatty foods, thinking this would narrow their blood vessels and raise the blood pressure in their body.
7. Bacon Wrap
A couple of weeks ago, we had a patient with diabetic foot issues who believed that wrapping his foot in raw bacon would help kill bacteria. He’d apparently been doing it for a while, and it ended up costing him four toes.
8. Radical Cure
I once cared for a pregnant woman whose ultrasound showed the baby had Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. That means the baby’s left side of the heart didn’t develop properly, and without surgery the condition is fatal. She stopped seeing her obstetrician because she decided to have the baby in the forest and believed bathing him in breast milk would cure him.
9. Home Sweet Home
Most of my own stories tend to follow a similar pattern: “A patient gets chest pain while driving a coach full of school kids, assumes it’s indigestion, takes a big swig of Gaviscon, and later turns out to have had a massive heart attack.”
My all-time favorite story from a colleague involves a patient who came in with abdominal pain. As part of the workup, he had an abdominal X-ray, and the cause was obvious straight away.
My colleague then went on to remove an 8-inch replica of Nelson’s Column—the monument in the middle of Trafalgar Square in London—from the patient’s rectum. When he showed it to the patient, the patient simply said: “Oh, that’s Nelson—he lives up there.” I mean… what?
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10. Shove It up Your Nose
Two stories really stand out in my mind. The first was a mom who brought her toddler into the emergency department. The little guy had some nasty drainage coming out of his left nostril, with a lot of redness and swelling on only the left side of his nose and the nearby cheek. Mom was convinced it was a sinus infection and just wanted antibiotics.
I knew that some kids will stick anything they can into whatever opening they can find, and the fact that it was only on one side made me pretty suspicious. But Mom insisted he would NEVER put anything in his nose. It took a bit of persuading, but I finally got her to let me take a look. I gave a squirt of midazolam in the good nostril to help calm him down, then carefully worked with tweezers through the gunk until I pulled out a big button battery—like the kind used in watches.
It had probably been burning his nose for a couple of days. Hopefully he healed up well.
11. Bad Diet
I had a patient who had a really hard time getting pregnant. She finally did conceive, but then she miscarried. She had a procedure to clean out the uterine lining so she could try again, this time with medical support. We followed her blood work to make sure the pregnancy hormone (hCG) dropped back to zero before starting the next treatment. But she kept coming in with high hCG levels.
The doctors were concerned because it could mean retained placental tissue or, less commonly, a pituitary issue—either of which could be a serious problem for her future fertility. We asked her to come in to talk about why her hCG wasn’t going down. After a long discussion about what could be causing it, we agreed she’d go home and think about doing more testing. Then she said, “I have to go—I have an appointment at the weight-loss clinic for an hCG shot.”
That’s when it clicked: she was on the hCG diet. hCG is the pregnancy hormone. And this was after we’d spent an hour saying, “We don’t understand why your hCG is staying high, and we’re worried.”
12. Explosive
A patient asked about birth control and was very insistent that she wanted an IUD (intrauterine device).
13. Making It up
I told a patient’s mom that his heart rate went up from pain as a “physiological” response. She got really upset with me and became confrontational. It turned out she thought I was saying it was “psychological,” like it was all in his head.
14. Bigger Isn’t Always Better
An ER doctor told me this story: a 16-year-old boy came into the emergency room with severely swollen, discolored genitals. It turned out he’d been using his mom’s insulin needles to draw blood from his arm and inject it into his genitals. He believed that adding blood would make him bigger. He ended up with a serious infection and had to stay in the hospital for about a week.
15. Wishful Thinking
I’m in a military medical unit—not a doctor—but I once had a patient tell me there was no credible research showing that smoking is bad for your health. Alright then.
16. Disease Machine
Optician here. We had a patient who refused to let us use the tonometer, which is the machine that checks the pressure inside your eye to help diagnose glaucoma. He said the machine *causes* glaucoma, and that we weren’t going to try that on him. He told us his father had an exam, and after using that machine, he ended up with glaucoma.
He also said his uncle and brother had no signs of glaucoma, and after getting the puff test, both were diagnosed with it. The problem is that glaucoma usually doesn’t have obvious symptoms until you’ve already started losing vision. This person basically told me glaucoma runs in his family, and still refused to get tested for it.
