There's not a lot that goes to plan in a doctor's office, or an emergency room, or on an operating table. Still, these medical surprises take the cake. Get ready for anything but a routine examination.
1. A Telenovela Evening
One night while I was working in the emergency room, a patient came in because she’d noticed blood in her underwear. She said she’d been bleeding for two days and had some mild pain. She thought it had started after her female partner had been “a little rough” during their last intimate encounter. But her exam showed something completely different.
She had a severe tear in her genital area. I almost gasped, because the injury didn’t match what she was describing at all; it looked like trauma from a difficult childbirth. The story didn’t fit the extent of the damage, so I ordered more testing, including a urine pregnancy test. When it came back positive, things became much more complicated, especially considering her relationship.
It turned out she had secretly delivered a baby two days earlier and hadn’t told anyone. She had hidden the baby from both her family and her girlfriend. Soon, everyone from child protective services to pediatrics was involved. They found the baby in her apartment under some towels, and it became a very long night of paperwork. Her parents eventually adopted the infant, and as far as I know, they’re still the child’s guardians.
2. We Almost Threw In The Towel
I worked on an internal medicine ward just outside New York City. We had a 55-year-old woman, who was mute, come into the emergency department. She was badly constipated, in significant abdominal pain, and looked seriously unwell. She was reluctantly admitted to surgery. Then, the next morning during rounds, she was suddenly talking nonstop, giving detailed answers about her diet, symptoms, family, and everything else.
By the afternoon, she had gone back to being mute, and the abdominal pain and constipation were back too. Two days later, the exact same pattern happened again. The medical team was baffled. She couldn’t believe we hadn’t figured it out, and honestly, neither could we.
Her labs, scans, and specialist consults all came back without answers. When the strange truth finally came out, I could barely believe it. She had strict monitoring of intake and output, along with close dietary restrictions, and we were trying everything we could think of. Then the janitor happened to mention being annoyed that he had to keep refilling the paper towels in her room.
It turned out this one patient was taking nearly all of them. Sure enough, she had been eating around 2,500 paper towels in 24 hours. Psychiatry was called in for the expected consult, and naturally, she went back to being mute. We eventually got her to speak—and complete a psych evaluation—one paper towel at a time.
3. Malpractice Much?
When my daughter was three months old, she suddenly changed from a perfectly healthy baby into one who was frequently projectile vomiting. She also became lethargic and would sometimes seem strange and distant.
Every time I called her pediatrician, he suggested something new: reflux medication, allergies, and so on. Finally, I lost my patience and demanded that he test her for everything. He told me he had.
He also mentioned that her head seemed swollen, but brushed it off after saying the ultrasound “showed nothing,” then sent us home with yet another reflux medication. Two weeks later, my worst fear happened: my daughter had a seizure.
I rushed her to the hospital, where a CT scan showed swelling in her brain. The ultrasound technician had missed the hemorrhage by about an inch and a half. Then came the worst part. I later learned that my doctor had started changing my daughter’s medical records afterward to make it appear he had recognized the problem from the beginning.
4. It’s Just A Scratch
I’m a nurse, and I was working in the ER when I had one of those “What just happened". moments. A man came in because of a scratch on his neck and said he was “feeling drowsy". We started the usual workup. Then something completely unexpected happened. His blood pressure suddenly crashed. We rushed to do everything we could, but he passed on within ten minutes of walking through the door.
It turned out the “scratch” on his neck was actually the exit wound from a .22-caliber. He didn’t even realize he had been shot. When the coroner’s report came back, we learned the round had entered through his leg and ricocheted through his torso, destroying everything in its path. There truly wasn’t anything we could have done.
5. The Missing Piece
In 1983, I was a medical resident in New England. We had a patient admitted for better management of end-stage renal disease caused by diabetes. The patient had already undergone an above-the-knee leg amputation six months earlier at another hospital because of vascular disease.
The patient was married, and they had a 19-year-old child. Then a truly startling detail came out. The patient’s wife explained that one month earlier, she had discovered that her husband—a former construction worker and truck driver—was actually a woman who had been presenting as a man for decades. I was present during the wife’s interview with a psychiatrist, and she insisted she had never known.
She had already been pregnant when they met, and when asked about their intimate life, she said, “I don’t know, but he managed". The patient had undergone an above-the-knee amputation, which would have required skin preparation and disinfection. I still don’t understand how no one noticed that this “man” did not have typical male anatomy.
6. Keep Your Mouth Shut
I was the patient in this story. My reckless surgeon would probably never tell it himself, so I’ll tell it for him. When I was 18, I had to have an impacted wisdom tooth removed. I went to an oral surgeon who told me the tooth was pretty much fully developed. He said I’d need general anesthesia so he could break the tooth apart and remove it. It all sounded pretty standard.
On the day of the surgery, I went in expecting everything to go smoothly. I had arranged for my mother to pick me up a couple of hours later because I wouldn’t be able to drive after the anesthesia. When she got there, the staff told her I was still in surgery. After almost two more hours of waiting, she felt like something was wrong and called my father right away.
My father came in, and the staff told him the same thing: I was still in surgery. Eventually, my parents insisted on seeing me and threatened to call the police. That’s when the staff finally told them what had happened. The surgeon had accidentally broken my jaw. Apparently, instead of breaking up my wisdom tooth, he had tried to remove it in one piece.
On the very first tooth, he fractured my mandible. It shifted up into the muscles in the back of my cheek and pressed against two nerves. Panicking, this surgeon wired my jaw shut. He didn’t ask my next of kin for consent about what to do next, and he didn’t even take an X-ray. As I later learned, the reason you take an X-ray is to make sure the bone is aligned correctly. Mine wasn’t.
Over the next two weeks, the bone didn’t heal because it hadn’t been set properly. It slowly cut through my trigeminal nerve, destroying feeling in the lower right side of my face. I looked like I’d had a stroke because I had so little control over that side. It has improved somewhat since then and moves mostly in sync with the rest of my face, but I still don’t have the control I should.
It was probably the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I was taking liquid Vicodin every two hours because, of course, my jaw was wired shut. I could barely sleep and needed help doing basic things like climbing stairs and going to the bathroom because of the pain and the medication. It was unbearable.
We eventually found another doctor to repair my jaw. He had to reset the bone, which took about six hours of surgery and required a two-night hospital stay. The bone was so badly out of place that he had to put in a plate and seven screws just to stabilize it. He also had to keep my jaw wired shut for another ten weeks while it healed. But that still wasn’t the worst part—later I was told the nerve damage was permanent.
The original doctor who broke my jaw refused to accept responsibility or cover any of the damages. I assume his lawyer advised him never to admit he’d made a mistake. So I sued him. In his deposition, he claimed he had broken up the tooth, which he hadn’t. I still had the tooth, which proved he was lying, and after that we settled for the amount of the damages.
About 75% of the settlement ended up going to legal fees and related costs, so financially I still came out behind. But at least I ended up with a dramatic scar on my neck from the surgery—and I still have my other three wisdom teeth, so there’s that.
7. Hello, Doctor Dad
During a rotation in pediatric radiology, we had a father bring in his young son. The boy, who was about five, wasn’t eating properly and was vomiting a lot. Unsurprisingly, he was very thin. I looked through his chart and saw that he’d been in and out of the hospital for the same issue over the past six months, but no one had figured out the cause.
The chart also said the father thought his son might have swallowed something, but since the symptoms were so vague, that possibility had never really been pursued. By the time they came to me, someone must have decided to revisit that suspicion because they were sent for a functional fluoroscopy. The first image I took completely stunned me: there was a button battery lodged in the child’s esophagus.
His father was so relieved that they had finally found the reason for his son’s problems that his eyes filled with tears. Later, I checked the chart again and found out that the battery had been removed endoscopically that same day. There was already significant inflammation in the esophagus from leaking battery acid.
It’s wild to think that this child’s father had suspected something like this from the very beginning, yet it took half a year before anyone seriously investigated it. That case taught me a lot about how easy it is to underestimate people. I constantly remind myself to treat every patient equally, even in my own mind.
8. Off Like A Rocket
I was assisting with a C-section for a mother who had been in labor for hours. The baby wouldn’t come out through the incision we’d made, so we applied a little more pressure—and suddenly, whoosh, the baby shot out like a torpedo, completely slick with fluids. She slid across the surgical drape, which felt basically like a Slip ’N Slide, and nearly launched right off the table.