17. Annoying Family
An 80-year-old patient was getting weaker, with several medical problems and three bedsores. His daughter was insistent that he stay on a strict “paleo” diet because she believed it would “supercharge” his healing. She even brought in a stack of diet books. But he simply wasn’t getting enough nutrition to help those ulcers heal, and he didn’t like the diet at all. After a while, you have to stop tiptoeing around it and be very direct with patients or family: this is what I recommend and why, and I don’t have time to debate it endlessly. They can choose what they want, and I’ll document everything.
I’ve seen this kind of situation a lot, but she really stands out.
18. Tales From the Eye Doctor
As an eye doctor, I’ve seen a lot and could probably write a book about the strange ways people neglect their eyes, but three stories in particular really stand out. One patient told me they clean their contact lenses with milk because it “gets the acid off them.” Another came in with a 6-year-old translating for them. They couldn’t really explain what was going on beyond saying their eye hurt.
Another patient showed up with her hand covering one eye. I asked to take a look. Her eye looked like a shriveled grape. The optic nerve was basically holding onto a shrunken, decayed eye that was loosely sitting in the socket. She wanted glasses to fix it.
I also had a guy come in recently because his “wife made me.” He’d tried to use tweezers to remove a piece of metal from his cornea. It wasn’t pretty. I removed the remaining metal and rust using a needle and a small spinning burr brush. He needed antibiotics, and I told him not to ever do that again.
19. Paging Dr. Liar
I’m a dental student. One patient, in particular, seems to make up stories all the time. At one visit, they said they went to medical school. At the next, they claimed they were in the Royal Army Dental Corps. Last time, they told me they had a PhD. The patient will say things like, “Hey doc, do you need me to move my head mesial or distal?”
No. I need you to move your head to the right.
“Hey doc, are these cavities being caused by anaerobic pathogenic microbes?”
No. They’re caused by snacking all day and not brushing.
20. We Didn’t Start the Fire
Not my story—this happened to a colleague of mine. A patient was admitted for anemia, and doctors discovered a localized cancer. She was referred to surgery so the cancerous tissue could be removed. But she started telling everyone that the doctors had caused the cancer and that she’d been perfectly fine before coming to the hospital. She went on at the surgeon and my colleague, who both urged her to have the operation so the cancer wouldn’t progress. Still, she refused, insisting she knew better and claiming she probably didn’t even have cancer.
21. Walking Dead
I didn’t take care of this patient directly, but I was on shift when he came in with chest pain. His EKG showed classic “tombstone” changes, which meant he was in the middle of a serious cardiac event. He told the ER doctor, “I want a second opinion before going to the cath lab.” But the EKG was very clear. The interventional cardiologist had to come down to the emergency department and explain to him that he was having a heart attack.
22. Bad Plans
ER nurse here—not a physician—but you might find this interesting. A young adult male comes in with multiple abscesses on different parts of his body. He says he injected his boyfriend’s semen into himself because he was trying to get pregnant. He tells one of the APCs that he should’ve stuck with his original plan and tried it on his dog first. Somehow, psych clears him.
He gets admitted upstairs and started on IV antibiotics. Seriously—what.
23. Wrong Kind of Doctor
I’m not a doctor—I’m an optician—and at the time I was a woman in my mid-twenties. A guy came in saying he was a doctor. He’d written himself a glasses prescription and brought in his own frames. A few days later his lenses came back, he put on the glasses, and he couldn’t see. So I started going through what could be wrong.
With progressive lenses, a lot of the time it’s just an adjustment issue, and the glasses need to sit a little differently on the face. He completely refused to let me adjust them. I checked the lenses, and the prescription matched exactly what he wrote. I tried to explain that there were really only two options: either the glasses needed to be adjusted on his face, or the prescription wasn’t right. He said, “You don’t understand. I’ve had eye surgery for a disease you’ve never even heard of.”
I offered to remake the lenses just to prove the point. The new lenses came in a few days later, and an older coworker helped him. I’d already told her the whole story. Once again, he couldn’t see. She told him, “The young woman who helped you last time was trying to explain that if we adjust your glasses, you might be able to see out of them. Will you please let me try?” He finally let her adjust them, and suddenly he could see—though not perfectly. Turns out the guy was a lung doctor, not even an eye doctor.
24. Spread of Hysteria
I once had a mom completely panicked because she was sure her neighbor’s friend’s stepson’s teacher’s dog had MRSA, and that meant her baby was going to die. I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling her she was overreacting. But it still took three hours to calm her down after I called infection control, her pediatrician, her OB-GYN, and her family doctor.
Yes, I really had to call all of them; yes, they laughed; and yes, she stood right next to me the whole time questioning their judgment. I truly love my job, but sometimes it drives me up the wall!
25. Teaching Moment
I once cared for a young child who came in with a very high blood glucose level. After we got her stabilized, we provided some education and kept her for a few days for observation. For some reason, every time I checked her, her levels were still extremely high, even though we were treating her appropriately. We eventually found out that her family was bringing her fast food for every meal and hiding it in the bedside table.
26. Who’s the Idiot?
Picture a middle-aged man, except his index finger is about five times bigger than the rest of his fingers. It smelled awful, it was leaking pus, and there was dead tissue. Basically, it was one huge, badly infected finger with cancer. He strongly believed in not taking any kind of medication, including antibiotics or chemo. He died a few weeks later, but he did manage to tell us we were all clueless before he passed away.
27. It’s Measles, Susan
I was working at a pediatric urgent care clinic. A family brought in their unvaccinated 3-year-old son, who has autism, because he had an unusual rash. When I asked about his vaccination status, they couldn’t really explain why he wasn’t vaccinated.
28. Some Extra Skin
I’m a nurse. The number of American guys in their 20s who don’t know what circumcision is seems surprisingly high. Some genuinely think boys are “born circumcised.” For example, I’ve had new fathers (and mothers) ask me what’s wrong with their newborn son’s genitals. I’ll say, “Nothing—he still has his foreskin. Some parents choose to have it removed when the baby is a couple of days old. That’s called circumcision.” And then, more often than you’d think, they ask, “What’s circumcision?” That’s when I just shake my head.
29. Technical Dummy
I had a patient insist, “I didn’t have a heart attack, I had a myocardial infarction.” That’s just the technical term for a heart attack, buddy.
30. Stinky Attitude
I’m not a doctor, but I’m a gastro nurse. We had a repeat patient who was, honestly, a very unusual woman. She had a stoma (an artificial opening into an organ that’s needed for some medical conditions) that smelled awful because, for about 20 years, she hadn’t been cleaning it properly. Every day her stoma appliance would come off, partly because she kept twisting the drain tube and wouldn’t let us change it.
She was also really rude and would shout at us. One night shift I finally hit my limit and snapped at her. I didn’t yell, but I was much more stern than I should’ve been, telling her that if she wouldn’t let me clean and treat her stoma, the MRSA infection she couldn’t get rid of could seriously harm her. Looking back, I didn’t handle it in the best way—but she did let me change the stoma.
The whole time, she kept yelling that her stoma bags weren’t cut to fit, saying they were too small because her stoma was “50 cm by 50 cm.” I told her that wasn’t possible, but she insisted that’s how big it was. While I was cleaning it, she yelled that it hurt and said she just wanted me to put the new one on quickly.
I explained it hurt because it was infected—and because she wasn’t cleaning it. She told me she knew better since she’d had the stoma for almost as long as I’d been alive. Eventually I told her to please stop and let me do my job, and that finally worked. The appliance didn’t come off again during that shift. When she was eventually discharged—after refusing every nearby care placement to the point we were nearly looking into legal options—one of our staff almost cried with relief.
31. Whatcha Gonna Do With All Those Lumps
I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve got a story that fits here. I have a ganglion cyst (pretty harmless) on the inside of my wrist. When it starts getting big, I smack my wrist down on a hard table and it goes away. Later, I developed a similar bump on the top of my foot. I couldn’t smash it down like my wrist, so I tried tapping it with a hammer.
It didn’t help at all, and it kept getting bigger and started interfering with my shoes, so I had it checked out. Turns out it wasn’t a cyst—it was arthritis in the joint. No wonder my hammer idea didn’t work. The radiologist got a kick out of my “treatment,” but told me that if I find any more lumps, I should get them checked instead of trying to fix them by hitting them.
32. Decide for Yourself
My aunt (she has varicose veins, which are pretty obvious to anyone who sees them) once asked me why her legs hurt and what those bluish lines under her skin were. I was about to explain that they were enlarged veins, but she cut me off and decided on her own that they were her nerves. Nerves that were dying. And that the blue stuff was blood clots inside the nerves. I’m a med student.