A nurse caught the baby by one foot and lifted her up upside down like something out of an old cartoon, but almost lost her grip again. Thankfully, the midwife was ready with a towel and caught the baby so she could be wrapped up safely. The parents seemed to think everything was perfectly normal and didn’t notice anything unusual, but my colleague and I just looked at each other in complete horror.
I still shudder when I think about how close that baby came to hitting the floor headfirst. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
9. Too Close For Comfort
For two days, my sister suffered terrible abdominal pain. Her stomach was extremely swollen, and the pain was so intense that she kept vomiting. She couldn’t even walk, so her husband had to pull her across the apartment on a blanket just so she could get to the bathroom.
We live in Switzerland, and her insurance requires a phone call first to decide whether someone needs medical care. On the phone, they brushed it off as a stomach bug. When she said she was in extreme pain, the operator asked whether she felt like she was about to pass, and my sister said no.
It’s worth mentioning that we had a rough childhood, which left us with a very high pain tolerance. The next day, she refused to call the insurance line again and instead went straight to her doctor. After an ultrasound, they immediately had her flown by helicopter to a hospital because she lives in a remote mountain area.
At the hospital, she needed emergency surgery and blood transfusions. It turned out she had lost over a liter of blood because of a ruptured fallopian tube caused by an ectopic pregnancy. If they had waited any longer, she would not have survived the day.
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10. So That’s Why Anesthesiologists Get Paid So Much
During my anesthesia rotation, we had a spine surgery patient who needed all of his anesthesia through an IV because gas anesthesia interferes with neurological monitoring. He was a very difficult IV placement, but eventually we managed to get one in. The anesthesia was given through the IV, and as usual, the patient was also given paralytics.
Then everything went wrong very quickly. When we turned the patient onto his stomach, the IV came out. The fast-acting anesthetics were starting to wear off while he was still paralyzed. Five people were desperately trying to get another IV in while, at the same time, his heart rate and breathing rate started climbing, which suggested he wasn’t under enough anesthesia.
I ended up turning on anesthetic gas for a few minutes. It delayed the surgery a little, but it was absolutely necessary. At that point, all we could do was hope that the medication that causes temporary amnesia was still working. When the patient woke up after surgery, the anesthesiologist leaned over him and nervously asked, “Hey, buddy… so, how did the surgery go".
Thankfully, the patient remembered nothing. Anesthesiologists can often tell when a patient is experiencing pain and adjust medication accordingly. A patient waking up during surgery is about the worst-case scenario imaginable—not just because of legal consequences, but because of the psychological trauma it can cause.
11. The Tell-Tale Signs
I was the patient on the operating table when this happened. A few years ago, I was in labor for 28 hours and pushing for six when my baby started showing signs of distress. His heart rate was a little high. My hospital midwife told me the doctor was coming in to check whether a vacuum assist might help.
She examined me, and then I saw something terrifying. She immediately stood up with blood on her hand and said, “We’re going to the operating room now". Right then, I got that distant, tunnel-vision feeling I recognize as shock. I was anxious, but I trusted that she knew what she was doing. She did. We were in the OR eight minutes later, and when they opened me up, I heard the surgeon say, “Oh God. Look at this".
They had seen blood in my catheter bag, and once they fully opened me up, they found that my son was actually trying to come through my uterus. He had ruptured it. They got him out, but those moments when he was silent and not crying felt endless. Then he cried, and he was completely healthy. After I woke up and got back to my room, the doctor came in and explained everything. I knew a ruptured uterus was serious, but unfortunately I looked it up online and immediately had a huge anxiety attack.
A ruptured uterus is incredibly rare and often deadly. I read that from the moment it happens, you may have only about 15 minutes before the mother bleeds out and the baby is lost. At my follow-up appointment, my midwife told me she had never seen it happen before, and that a few days after my delivery, the whole team got together to review my case because it was such a major event.
I was so lucky that I chose to give birth in a hospital, and that the doctor could tell from my vitals and my baby’s that something was wrong. They just didn’t know exactly what until surgery. I can’t even describe how grateful I am to Dr. S. You saved my life, my son’s life, and our family will always be thankful.
12. Hit Right Between The Eyes
When I was about ten years old, I lived deep in rural Louisiana. It wasn’t unusual for kids to help with heavy chores. One day, my neighbor, who was around my age, was chopping wood with a double-bit axe. All of a sudden, the axe head flew off during an upward swing and lodged right between his eyes, straight into his forehead.
He turned and looked at me, completely confused. I started screaming right away. Neither of our parents was nearby, but there was a fire station about two blocks away. I walked him there, holding his hand, while he looked around in a daze with an axe head sticking out of his forehead.
The firefighters were stunned and rushed him to the ER in a firetruck. Since our parents weren’t there, I got to ride with him and stayed in the ER with one of the firefighters until both families arrived. It turned out the axe had lodged right between the two hemispheres of his brain, and he had come within inches of permanent brain damage. Thankfully, he ended up being okay.
13. Now There’s A Plot Twist
Psychiatrist here. This happened during my residency, when I was working in a short-stay psychiatric unit, mostly for acute psychosis. There was a woman who had been there for a while because she believed the Russian mob was after her. She had paranoid delusions, hallucinations—the whole picture.
Her family confirmed that no one was actually following her and that these situations were part of her illness. She had been on medication for a while, and her symptoms had improved a lot.
She no longer believed she was in danger or being hunted, and everything seemed to be going well—or so we thought. Following standard procedure, the staff contacted her family so she could start spending weekends with them before being fully discharged. On her first weekend away from the hospital, she was actually kidnapped by the Russian mob.
It turned out this was related to a huge debt that no one in her family knew about. Fortunately, there was a happy ending. She was found and brought to safety pretty quickly because we had already contacted law enforcement about her “delusions” just in case, so they responded fast when she disappeared. And yes, several people were arrested, and thankfully a number of other women were rescued as well. In the end, it was an unexpectedly satisfying outcome.
14. What Lies Beneath
My mom had to have a kidney removed after waiting nearly two years to see a doctor about pain in her back. The doctors discovered it was a large kidney stone, and that the kidney was badly infected and full of pus, to the point that it had basically stopped working. After draining the infection with tubes, she was finally cleared for surgery.
Then came last Wednesday, the day of the operation. She was ready to finally be done with all of it. They removed the stent and placed the tubes without any trouble, and next came the kidney. That’s when the “Oh God” moment happened. As they prepared to remove it, they realized the infection had spread to part of her lung and to a major artery, leaving those tissues dangerously fragile.
As the surgeon removed the kidney, he tore a hole in the lung, and even worse, he cut the artery. At that point, it became a race to save her life and get her stable. I don’t remember all the details of how they managed things in that moment, but they had to airlift her to another hospital, where a heart surgeon repaired the artery properly.
The heart surgeon saw how serious it was and said she had only a 1% chance of surviving. But he did an incredible job, and my mom is still here and getting stronger every day. The lesson here is simple: if you have access to medical care and you’re in pain, go to a doctor as soon as you can. It might save your life—and spare some doctors from a moment like this.
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15. This Guy Was Dy-no-mite!
When I was working as a medical technician in the ER, we had a man around 75 years old come in with extremely low blood pressure and heavy bruising on his face and upper body. EMS brought him in after staff at his nursing home found him on the floor of his room, with some blood on the wall nearby. He wouldn’t tell us why he was there, but he was more than happy to chat about almost anything else—sports, current events, whatever.
We couldn’t figure out what had happened. We found no internal bleeding, his fluid levels looked fine, and he hadn’t left the nursing home, so there was no obvious cause for such major injuries. When he finally explained, I could hardly believe it. After about four hours, we got him to open up, and he admitted he had wanted to end his life. He had taken the rest of his prescribed nitroglycerin, which he used for chest pain and which lowers blood pressure very quickly.
Nitroglycerin is also related to the explosive compound used in TNT, though the amount in those pills is tiny compared to actual explosives. The man had tried to make himself explode by repeatedly slamming himself into the wall. He was actually a very kind person, and after everything, he even sent us a card. He was just deeply lonely.