33. Who Needs That Money?
I was doing a respiratory exam on a man who gets admitted to the general ward pretty often (about once a month) because of breathlessness. He’s had COPD for a couple of years now—pretty severe. He told me he isn’t going to quit smoking because God told him not to. When I asked why, he said the people who depend on him for their daily livelihood wouldn’t make it if he stopped. I asked if he meant the people at the cigarette factory or the healthcare system. He didn’t pick up on the sarcasm, though.
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34. Alternative Doesn’t Mean Better
A patient came to the surgery clinic complaining of a mass in his rectum. I wasn’t there at his first visit. The surgeon wanted to run a couple of tests and recommended that he be admitted, but the patient decided not to.
A couple of months later, he returned to the clinic. In the meantime, he had gone to an alternative medicine place, and for some reason they had tied a metal wire around the mass. By then, the mass had eroded around the wire, was bleeding, and had grown much larger. It turned out to be a cancerous growth.
35. Let the Doctor See You Now
I worked as a unit secretary and nurse aide on a radiation oncology unit in the early 2000s. One day, a patient came in through the ER and was admitted for emergency radiation. She had a fungating mass in her mouth that had taken over much of her face. When the doctor tried to examine her and gently open her mouth, her remaining teeth came loose and fell into his hand.
The tumor had eaten through the facial bones, spread into her eye socket—everything. The doctor said it was the most severe case of oral cancer he’d ever seen. Her husband told us it started as a small lesion on her hard palate (the roof of her mouth). After she was diagnosed with early-stage squamous cell carcinoma, she chose to treat it with essential oils and things like frankincense, believing chemo was poison. Her husband said he tried to talk her out of it, but she was set on the “natural” approach. She passed away in severe pain not long after.
36. Positively Priceless
I’m not a doctor, but I am a medical technologist. I’ve seen plenty of questionable patient moments, but this one happened recently. I did a fingerstick blood test for a patient, made sure the tiny cut stopped bleeding, and put a Band-Aid on it. Then I told her to collect a urine sample for testing. The urine test came back strongly positive (4+) for blood.
She complained to the doctor that there was NO WAY she had blood in her urine, and insisted the blood from the fingerstick must have gotten into the urine and messed up the result. She said it was my fault for doing the blood test before the urine test, and that I’d clearly made a mistake. She repeated the urine test later that afternoon—still 4+. She came back a week later—still 4+. The look on her face when I told her, “Sorry, ma’am, it’s still positive,” was unforgettable.
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37. Nasal Problems
A 70-year-old woman tripped and fell two days ago. She came in with hip pain, but she also said that right after the fall her nose started bleeding—she’d landed on her nose. About a year earlier, her dentist had a problem with an infraorbital nerve block and it caused some swelling in that area, but it had fully resolved.
She became convinced that the nosebleed from falling on her face was connected to an “infection” from that dental issue a year ago. After going back and forth several times about what caused the nosebleed, she ended up being the first patient I raised my voice with and firmly said, “No, that’s not correct—please stop.”
38. Get Glasses
I work at an optometrist’s office. It was the month before school started, and a woman brought in her son to get his eyes checked for the first time. That seems pretty reasonable for any parent, even if he was a bit older than most kids for a first eye exam. Better late than never, I figured. The mom was well-spoken and seemed fairly intelligent.
Everything went normally. The doctor examined the boy and ended up prescribing glasses. He explained to the mom that her son needed to wear them all the time because he’s nearsighted and basically can’t see clearly past five feet in front of him. He would definitely need glasses for school. For some reason, that completely set the mom off. She insisted her son didn’t need glasses and claimed the doctor was only saying that to sell eyewear.
She said she only brought her son in because the school needed a form filled out, and that doctors are all scammers trying to push unnecessary medications and treatments. The doctor tried to calm her down and explain that he was only trying to help, but also said she was welcome to get a second opinion. He gave her a copy of the kid’s prescription and sent them on their way. About four months later, she came back asking for another copy of her son’s prescription. The first semester midterm results had come in, and her son had failed all of them—because he couldn’t see the board in class.
39. Drug-Free
I’m a nurse, and I worked in the operating room at a trauma center. I was in a surgery with a 19-year-old who had tested positive for drugs. He kept grilling the anesthesiologist about every medication we were going to use because he “doesn’t like putting chemicals in his body.” Really committed to that organic, fair-trade, non-GMO cocaine, I guess.
40. Anti-Vaxxer Sources
Med student here…on my pediatrics rotation, a mom refused vaccines for her kid after “educating herself.” When I asked what sources she was using, she replied, “my own brain.” Wonderful.
41. Yahoo Answers
I’m not a doctor, but I am a patient, and my mom was like this. At one point, the doctor had to pull me aside to talk to me because of it. My grandmother has Crohn’s disease—very, very severely. It skipped my mother and her brother. Then when I was 15, over the course of six months, I went from being 5'9” and 190 pounds to 110 pounds.
I was basically a skeleton, extremely anemic, and coughing up blood. My mother was convinced it had to be something else. I had to push her to take me to a doctor, and she started listing off all these different possibilities. Then she went on about what she’d found on Yahoo—not even Google, Yahoo—about genetics and how “Crohn’s can’t skip generations.” The doctor said, “Just in case, we’re going to run some tests.” Long story short, I have Crohn’s in my throat and small intestine. So does my cousin. It really did skip a generation.
42. Denial Is Not Just a River in Egypt
I had a patient come in with several pages he’d printed from the internet. He sort of dropped them on the counter and said, “This is what I have.” He was dealing with bloating, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bloody stool, and fever, among other symptoms. He was convinced it was schistosomiasis. He was pretty rude about it, acting like we were wasting time because he already “knew” the diagnosis.
So I asked him when he’d gotten back from Africa. He said, “Africa? I’ve never been to Africa. Why would I be in Africa?” I explained that schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease people can get from swimming in certain rivers—like the Nile—or in other developing areas, including parts of Southeast Asia. He got upset and thought I was being sarcastic. He was evaluated and ended up being diagnosed with gastroenteritis—just a regular stomach bug. And the bloody stool? Turns out he had hemorrhoids.
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43. Probably Never Heard of it
I was a fourth-year med student seeing patients on clinical rotations. A patient comes in with a long list of chronic conditions he says he has—fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and so on. He’s wearing over-the-counter braces on all of his fingers and both thumbs, plus both wrists, forearms, knees, and shins, because of a rare bone disorder he says he has.
When I tell him I’ve never heard of it, he says, “Well, that doesn’t surprise me—doctors go to med school to learn how to prescribe drugs and make money, not heal people.” Alright. Then he tells me he has a rare disease I’ve probably never even heard of called myalgic encephalomyelitis. True, I hadn’t heard of it. Again he says, “That’s because doctors don’t care about learning about illness and healing—they just care about giving people drugs and getting money from big pharma.” Okay.
I wasn’t invested in this patient thinking I was brilliant, so it didn’t really get under my skin. He keeps “educating” me throughout the visit, and I just keep the conversation going. By the third time he repeats that all doctors go to med school so they can put everyone on meds, I finally say, “Well, lucky for you, pharmacology was my weakest subject!”
That actually makes him laugh, and I listen while he explains all of his rare diseases and disorders. The appointment ends and he leaves. Afterward, I look up myalgic encephalomyelitis. It turns out it’s the British term for chronic fatigue syndrome—which he had already listed.
He has a weekly standing appointment with my attending, and that’s basically the only thing keeping him from going to the local ER every day, sometimes more than once a day. His diagnosis is Illness Anxiety Disorder, although he would tell you it’s 800 other things you’ve obviously never heard of. He insists my attending is the only honest doctor in the country, mostly because he just has him come in once a week and talk through all his symptoms for 20 minutes, and then the patient goes home feeling heard.
The ER doctors love my attending for that. The patient is dealing with mental illness, so I’m not personally offended by his comments, but you’d be surprised how many people come in asking for help while also telling you how terrible doctors are and how they’re all puppets for big pharma. It reminds me of when I worked fast food and someone would say, “Every time I come here you all mess up,” and I’d think, then why do you keep coming back?!
44. What Do Nurses Know?
I’m not a doctor—I’m an RN who works with oncology (cancer) patients, including some who are in clinical trials. I had a patient who, before starting chemotherapy, went over his lab results with me. I told him his glucose was 73. The normal range is usually around 70–100. He got really upset, so I asked, “What’s wrong? Your labs are within the normal range.”
He said, “I need it to be zero.” I said, “What? Why would you want your glucose to be zero?” He told me he was trying to qualify for a new clinical trial that supposedly requires his glucose to be zero. I said, “I don’t know what trial you’re looking at, but if your blood glucose were zero, you’d be extremely sick and in serious danger.”