16. The Lung And Short Of It
I admitted a man with pneumonia, which seemed unusual because he was young, strong, and otherwise healthy. It didn’t take long for me to sense that something was off. The X-ray didn’t look quite right, and the whole picture just wasn’t adding up, so I started asking more detailed questions. I asked if he used illicit substances, and he immediately said, “That’s disgusting. I’m not some user. I’ve never touched that in my life".
So I moved on, but then a moment later he said, “Look, doc, I just want you to know I may have used some hard stuff once or twice, years ago. That wouldn’t cause this, right". I asked, “How long ago". He said, “Like ten years, maybe more". I told him, “No, that wouldn’t still be affecting you after all that time".
Then he said, “More like five". I asked, “Years". He said, “Uh, more like five months ago". This went on and on until he finally admitted he had just come off a huge binge the day before, after spending three days in a hotel with some “fast women". Then he added, “But I don’t want you to think I’m one of those people".
I didn’t think he was “one of those people". I thought he was making bad choices, lying, and being treated for pneumonia instead of getting the right treatment for crack lung, which is what he actually had. I truly didn’t care about judging him. I wasn’t his mother, partner, or pastor. I just didn’t want him wasting my time and putting his health at greater risk by lying. Whatever deeply embarrassing thing you think is too shameful to mention, I promise I’ve heard worse.
17. Can You Feel The Rage Tonight?
Around 14 to 16 weeks into my pregnancy, I started feeling unusually full. It was like I had a basketball in my stomach. Breathing became difficult, and eventually I couldn’t even walk a block without stopping to squat down and rest because I felt so weighed down by that “basketball” sensation.
I even had to sleep sitting up on the couch because I couldn’t breathe if I lay down. Around the same time, other strange things started happening that just didn’t feel right. I brought all of it up to my doctor—three separate times—and each time she brushed it off.
Even when I asked her if she was sure. That should have been my first warning sign: if I didn’t feel confident in my doctor, I should have left then and found someone else. At 23 weeks, I started leaking fluid and was sent to the hospital.
The doctors there were shocked to discover that my doctor had missed a serious condition: twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. They had me flown by helicopter to another hospital for surgery, but by then it was too late. The twins were born alive, but we lost them about an hour later.
After that, I had to undergo another surgery and ended up in the ICU because I wasn’t doing well. So yes, my doctor made a terrible mistake.
18. All Choked Up
I was a medic in the Army. For a while, I worked in a clinic that only treated trainees. Most of the people who came in fell somewhere on a spectrum: either they were trying to get out of training, or they insisted, “I’m fine, but they made me come". We saw a lot more of the first group, but I’ll always remember one patient from the second group. He had been made to come in after an injury.
He didn’t want to miss any training, but while he was telling us about his ankle pain, the PA I was working with cut in and asked if his throat hurt, because he sounded like his airway was partly blocked. He admitted it did, but he was still determined not to miss training over a sore throat. Once we looked, we realized he had a tonsillar abscess.
19. Talk About Looking On The Bright Side
I started having a problem where printed words looked wavy when I used my right eye. It was almost like looking into a funhouse mirror. Every so often I’d also lose part of my vision in one corner of that eye, but if I blinked, it would come back.
My father had a spontaneous retinal tear in his late twenties, and I’m in my mid-thirties, so I had a pretty good idea of what might be happening. I went to the eye doctor and told her I suspected a retinal tear. She did all the usual tests, then asked if I was stressed. I said yes, work had been especially rough lately.
She told me my optic nerve was inflamed but said she didn’t see any retinal problem. Then she suggested it might be stress-related and prescribed steroid eye drops. Unsurprisingly, they did nothing. After about two weeks, I called back and told her the symptoms were still happening.
She said she doesn’t refer patients to specialists, but that I could come in for another exam. I said, “Wait, should I be seeing a specialist". She got very quiet, then tried to get me to book another appointment. I didn’t.
Instead, I found a local retina specialist myself and begged the front desk to see me without a referral. By then, I had already lost about 30 percent of the vision in the upper left part of that eye. The diagnosis: retinal detachment. The specialist couldn’t understand why I had waited so long to come in.
He also couldn’t understand how the original eye doctor had missed it. I was sent straight into emergency surgery. Over the next year, I had three more procedures on that eye, including cataract surgery, and I still only have 20/200 vision in it, along with a large blind spot in the center caused by optic nerve damage.
I’m not technically blind in that eye, but functionally, I am. At least my new eye doctor is far more capable.
20. I Can See Clearly Now
I was performing a corneal transplant when I had the “oh no” moment. During the procedure, I removed the patient’s damaged cornea and prepared to replace it with a donor cornea. In the brief moment after the original cornea is off and before the new one is stitched in, there is literally nothing covering the front of the eye except a thin tear film. Right then, the patient started vomiting.
That’s exactly why we tell people not to eat or drink beforehand—so they don’t aspirate if they get sick during surgery. This patient had lied about eating breakfast and then vomited all of it up. At that point, the eye was still completely open. Everything inside the eye could potentially come out. And she was moving and vomiting at the same time. It was awful. I had to grab the donor cornea and start stitching as fast as I could while the patient was actively throwing up.
Please don’t lie about eating breakfast before surgery.
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21. It’s Hard To Be Humble
I work in behavioral health, and one of our emergency department providers requested a psychiatric evaluation after a woman came in for a medical issue and then said her gynecologist was obsessively in love with her and stalking her.
The ED provider said that seemed very unlikely because he knew the gynecologist personally. Because of that, we seriously doubted the woman’s story. But after we finished the evaluation, she showed us her phone. The moment I looked at the screen, I felt a chill. There really were countless texts and pictures that proved she was telling the truth.
22. The Cupboard Was Not Bare
There was a patient who was supposed to provide a stool sample. The patient said they hadn’t been able to poop for a week. They were being observed and were given things to help, but still nothing happened. Then a healthcare aide came in to check the room. While making sure everything was in order, he noticed the room smelled a little more like poop than it should have.
He checked the bedpan, but it was empty. He asked the patient, “Did you have a bowel movement". The patient said, “No, I can’t poop". The aide was confused but kept tidying the room until he found where the smell was coming from. When he opened one of the cabinets, he found several days’ worth of poop. The patient had been going in her hand and hiding it in the cabinet. Why? No one knows.
23. Make Mine A Double!
When I was 13, I went to the dentist to have my wisdom teeth removed, and the surgeon was someone I had never met before. He told me I fit the age range for one dose of anesthesia, but my size and weight suggested I needed a much larger one.
Even though I told him he really should use the bigger dose since I weighed 90 kg (200 lb) at the time, he went with the smaller one. Halfway through the procedure, I woke up at the exact moment he was pulling out the first tooth.
I mostly just felt pressure, but once the tooth was out, I remember asking if he was finished yet. He and my regular dentist nearly jumped out of their skin. The surgeon rushed to give me more anesthesia while shouting, “Nope! Go back to sleep".
When I woke up after everything was over, the first thing I said was, “I told you I needed a double dose". Apparently I was clear-headed enough to brag about being right. According to my mom, I didn’t start acting loopy until we got in the car to go home.
24. Self-Inflicted Lies
I was a paramedic, and we got a call about a woman who had been shot. When we arrived, she had a single bullet wound in her right thigh with very little bleeding. She was standing and limping while talking to police. She was polite, calm, and thanked us for coming to help. She said she had been walking through the parking lot of a restaurant when she saw a blue car drive by.
Then, she said, someone leaned out and started shooting, and that’s when she felt something hit her leg. We helped her into the ambulance, and I bandaged the wound. I gave her pain medication, and we headed to the hospital. She joked that she had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was having terrible luck. She answered all our questions with “Yes sir” and “No sir,” even though I told her that wasn’t necessary.
We got to the ER, and I was giving my report to the trauma team when one of the officers from the scene quietly stepped into the room. As I was repeating the patient’s story to the doctors, the officer got a huge grin on his face and motioned for me to step outside. That’s when the real story came out. He told me that right after we left, a blue car pulled up and gave officers a reason to check the restaurant’s security cameras.