He still wasn’t convinced because I’m “just a nurse,” so I messaged his doctor and asked them to do more patient education.
45. Dumb Doctor
I’m a physical therapist and vestibular (inner ear/balance) specialist, and I’ve got a pretty frustrating physician story. A patient came in with clear signs of BPPV (benign paroxysmal positional vertigo), a condition where the tiny salt crystals in your inner ear—normally used to help your brain figure out which way is down and how you’re moving—end up in the wrong place and get stuck.
When that happens, your inner ears and your eyes send conflicting information about your position and movement, and you can get extremely dizzy. She’d gone to urgent care, where the doctor told her she had BPPV. For treatment, he told her to go home, lie down with her head hanging off the bed, and have her husband (a retired accountant) shake her head around for five minutes.
Picture being on the most intense rollercoaster you’ve ever ridden, feeling like you’re about to throw up, and then having someone with no medical training shake your head for five straight minutes. She spent the next two days vomiting before she could get in to see me. For context, treating BPPV properly involves a very specific set of movements, plus the right steps before and after—and even when it’s done correctly, some patients may still vomit once afterward.
46. Organic Cigarettes
Paramedic here. I transported a guy who was really set on only using homeopathic medicine, natural/healthy living, etc. He was refusing meds, interventions, and X-rays for that reason. He also smoked a pack a day. The ED doctor called him out on it, saying something like, “You smoke, so you’re not exactly living that homeopathic lifestyle—you’re getting a chest X-ray.”
47. Can’t Control Everything
I had a patient whose Hemoglobin A1C (a blood test used to check for diabetes) was 13, which is very high. He believed he could control how much glucose his liver made using his mind. He also saw himself as very fit and active, and thought that this mental control made him a better athlete than most people because he could boost his glucose production whenever he needed to. He was in the hospital for a diabetic foot ulcer, and part of his foot had to be removed.
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48. DIY Plastic Surgery
A male patient injected cooking oil into his own cheeks after watching a plastic surgery TV show where a surgeon injected something similar into a model. He was surprised that the oil lumps didn’t go away, and that they were becoming red and painful.
49. It's My Poop In A Box
A patient scheduled an appointment and brought in his poop in a box. He was worried about how big it was and whether that was normal. All he really got from the visit was, “Yes, it’s normal. It’s just pretty wide.”
The box was set out with the biohazard waste. The waste pickup guy thought it was a misplaced package and put it on the front desk. The secretary got quite a surprise that day.
50. How Do You Fix It
I was treating cavities on a very nervous 4-year-old. We’d finally gotten into a nice, cooperative groove when her mom—who’d been on her phone—looked up and suddenly noticed I was drilling. She’d been in the room the whole time. I’d already reviewed the treatment with her, and she knew we were fixing cavities. Still, she started muttering and swearing under her breath, saying things like, “You’re drilling holes in her teeth! This is ridiculous—you people are scammers making holes in people’s teeth!”
I stayed calm and said, “Ma’am, if you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer after I’m finished.” Meanwhile I’m shaking with anger, because she was 20 minutes late and I’m bending over backward to make sure her kid has a good experience and doesn’t end up scared of the dentist. When we’re done, the kid hops down, high-fives me, and gives me a big hug.
I turned to the mom and asked what she thought we were supposed to do to fix cavities. She said, “You don’t drill—my mother is a dental assistant.” So I explained, in very detailed terms, the science of removing decay. She just said, “That’s not true.” At that point I told her she could ask her mom, look it up online, or go to dental school if she wanted to learn more—but I wouldn’t be treating her child anymore.
51. The Milk Is For The Baby
I saw a patient who was worried because she was still producing milk, even though she stopped breastfeeding her twins two years ago. She told me, “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my husband nursing. He says he’s trying to help by emptying the milk.” I explained that continued nipple stimulation, including nursing, can keep milk production going.
52. Junk in a Box
A guy came into the ER asking for an ice chest (a cooler full of ice). After a long conversation, we finally pieced together what happened, because his story was all over the place.
He’d gone to a party, met a woman, and they hit it off dancing. She invited him back to her place, and things got intimate. She suggested “taking it up a notch,” and he figured, why not.
She pulled out a syringe and injected something into his genitals to make things last longer. They went on to have a lot of sex. A few days later, he was really sore, and something didn’t feel right. A red spot showed up, then got bigger, darker, and worse over time. Eventually parts started turning black and smelling bad. Instead of getting medical help, he decided to handle it himself—he grabbed a knife and started cutting at the area to try to remove what he thought was dead skin.
Then he hit a nerve. That’s when he changed plans and tried to “treat” it by putting olive oil on it and wrapping it in plastic wrap. More time passed, and while he was in a restaurant bathroom, he pulled his pants down—and the tissue slid off and dropped onto the floor.
He picked it up, got a cup from a vending machine, filled it with ice, and put the tissue in the cup to “keep it fresh.” He walked around like that for a few days, but the cup started to smell, so he finally came to the ER asking for a cooler full of ice.
He was brought back, urology got consulted, and it turned out that when he tried to urinate it was spraying everywhere uncontrollably. The hospital couldn’t let him keep the tissue because it was now a biohazard, but he refused to hand it over—until they agreed to give him a receipt. After that, it was taken away for disposal, and he ended up admitted with a surgical/urology consult.
Moral of the story: don’t inject random substances into your genitals—especially not from strangers, no matter what the situation is.
53. Look it Up in the Dictionary
This happened to my ex-father-in-law, and it’s kind of funny, but also not. He was a surgeon—really gentle and soft-spoken. He went out to tell a patient their biopsy results, and the patient replied, “Praise Jesus, it’s malignant.” He had to explain that “malignant” actually meant it was bad.
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54. One Disease at a Time
A man brought his wife to the ER. She had a 7 cm by 7 cm wound on her leg (a diabetic ulcer) with greenish-yellow pus, and what looked like a few maggots. I took one look and referred her to the surgery team to be admitted. But her husband was fixated on her kidney disease. He said, “But doctor, it’s just a wound—you need to fix her kidneys first. I read online that diabetes can cause kidney failure, so you have to do something about that.” I spent about an hour explaining that, with an infection that severe, she could become critically ill or even die from sepsis long before any kidney damage became the immediate issue.
55. Learning Experience
One day during my pediatric internship, I was covering the general ward. Nothing fancy—just keeping an eye on the kids, handling minor complaints (coughs, shortness of breath, that kind of thing), and assessing new admissions. Where I work, interns are also expected to draw blood from children when tests are needed. So I’m doing my rounds, and there’s this little kid who’s way too energetic and starts bouncing around the moment he sees the needle. His mom shoots me a sharp look and says, “You’re all just poking my child for your own training.” And right then, the kid starts screaming even louder. Because yes, of course—I’m supposedly practicing blood draws at two in the morning by waking up a child. That’s what she believed.
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56. Protect Yourself
A woman walks into the office. The smell of cigarette smoke on her is so strong that I start coughing. Her skin is dry and leathery, and it looks cracked as she talks from years of too much sun. She tells me, “I stopped using sunscreen because I read online that it causes cancer.”
57. Growing Pains
One thing I’ll never forget is the lesson I learned about never getting angry with a patient. This was back when I had just started as an intern. We had a patient with an intestinal obstruction. Since he couldn’t eat or drink anything before surgery, we put in a nasal feeding tube. The issue was that he kept calling me over and complaining that I hadn’t placed it properly.
After two or three times—when I reluctantly went back and did it again—he’d complain that the tube had come out of his nose, and sure enough, it had. Those tubes are really uncomfortable, and many patients try to pull them out. I ended up replacing it about four times. By then, the poor man was completely fed up.
On the morning of surgery, his wife came to me and said, “Doctor, can you just take that tube out so I can give him some coffee?”
I lost my temper. I was in the middle of a 72-hour shift, and I snapped at her, saying that if they didn’t want the surgery, there was nothing I could do—and that I really needed some peace. She didn’t respond.
The patient, a 50-year-old with no other complications, died on the table. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to face her.
The takeaway is that doctors often understand things patients don’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s ever a good idea to speak harshly. I could have calmly explained why removing the tube before surgery wasn’t an option. Since then, I’ve tried to communicate better with patients and their families.
58. Very Superstitious
I’m still just a medical student, but our hospital treats a lot of patients who are poor and haven’t had much access to education, since we’re a big tertiary hospital in a developing country. The hardest cases for me so far are the older women in the family who everyone turns to for health advice, mostly just because they’re the elders. They often have a lot of superstitions, and sometimes those beliefs end up contributing to the patient’s condition in the first place.