When they reviewed the footage, they saw my patient inside the restaurant suddenly start yelling at the person who had been driving the blue car. That person left the restaurant trying to get away, and my patient ran after her. The parking lot video showed my patient go to her own vehicle, take out a pistol, and start running after the other person. Then there was a flash on the camera, and my patient began limping. She had shot herself in the leg.
25. Take Heed
I had a severe abdominal infection that may very well have been caused by the hospital. It was a particularly nasty strain of E. coli, so they treated me with Invanz. I was a broke college student without insurance. Invanz is expensive, so after four weeks they told me I was finished with treatment.
I was relieved because the Invanz made me feel completely drained. But there was one problem: I knew something was still wrong, and the infectious disease doctor brushed off my concerns. On top of that, I was scared to go back and end up with an even bigger hospital bill. Still, I started to realize how serious it was when I couldn’t even fit into my “fat jeans".
I was so bloated because my abdomen was still full of infection. I went back and insisted they take a closer look. They operated, drained FOUR abscesses instead of just one, and in the process completely destroyed my fertility. And somehow it got even worse: they wanted to charge me $320,000 for a mistake they made.
I should have sued them, but I was too shaken by the whole experience to do anything. Moral of the story: don’t let fear of medical bills stop you from protecting your health, and don’t ignore your body when it tells you something is wrong just because a doctor says otherwise.
26. It All Comes Down
My dad had triple bypass surgery in 2011, and just as they were about to finish, a ceiling vent fell down and contaminated everything. When he finally came out of surgery, he looked almost blue because they had disinfected him so thoroughly. The surgeon, who was a former Army doctor, came out absolutely furious.
He basically told us that if my dad ended up with any kind of post-op infection, the hospital would be in serious trouble. Thankfully, my dad recovered just fine and is still with us, healthier than he had been in quite a while. From what we heard, the maintenance crew got a major dressing-down, and people at the hospital still tell the story.
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27. Those “Dramatic” Teens
I’m a paramedic, and I once responded to a call about a 16-year-old girl who had suddenly stopped responding while watching a movie on the couch with her boyfriend. She was just staring straight ahead. It was one of those “lights on, but nobody’s home” situations. The whole room also felt a little off. Her boyfriend kept giving her odd looks, and her mom and aunt were praying over her. All of her vital signs were normal.
I had a strong feeling she was doing it for attention, because a lot of calls like that turn out to be dramatic behavior rather than a true emergency. On the way to the hospital, I tried something new. I said, “I think you may be pretending. I need you to stop and talk to me honestly so we can figure out how to help you". Her heart rate went up, and her blood pressure increased too. I thought, “Got it".
I explained my thinking to her mom, and while she wasn’t fully convinced, she understood where I was coming from. I still can’t believe how wrong I was. Her mom called a week later to say they had found a brain tumor. It was a very humbling experience. Never let personal bias affect your clinical judgment.
28. Nailed It!
A patient came in with chest pain and said they had fallen and hit their chest on a table. An X-ray was ordered to check for a rib fracture or a collapsed lung. Instead, it showed a long metal object in the left side of the chest, actually inside the heart. When asked again, the patient admitted they had lied and said they had really shot themselves in the chest with a nail gun. The wound wasn’t bleeding and was barely noticeable. They were taken to the operating room and ended up doing very well after open-heart surgery.
29. The Next Doogie Howser, MD
When I was five, I had severe migraines every day for almost a year and a half. I went through countless scans and had three spinal taps in one month, which, from what I understand, is extremely risky.
After a long, frustrating year of doctors not knowing what was wrong and probably thinking I was faking, we finally got an answer in a surprising way. We were at an eye appointment for my brother, and my goofy five-year-old self insisted that the eye doctor check me too because I wanted to be like my big brother.
The doctor looked into my eye and could tell there was a major buildup of fluid in my brain. Less than two weeks later, I had a shunt placed in my head. I was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, which happens when fluid can’t drain properly. The only cause we could come up with was a baseball that had hit the back of my neck earlier that year.
I’m sure that doctor has passed away by now, but he probably saved not just my quality of life, but possibly my life.
30. Her Story Was The Pits
A woman came in with blood in her urine, which can be a sign of bladder cancer. Scans are not especially reliable for that, so the usual next step is to pass a camera through the urethra and look directly into the bladder. I was a junior doctor at the time and was learning how to do the procedure, so I was being supervised.
I got the camera in and at first couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. When I realized it, I almost screamed. Her bladder was full of citrus seeds. There had to be at least 50, probably more. So I said, “Why are you putting fruit seeds in your bladder? That’s a bad idea, and we’re going to have to remove them".
She replied, “I haven’t done that. I wouldn’t. But I do eat a lot of fruit, so that must be where they came from". Which is impossible, by the way. At that point my supervisor stepped in and became more and more frustrated because she refused to admit she had inserted them. She stuck to her story that they came from her diet.
31. Can’t Be Too Careful
This happened when my daughter was a baby and it was time for her first round of vaccines. While we were waiting for the doctor, I read the pamphlet they handed me. It listed each vaccine children get and the ages when they’re supposed to receive them. After a while, the doctor came in with a vial and set it on the counter.
As he prepared the needle, I looked at the vial and immediately felt uneasy. It didn’t match the pamphlet. I told him he had the wrong vial, but he brushed me off. Maybe he assumed I was being difficult or that I didn’t know what I was talking about—I’m not sure.
It got to the point where I actually had to physically stop him from giving my baby the wrong shot. I handed him the pamphlet and showed him. He looked really irritated with me. But it turned out I was right, and somehow he had the wrong birth date listed for my daughter.
He gave her the correct vaccine after that, but we decided it was probably best to switch doctors.
32. On The Right Tack
I was in medical school doing my radiology rotation with an interventional group. They did some incredibly interesting work. One day, we were doing a procedure that involved sedation, so the patient had to stay a while to recover. Everything had gone smoothly, and I went back to the reading room with the doctor to catch up on films.
We sat down at the viewing box. This was back when everything was still on film, so we had a large auto-rotator that would spin the next image into place. At the end of the procedure, they had taken a film of the whole abdomen to make sure nothing serious had happened. Right then, the tech who had assisted with the case came back. The full abdominal image appeared, and all three of us tilted our heads, completely puzzled.
There were three bright white objects down in the pelvis: one circular, one more oval-shaped, and one T-shaped. They were all about the same size and close together. The tech asked, “What are those". The radiologist was stumped. Being new to medicine and still thinking a bit like a kid, I said, “I think those are push pins".
At first we went back and forth, thinking, “No way, that can’t be right,” then wondering where in the office we even kept push pins and how they could have ended up on the patient before we draped him. Then I finally said, “They could be inside him". Unfortunately, we didn’t have a lateral image, so there was no way to know for certain. The radiologist then started trying to figure out why anyone would swallow push pins and how long they might have been there.
After a couple of minutes of this, I came to an uncomfortable conclusion. “You know, there’s a much shorter route to where they are". In other words, he may have inserted them himself. There was a long silence. Then someone said, “Well, somebody is going to have to tell him what we found. He can’t leave until we know what that is". The radiologist and I looked at each other, then at the tech. He sighed and reluctantly walked out to the recovery room.
A few minutes later, he came back looking completely pale. I asked, “What did he say". He replied, “I told him the procedure went well, no complications, stents were in place, and everything looked good. Then I explained that we took one final image to be thorough, and when we reviewed it, we noticed some metallic-looking objects that seemed to be in the pelvis.
“‘They aren’t anything we normally use during the procedure, and we weren’t sure whether they were on top of or inside your pelvis. They looked like push pins, so we just wanted to know if you had any idea why—’ and the patient cut me off and said, ‘Yes, I know about those. Please don’t tell my wife.’”
The tech said nothing else after that. None of us wanted to ask any more questions.
The radiologist dictated the report as carefully as he could. I never heard anything else about it, but that image has stayed in my mind ever since. I could still sketch it from memory today.
33. Hard To Swallow
When I was a fourth-year medical student rotating through the Veterans Administration hospital, a patient came to the emergency room complaining of stomach pain. We did an X-ray, and it showed two toothbrushes in his stomach. He told us he had felt like something was stuck in the back of his throat, used his toothbrush to try to dislodge it, and accidentally swallowed the toothbrush.
Then the same thing supposedly happened with the second one. We consulted gastroenterology, and both toothbrushes were removed with an endoscope. He was admitted overnight for observation. The next morning, he was complaining of stomach pain again. That was when we realized something else was clearly going on. A follow-up X-ray showed that he had swallowed his entire hospital convenience kit.
He had swallowed a small toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, and even his plastic razor. At that point, we called psychiatry for a consult. It turned out this was not his first episode; he simply had a habit of swallowing objects.
34. Mind Blown
A patient came into our ER for the sixth time in six months with the same complaint: episodes and worsening neurological symptoms. Four months earlier, she had undergone an MRI, and it had been normal.
We referred her to a functional neurologist to help her manage symptoms we believed were more psychological than physical. We came to that conclusion because her first neurological event had happened while she was on the phone receiving bad news. On top of that, her MRI four months earlier was normal, and she had already seen a neurologist who couldn’t find anything wrong.
But on this visit, she arrived in a wheelchair because she could no longer stand. That prompted one of the senior ER doctors to order another scan. I will never forget the feeling of horror when I looked at her repeat MRI on my screen just before going in to speak with her. It showed a tumor the size of a golf ball at the back of her brain.
Her neurological decline was happening quickly, which meant she was in very serious trouble. I felt awful for both her and her family. The first thing I did was tell them that we had been wrong and that there was a real physical cause for her symptoms. I apologized for the many times she had been sent home from the ER and told, directly or indirectly, that her symptoms were not real.
Her family was simply grateful to finally have an answer. She passed away about a month later. I tell this story to all of my junior colleagues because it made me very cautious about dismissing someone as having a factitious illness.
35. Hammer Time
A patient’s relatives came into my office asking if I could see an elderly man who had accidentally cut himself and needed stitches. I told them I couldn’t do any suturing because we didn’t have sterile equipment available, but I’d be happy to use steri-strips if the wound was suitable—as long as they brought him into the office.
They refused and kept insisting that I come see him at home instead. So I packed my bag and went to check on him. I found him lying in bed, conscious but unwilling to speak, with several shallow cuts on his abdomen and a massive hematoma swelling on his forehead.
I was stunned and finally got the relatives to explain what had happened. What they told me was shocking. They said the man had argued with his sister and then tried to harm himself by repeatedly hitting his forehead with a hammer and then attempting to stab himself in the abdomen with a kitchen knife. They hadn’t called an ambulance because they were “ashamed” and didn’t want to deal with taking him to a hospital that was far away.
I gave them 15 minutes to sort out their priorities and either call an ambulance or take the man to the hospital themselves.
36. Running From The Truth
I was a neurologist in Spain. One morning, we treated a patient who had just had a stroke. When we asked what happened, he said he had gone out for an early jog, fell, and suddenly couldn’t move the left side of his body. About an hour later, a nurse asked him again, and he gave a completely different made-up story.
It turned out he had actually gotten up early, left home, and was with a lady of the evening when the stroke happened. She was the one who called the ambulance. The hardest part was later meeting with his family.
37. Doing God’s Work
This happened when I worked as a developer for a medical alert company—you know, the kind with “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up". One day, a woman accidentally got transferred to my extension. She said someone was contacting her through her emergency pendant and threatening her.
I checked the notes on her account, and they said she had schizophrenia and had reported similar concerns before. She told me she knew she sometimes heard voices, but it would really help her feel better if I could check anyway.
So I pulled up the cellular logs for her device, and I was stunned. There were hundreds of calls and text messages containing violent threats and references to criminal activity. Thankfully, the pendant had no way to display the images being sent.
It turned out her number had been targeted by scammers. She was caught up in what’s often called a cartel scam, where criminals target older people, pretend to be connected to a cartel, and threaten horrible violence unless they’re paid. They even send disturbing images to scare people.
I got her a new number and also spoke to the people who had kept brushing off her concerns.
38. Reality Was His Kryptonite
I had surgery to straighten my nose and shave down my septum after I broke it. When I woke up from anesthesia, I felt unstoppable. Within about a minute, I ripped out my IV, stood up, and started heading out of my room because I had decided I was going to walk the three miles home and finish a mission in Heroes of Might and Magic 3.
As I passed a nurse, she said, “You’re bleeding". I laughed and told her, “No, I feel great". I kept going until I reached the elevator and caught my reflection in the metal doors. The second I saw myself, my stomach sank. My face was wrapped in bandages, dark bruises were showing under the white fabric, my eyes were bloodshot, and overall I looked awful.
The next thing I remember, I woke up back in bed with an IV in my other arm, strapped down. Apparently I was on a morphine drip, which is why I felt invincible. My parents were yelling, and I had no idea why. Later I found out I had collapsed while waiting for the elevator and gave myself a concussion.
39. Couldn’t Get Much Worse
My best friend’s aunt got a headache so severe it was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her doctor told her it was probably a migraine and prescribed strong pain medication. The next day, she felt even worse, so they took her to the ER.
The doctors sent her home with basically the same explanation, even though she kept insisting this felt nothing like any migraine she’d had before. She tried to make it clear that the pain was far too extreme, and things became tense enough in the ER that security was called.
That night, she woke up blind. They rushed her back to the hospital, where she was put into a coma. It turned out she had meningitis, but by then it was too late. She passed on three days later, leaving behind two young children.
To make it even worse, her ex-husband said he didn’t want to take the kids because he had a new family and not enough room in his three-bedroom house. Now my best friend, a single mom, is raising her aunt’s two children along with her own two.
40. It Was A Crazy Ride
When I was 12, I got an infection in my testicles. I tried to hide it and hoped it would go away, which I still regret. I started walking strangely, and eventually the area turned purple. My parents became concerned and asked why I was moving like that. In the end, I had to show my mom the badly swollen purple area, and we went to the doctor the next day.
At the appointment, I explained what was going on. They needed to run some tests, so they gave me morphine before doing an ultrasound. The nurse doing it was extremely attractive, which only made the whole thing more awkward. On top of that, I was ticklish. Every few seconds I’d laugh or smile, and then a moment later it would hurt again.
It was a bizarre experience, especially at that age. It went on like that for at least five minutes. In the end, it was a bacterial infection, it cleared up, and I was fine. The only lasting effect, apparently, is that I still find women with short hair especially attractive.
41. Just Like Basic Instinct
I was working as a clinical pharmacist in the emergency room when a patient calmly walked up to me and said he had an ice pick stuck in his back after an incident with his plastered neighbor. I told him, “If you’d really been stabbed with an ice pick, you’d probably be gone on arrival". Then the patient took off his shirt and, sure enough…
You guessed it. He had an actual ice pick sticking out of his back. Naturally, he needed emergency surgery. During the operation, one of the nurses who had overheard our conversation leaned over and whispered, “You really got that one wrong".
42. Nerves Of Steel
While I was in the ER, a man walked in with a couple of towels draped over his shoulder, and blood was already starting to soak through. The nurse asked what had happened and began lifting the towel away. The second she saw the injury, her expression changed from calm to alarmed. She immediately called the doctor and several others over. The man explained, “I was cutting branches overhead with a chainsaw. It got caught on one of them and swung back into my shoulder".
By then, a crowd had gathered around him, and they were preparing to take him straight to surgery. He had basically sliced into his chest with a chainsaw. It somehow wasn’t immediately life-threatening since he had walked in on his own, but I was stunned. I still wonder how he managed to switch the thing off before doing even more damage.
43. It’s Getting Hot In Here
I was working in obstetrics during a heatwave. That matters because maternity wards are kept very warm, since newborns aren’t good at regulating their body temperature. In the middle of an emergency C-section, the scrub nurse assisting the surgery started to feel faint. That was unusual, because this nurse worked in those operating rooms full-time and was very experienced.
I can only assume the heat got to her. She had to step out, and someone much more junior took her place for what was their very first C-section. While helping with instruments near the uterus, they fainted too. I had to grab the back of their gown to keep them from falling face-first into the open surgical field, then carefully pull them backward so they fell into me while someone else stepped in. Thankfully, the baby was already out.
44. Taking In The View
One night, two people came into the accident and emergency department. One had cuts across the lower back, upper thighs, and around the buttocks. The other had cuts on the face and a piece of glass lodged there as well. At first, neither would explain how they got hurt. It wasn’t until staff found traces of fecal matter in the second patient’s wounds that they finally admitted what had happened.