One time, a baby was brought to the ER with a severe oral infection. The mother also clearly hadn’t bathed since delivery—there’s a common belief here that new mothers shouldn’t bathe for about a week postpartum—so we suspected that might have played a role. While we were assessing the baby, the grandmother hovered in the background and felt the need to comment on everything we were doing—keeping in mind she was probably the one who told her daughter not to bathe.
I ended up having to firmly ask her to stop because: (A) it was late, and everyone was running out of patience in our understaffed, under-equipped ER; and (B) they were more worried that the device monitoring the baby’s oxygen was hurting the baby’s tiny toes, while there was visible pus coming from the baby’s badly inflamed salivary glands. And yes, I understand that infections like this are often tied to poverty, and that limited education reflects a larger systemic problem that society keeps failing to address—but it can still be really frustrating in the moment.
59. Flea Treatment
I’ve got one. I heard this from a friend of mine who’s a doctor on the children’s ward at a rural hospital. Some parents brought in their child because their hair was infested with lice. The lice were visible to the naked eye, and staff could even see them crawling on the child’s clothing. While the medical team examined the child to figure out what to do next, they noticed the child was coated in a white powder and had a strong chemical smell.
They asked the parents what the powder was and why the child smelled like that. The parents said, very casually, that it was Sevin powder (a garden insecticide) and the flea-and-tick spray they use on their dogs on the family farm. As you’d expect, the hospital notified social services about the situation.
60. Take One Apiece
One day at the pharmacy, a girl came up to the counter asking for a refill on her birth control. We pulled up her profile and saw we couldn’t refill it because she’d just gotten a 28-day supply less than two weeks earlier. When we asked what happened to the pack she was given, she said she was already out. It turned out she and her boyfriend had both been taking one pill a day, and she was convinced that’s how they were supposed to prevent pregnancy.
61. Skipping Meals
We had a patient admitted to our hospital for treatment of anorexia, which, as usual, she didn’t want. Still, she seemed to be eating the meals that were prescribed for her. After a few days, it became clear she wasn’t gaining any weight. But her room was clean, and she was supervised during bathroom visits, so we knew she wasn’t getting rid of the food that way.
It turned out her family was going through a really hard time. Her dad had fallen on tough luck and had no money. So when he came to visit his daughter in the hospital every day, he was eating the food meant for her because he couldn’t afford to feed himself. Mealtimes were unsupervised if a family member was present. Once the daughter finally admitted what was happening, the hospital stopped the dad from visiting.
62. Allergic to Everything
Registered nurse here. I see some pretty wild things, but one that really sticks with me was the time I was admitting a guy to the hospital. I honestly can’t remember what he came in for, but he was diabetic, had heart disease, and was generally in poor health. Anyway, I’m at the computer going through the admission questions with him, and his 10 family members are packed into the room with us.
A few minutes in, he starts complaining that he’s thirsty—he needs something to drink right now. So I pull out my phone, call the nurse assistant, and ask her to bring some ice water. The second I say it, the whole family yells, “NO! NO WATER! HE’S ALLERGIC TO WATER!” Well… that was going to be an issue.
Turns out the guy had been drinking nothing but Sprite and sweet tea for years because of his “water allergy.” Then his wife asks, “So where are we all supposed to sleep?” The whole family—10 people—was planning to stay at the hospital with him. You really can’t make this up.
63. A Flesh Wound
I heard this from a friend of mine who’s an ER doctor a while back. A female patient came in complaining of severe abdominal pain. The nurses took her vitals, asked the usual questions, and went through the standard routine. Eventually my friend went in to see her, and after a few questions, he asked her to lift her shirt.
What was listed as “severe abdominal pain” on the chart turned out to be a cut so bad that part of her intestines were actually protruding. Somehow no one had noticed, and she hadn’t thought to mention that it had gotten to that point. She honestly seemed just as surprised as he was.
64. Not Fazed by Basal Cell Carcinoma
A woman came in, and a large part of her face had been severely damaged by basal cell carcinoma. One of her eyes was completely gone. She told us it had been like that for years. And here’s the surprising part: that wasn’t even why she came to the hospital. She came in because she had an umbilical hernia about the size of a basketball that had been there for months, and after she started vomiting over the past week, she finally went to the emergency department.