As it turned out, the first patient had been sitting on a glass table using the bathroom while the second sat directly underneath watching. The glass table collapsed and shattered during the whole situation.
45. Packed To The Rim
We had a woman come in with severe stomach pain, diarrhea, and a fever that had lasted for a couple of days. I started asking the usual routine questions: where the pain was, whether she took any regular medications, and if she had any other symptoms. Then I asked the standard question, “When was your last solid bowel movement". She paused for a while before answering. What she said completely caught me off guard.
She replied, “I think about a month ago".
I asked whether that was normal for her, and she said, “No. I usually go once every two months". She said it as if that were a perfectly ordinary pattern. The doctor ordered an X-ray, and her bowel was completely backed up. I had never seen anything like it. After gently explaining what a normal bowel routine looks like, I then had the unpleasant task of giving her three enemas and checking on her regularly until everything finally cleared out.
46. Stitched And Ditched
My mom worked intake in an ER. One night, a man came in with bloody, open wounds on his hand. He claimed he had burned it on a radiator. After getting stitched up, he vanished. But that wasn’t the last my mom heard of him. It turned out he had found the staff cafeteria, taken my mom’s car keys from her coat pocket, and stolen her car. He drove it back to a house and filled it with a bunch of stolen items.
Earlier that night, he had attacked an elderly woman during a home invasion. He cut his hand while assaulting her. He was caught that same night, and my mom’s car was impounded. When she went to pick it up, the officers told her to keep the items in the trunk for the trouble they’d caused. They even suggested she list them on the official report as if they had already been in the car.
She said no, but the authorities left one of those old-fashioned sleds—the wooden kind with metal runners—in the trunk anyway. She never took it out. It stayed there until the car was finally gone. I remember going grocery shopping with her and piling bags on top of that sled every time.
47. Her Bosom Buddies
When my mom was a resident, she was getting a woman ready for weight-loss surgery. She took her vitals, asked all the standard pre-op questions, and then started attaching the monitor leads with adhesive pads to her chest. The patient had a very large chest, and they were physically blocking the spots where my mom needed to place everything. The woman was also actively trying to keep my mom from reaching those areas.
At last, my mom said, “Look, this has to happen or there’s no surgery". She lifted one out of the way—and immediately found something that changed everything. There was a whole pack of soggy Oreos underneath, with a few already eaten. The surgery had to be postponed because the patient had recently eaten and no longer had the required empty stomach for the procedure. She had been hiding junk food under her chest.
48. That Sounds Awful
I went to the ER because I had a moth in my ear, and yes, it was every bit as awful as it sounds. To make it worse, the staff were pretty dismissive at first and seemed to assume I was on illicit substances. The most memorable part of the whole experience, if there can be one, was the ER nurse’s reaction when she put the scope in my ear...
“EeeerrrrgghhhAhhhh!!! He really does have a bug in there, and it’s alive".
49. Not-So-Sweet Dreams
When I was 10, my mother started trying to get medical help for me because I was having severe night terrors, migraines, sore muscles, and sudden weight changes. She took me to different clinics and emergency rooms, but no one could figure out what was wrong.
To make things worse, more than once I was accused of pretending to be sick to skip school or of having an addiction problem—at 10 years old. Eventually, I moved in with my first boyfriend when I was 19. He started coming with me to doctor’s appointments because he was convinced I was dying in my sleep.
They ran tests, but everything kept coming back normal. Finally, my boyfriend started calling an ambulance every time I would start to fade out. At 24, I finally got the answer. I was diagnosed with nocturnal epilepsy. I had been having generalized grand mal seizures in my sleep my entire life.
50. Pain In The Rear
A patient came into the ED with severe pain on both sides of her buttocks, along with fevers and other signs of infection. After more evaluation, she was diagnosed with a serious deep-tissue infection that required hospitalization and IV antibiotics. But the big question was still how the infection had started. It turned out she had read online that rubbing fish oil on your behind could make it look fuller.
She decided that if it worked on the outside, it might work even better on the inside. So she used insulin syringes to draw fish oil out of oral capsules and injected it into herself every day for two weeks, until she inevitably developed an infection. Her behind was not fuller. It was red, swollen, hard, extremely tender, and she couldn’t lie on her back or sit down properly for weeks.
51. Full Of It
A few years ago, I had awful abdominal pain. I was shaking, had chills, and was running a 100-degree fever. So I went to my mother, a former pediatrician who had retrained in allergy and immunology. She was clearly worried, so she did something called an obturator test to check for appendicitis. Sure enough, I doubled over in pain, so she hurried me to the hospital.
Before doing anything more serious, they wanted to confirm it really was appendicitis. So they took me in, injected contrast dye, and gave me a scan. It turned out to be even more embarrassing than expected. I was just severely constipated. As the attending put it, “I’ve never seen so much stool in someone in my life". I was completely mortified.
They gave me medication for the pain, which only made the constipation worse. I spent a few miserable days in the bathroom and dealt with the aftermath for the next week.
52. Fully Loaded
One night, we had an intoxicated patient come into the emergency department with a cut on her eyebrow. She told the doctor that her boyfriend had fired a revolver at her, but most of us assumed she was exaggerating.
It looked like she had simply been hit hard in the face, so we stitched her up and thought that would be the end of it. Then we ordered an X-ray to check for fractures, and that’s when we got a serious reality check. There on the X-ray was an actual .22 round. It had struck her orbital bone and ricocheted in a way that kept it outside her skull but under the skin. Once we knew it was there, you could actually feel it above her ear.
53. It Could Have Been Nipped In The Bud
I had a 57-year-old woman come in with a small 5 mm nodule on her lower eyelid. It was most likely basal cell carcinoma, which is usually very treatable and can be removed in a short office procedure that takes about 15 minutes under local anesthesia. She refused, but oddly enough, kept returning every three months just to refuse again.
The growth slowly got bigger. I saw her for five years. During the last three, she hid the expanding tumor with a folded piece of tissue tucked behind her glasses. Eventually, she agreed to surgery. By then, the operation took seven hours, and her eye, surrounding muscles, and some bone had to be removed. At that point, it was too late; the cancer had spread.
54. Mother Really Does Know Best
I had a patient in his mid-30s come to see me because he was having “difficulty reading". He was very shy and came in with his mother, which struck me as unusual. He worked at a library and said the words would get “jumbled up” while he read. That was his only complaint.
I did a very thorough neurological exam and found absolutely nothing abnormal. I asked him to read a magazine out loud at different speeds, and he did it perfectly. I told him everything looked fine and said I wanted to order some lab work. To be honest, I thought he was just an unusual person. He agreed to the labs, but his mother was very insistent about getting brain imaging.
I said we could and ordered a CT scan. The lab results came back first. They showed he was severely low on vitamin D, so I suggested treating that first and holding off on the scan. Not only did his mother refuse to cancel it, but she also wanted an MRI right away.
At that point, I stopped trying to reassure her and just ordered what she wanted. I was stunned when the results came back. Her son had the largest glioblastoma—an aggressive brain cancer—that I had ever seen. Credit to his mother.
55. A Case Of Animal Magnetism
My sister was a nurse working in the ER when a woman came in with a bad rash on her legs. She was being evasive about what had happened, and the department was especially busy that night. So my sister told her she needed to explain the situation or she’d have to step away and help someone else. The patient finally said she had been asleep when she woke up and felt a strange bumping sensation on her leg.
She looked down and saw her pet chinchilla rubbing against her. According to the patient, this went on for a little while before the chinchilla “finished". “Finished". my sister asked. The patient then made a vague hand motion and said, “You know, it… finished". My sister nodded and said she’d go get the doctor.
She barely made it into the hallway and closed the door before bursting into laughter. Eventually, the doctor came over to find out what was going on. My sister explained, and they both had a hard time keeping straight faces. But the doctor’s observation was the most surprising part: for the patient to be having an allergic reaction, this probably wasn’t the first time it had happened.
56. The Art Of Self-Defense
I tore my ACL during Jiu-Jitsu. I heard it pop the moment it happened, and the pain was intense. Over the weekend, I went to a walk-in clinic to get a referral for an MRI to confirm the injury. I would have gone to my regular GP, but they weren’t open, it would have taken longer to get an appointment, and it would have cost more.
All I really needed to hear was, “Yep, that makes sense. Here’s the referral". Instead, the GP at the walk-in clinic tried to convince me it was probably just a soft tissue injury and that I should rest it for a while. I told her I sincerely hoped that was the case, but I still wanted an MRI to be sure.
She even tried to talk me out of it by saying, “It’s very expensive". I finally said, “Doctor, I can afford it. I’m not worried about the cost. I just want peace of mind". She eventually gave me the referral.
When I went back a week later for the results, the news was bad, but it was exactly what I needed confirmed. Sure enough, I had torn my ACL. So much for just walking it off.
57. Game, Set, Match
When I was in pharmacy school, I was doing my internal medicine rotation in my final year. My supervisor and I were reviewing medications in the ICU when one of the doctors said, “Hey, want to see something interesting". They were trying to remove a foreign object from a man’s lung in one of the rooms, so we went in to watch for a while.
There were about six people in the room. A tube was down the man’s throat, with tiny grippers on the end. Two doctors were watching a monitor and trying to control the tool to grab the object, almost like a claw machine. I watched for a bit, but after a while I lost interest and went back to what I had been doing. A few minutes later, I heard, “Got it". followed by cheering from the room. Then someone said, “It’s a tooth".
The man had aspirated his own molar. The doctor came out holding it in a jar like a prize, and it was a completely intact tooth, root and all.
58. Hidden Agenda
I’m a paramedic, so I have a lot of stories, but this one has stayed with me forever. It was a rainy spring afternoon. The call was about an intoxicated person randomly pounding on people’s doors. Normally that would be a police call, but they were overloaded. We pulled up to the house with no lights or siren. I was so burned out at the time that I didn’t even get out of the passenger seat.
I just rolled down the window and called out to the older man on the porch, “Hey, what are you doing". He turned away from the stranger’s door and slowly made his way toward our ambulance. I saw the elderly woman inside close her curtains, relieved that someone had handled the situation. “Man, I just need to lie down,” he told me.
I looked at my partner, and she looked at me. Henry Ford Hospital was only six blocks away. Surely we could just take him there. “Get in the back,” I told him. “And if you throw up in my rig, you’re helping clean it up". Then he said, “But I have chest pain,” while holding his hand against himself in the pouring rain. I rolled my eyes and said, “I do too. Let’s go get us both checked out".
He started fumbling with his buttons, and I reached over to turn up the heater. When I looked back, he had opened his trench coat to show me where it hurt. What I saw still stays with me. Right in the middle of his sternum, clear against his white sweatshirt, was a star-shaped powder burn.
A large one. It was a point-blank gunshot wound to the chest. The next few minutes were a blur. I ran out to catch him as he started to collapse. My partner pulled out the stretcher, we got him loaded up, cut off his clothes, put on oxygen, and I yelled for her to drive. She covered the six blocks to the hospital as fast as she could.
During the three-minute ride, I only had time to get one IV started. He passed on 25 minutes later. When we rolled him into the trauma room, you could see an exit wound the size of a fist. The doctors told us the only thing that might have saved him was if he had somehow landed in the operating room immediately after being shot. That didn’t make me feel any better.
We had probably spent 10 minutes talking to him in the rain. For me, that was the moment I knew I was done. I took a week off, and two weeks later I resigned.
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59. Wrong On SO Many Levels
When I told the anesthesiologist that the general anesthetic was extremely painful, he acted like I was overreacting and then ended up paralyzing my lungs. The IV had missed my vein, which meant I never actually received the anesthetic. During the surgery, I was fully awake and unable to breathe, struggling on the table.
The last thing I remember before I lost consciousness from the pain was the surgeon telling the anesthesiologist that I “wouldn’t remember any of it anyway". He was wrong.
60. Faking It
I once had a young woman pretend to be unconscious so we wouldn’t discharge her after a short outpatient surgery. It was strange, because it’s very hard not to react to things like a sternal rub, so we knew she was awake and aware. She just wouldn’t speak, open her eyes, move, or respond. Eventually, after enough unpleasant stimulation, she opened her eyes and moved around, but then went right back to pretending to sleep.
We kept her overnight, and the next morning she acted completely normal, as if nothing had happened, and then went home. She was an unusual patient, and I heard she might have been a medical student too.
61. She Was Trying To Sugar Coat It
I was a family doctor, and one day a new patient came in for her first visit. I asked about her medical history, and she said she didn’t have any chronic health conditions. Eventually we got to her medication list. The first medication listed was insulin. When I asked about it, she said it was for her high blood sugar, but she didn’t remember ever being told that she had diabetes.
62. A Couple Of Slugs
A friend of mine was a surgeon working in proctology at a hospital in Switzerland. One of his patients was a very fit man in his late 30s—deeply tanned, very polished, and clearly nervous. He complained of intense itching around his rectal area, and his regular doctor hadn’t been able to figure out why. My friend started by talking with him and asking whether anything unusual had happened there recently.
The man denied it and repeatedly insisted that he wasn’t gay. My friend kept explaining that he wasn’t there to judge and that it had nothing to do with orientation. The patient still denied anything unusual. After a thorough exam using the proper instruments, my friend found severe irritation that clearly seemed to have been caused by some outside substance. At that point, he still had no idea what it was and needed to know quickly in order to treat it.
So he asked again, and once again the patient denied everything, repeating, “I already told you, I’m not gay". My friend decided to push a little and said, “Sir, if you’re absolutely certain that no substance, product, or object has been inserted there recently, then what I’m seeing is extremely abnormal and could be some kind of serious tissue change".
He paused, then added, “We may need surgery if it keeps getting worse". That finally made the patient tell the truth. He said, “All right, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise never to mention my name when you tell this story to your colleagues". My friend reassured him and said, “I’m not here to judge or laugh. I’m here to help". The man replied, “Okay. I’m really not gay, but… sometimes, in the moment… things happen".
He explained that he had been with his wife and another couple in his garden. They ended up swapping partners. Things were going fine, and then, as things became more intense, the two women paired off and the two men did too. He was on the receiving end, but they didn’t have any lubricant. Since they were in the garden, they noticed some slugs in the flowerbeds.
In the heat of the moment, they decided to use the slugs as lubricant, which obviously turned out to be a terrible idea. The slugs stayed there too long and started releasing an irritating substance as a defense mechanism. Naturally, the man was so embarrassed that he delayed going to the doctor.
63. Paging Doctor Google
After years of strange symptoms and being dismissed by multiple doctors, I became convinced something serious was going on. Over the course of about three years, I dealt with hearing loss, balance problems, vertigo, tinnitus, pain, and an overall sense that something just wasn’t right.
During that time, I was told it was sinus trouble or inner ear infections. At my final frustrating appointment, I directly told the ear, nose, and throat specialist that I had done some research and believed I had a brain tumor. I didn’t ask—I told her.
I could practically see her trying not to roll her eyes before she explained that it was very unlikely and that the kind of brain tumor that causes those symptoms is extremely rare. I’m sure she was thinking I had been reading too much online, but she did order an MRI—probably just to reassure me.
It turned out I was right. When the doctor called with the results, she sounded genuinely stunned. I had a benign brain tumor about the size of a golf ball, and it was large enough to push my brain stem out of place.
64. Did I Do That?
I once watched a medical student accidentally suck up a skin graft with a suction device. The graft was a very thin piece of tissue that had been carefully prepared and placed onto a wound, where it was supposed to be stitched on like a patch. The student was using suction to clear the area and accidentally vacuumed up the entire graft. It disappeared instantly.
65. We Got A Leg Up On The Problem
We had a patient who tried to downplay a severe staph infection as “just some leg swelling". What he actually meant was that he had a terrible infection in and around his groin, a condition called Fournier’s gangrene. Later, he told us he had to urinate into a five-gallon bucket held up to his body because he no longer knew where the urine stream was going.
He was taken into emergency surgery within hours. The only way to treat an infection like that is with surgical removal of damaged tissue, along with a huge amount of antibiotics. Somehow, he still wasn’t showing the usual whole-body signs of serious infection, like fever or low blood pressure. If he had waited any longer, his life would almost certainly have been at risk.
66. Out Of Nowhere?
When I was interning in the OB/GYN department, a woman was sent to the ER because of bleeding “down there". During the exam, the doctor was stunned. She had a huge tumor, about the size of a football, growing between her legs. Her husband was there, and both of them insisted it had just appeared and that they had never noticed it before. There was no question it had been growing for months. Sometimes, when people are in shock, they can deny even the most obvious things.
67. All Is Vanity, Nothing Is Fair
I had a tumor on my foot that my primary care doctor mostly brushed off, saying it was a fatty deposit that kept getting bigger because I was gaining weight. After I started having trouble getting shoes on and then dealing with severe pain from the pressure on this “deposit,” I realized I needed to push harder.
The doctor still didn’t want to send me for testing because he thought I was just being self-conscious. Still, he finally referred me to a surgeon after my ultrasound results showed it looked unusual. The surgeon pressed on it a few times and told me it was a fatty deposit and that the pain was all in my head.
She refused to do a biopsy because she wanted to “save me money". Huge mistake. Instead, she removed it and only then sent it for testing. It turned out to be cancer. I needed two more surgeries and ended up on bed rest for three months with a hole in my foot because the first surgery had damaged the skin so badly.
Now I have two large scars on my foot and inner thigh, so I guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t actually just being self-conscious.
68. Hips Don’t Lie
One of my dad’s colleagues was doing a hip replacement years ago. Hip replacements are intense: they basically have to open you up significantly to get the top of the thigh bone free from the hip joint. Then they cut off the ball at the end and attach a new stainless steel one, which is fixed to a long stem inserted down the center of the bone to hold it in place.
So the doctor had reached the point where he was tapping the stem down into the femur when it got stuck halfway. It wouldn’t go in any farther. It wouldn’t come back out. They couldn’t cut it off, because bone saws won’t work on hardened steel. They also couldn’t just close the patient up and deal with it later, because there was basically a foot-long metal spike sticking out of the top of his leg. Meanwhile, the anesthetist was saying they couldn’t keep him under much longer. It definitely was not a successful surgery.
69. She Was Poking Around
A 60-year-old woman came in after “falling asleep and rolling onto a pin cushion". The X-ray showed she had three needles, each about two inches long, stuck in her left shoulder. Later, we learned she had actually been trying to perform acupuncture on herself.
70. A Tickle Under The Rib
I once treated a patient with an extremely unusual condition. While asking why she kept having rib pain, she casually reached under her rib and moved it around with her fingers. It was as unsettling as it sounds. As I kept examining her, it became clear there were several other things her body could do that really shouldn’t have been possible.
I suspected a form of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissue and can make the joints and other structures far too flexible. I was so distracted by seeing her rib shift in and out of place that at first I barely processed how alarming it was that she could get her hand under it at all.
71. Medical Insurance
I was the patient, and I’m pretty sure it was one of those “oh no” moments for my OB-GYN. I was near the end of labor, and my daughter was stuck. I’d had two epidurals, but both had worn off. My doctor used forceps to try to help deliver her. I don’t think she realized how little the epidural was working by then, because otherwise I can’t imagine she would have inserted the forceps the way she did.
I definitely felt them and immediately started thrashing from the pain. The doctor panicked and tried to pull them back out, but they got stuck. She had to wait for the next contraction to get them free. Then there was blood everywhere. Most disturbing of all, she was on the phone with her lawyer while wheeling me in for an emergency C-section.
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72. And This Is Why We Wash Our Hands
Sometimes the shock is on the surgeon’s side too. My father is a physician, and while he didn’t become a surgeon, he did perform surgery during medical school. He once told me about a patient with necrotizing fasciitis, a severe flesh-destroying infection. It honestly sounded like something from a horror movie.
The patient had cut himself while gardening and never properly cleaned the wound. My dad said he had to work through layer after layer just to reach it. First he removed the bandages the patient had wrapped around it. Under those, there was even a layer of pages from a religious book. It just kept going—more layers, more wrapping.
When he finally reached the wound, what he saw completely stunned him. It was full of maggots. Apparently, they had been feeding on the dead tissue caused by the infection. Once the maggots were removed, the team could begin cleaning out the damaged area and treating the infection.
Strangely, those maggots may have helped save the patient’s limb. Because they had already eaten much of the infected tissue, my dad and his team didn’t have to amputate. After that experience, though, my dad decided surgery wasn’t for him and chose to become a specialist instead.
73. I Told You So
My friend is a nurse, and she told me about a woman in her early 30s who kept coming to the ER insisting that something was seriously wrong. She had basically been sick for a year and a half straight.
For whatever reason, probably because she was so young, the healthcare team assumed she was just seeking medication and dismissed her. Eventually, though, they finally found the cause. It was awful. They did a biopsy, and it turned out she had Stage IV cancer. Stage IV.
Her whole ordeal might have gone very differently if they had taken her seriously from the start. Age bias in healthcare is very real.
74. Silent And Fatal
During my father’s residency, a man came in with an infection he developed after having his gums scraped during a dental cleaning. The infection had spread into his sinus cavity, and my father told his attending that the man was probably going to pass on. There happened to be a specialist from Harvard at the hospital, and he called my father an idiot.
The attending corrected the Harvard specialist and said my father was right: the man likely wasn’t going to survive. He had seen 10 similar infections before, and none of those patients had made it. Apparently, there’s an area of the face that some physicians call the “Triangle of Death". The gums above your upper teeth form the base, and the sinus cavities make up the sides.
Over the next two days, the infection spread to the man’s left eye. The Harvard specialist said they should remove the eye and hope that would be enough to save him. My father said it probably wouldn’t change the outcome and that the man should begin putting his affairs in order. Not wanting to give up, the man agreed to have the eye removed.
It didn’t help, and within three days of losing the eye, he passed on. The infection spread from the sinus and eye area and crossed into the brain.
75. Itchy And Scratchy
I once saw a high-school-aged kid come in with a dinner candle stuck in his backside. He reportedly said he was using it to reach an itch. Apparently, the itch was somewhere near his spleen, because that thing was in deep. His mom told me the story and said she had already asked him before not to scratch himself with other household items of hers. I didn’t ask any follow-up questions. Honestly, I think she truly believed he was just very itchy.
76. That Escalated Quickly
I’m an elder care nurse, and there was one patient I’d looked after for years. She had advanced dementia and would sometimes slip into a very sleepy, unresponsive state for a day or two. During one of those episodes, a doctor came by on rounds to do a general review.
Because she wasn’t eating or responding, the doctor decided she was receiving end-of-life care. Then he took it a step further. I was stunned when he said he wanted to start a syringe driver, which delivers end-of-life medication through an automatic syringe pump. My team and I had to work hard to convince him that this was simply one of her usual “sleepy” periods.
Thankfully, she returned to her normal state and went on to live another year and a half after that.
77. A Stitch In Time
I was in sixth grade, and my family lived in an upstairs-downstairs duplex. The family above us had two young boys, one in first grade and one in preschool, if I remember right. Their dad was at work, and their mom needed to run some errands, so she asked if I could watch them for a little while. It was a beautiful summer day, so we were outside running around the yard, basically just being kids.
At some point, a game of tag started, and the boys were chasing me. I ended up running along the side of the house, lost my footing, and fell. Instead of landing on my knees or hands, I hit the side of my head. It hurt badly. I got up on my knees and touched the side of my head, only to feel something warm. A lot of it.
I looked at my hand, and it was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere. Then I looked up and saw a trail of it on the side of the house leading to the head of a nail sticking out about an inch. My dad grew hollyhocks and tied them up with twine so they wouldn’t fall over, and I had managed to hit one of those nails right above my eyebrow.
So I went inside and told my mother, as calmly as I could, that I probably needed medical attention. I had already been to the emergency room plenty of times before, so she was pretty used to me appearing in the kitchen bleeding or injured. She didn’t panic much, aside from a quick scramble for towels, before loading me and the two now-terrified little boys into the car and heading to the local ER. That’s where the real “oh no” moment happened.
It was a summer weekday in a suburban neighborhood, and the ER was completely empty except for the receptionist, who was busy typing. Mom dropped me off at the entrance to start check-in while she parked the car. Apparently, no one noticed me at first, because the receptionist didn’t look up until I was only a few steps away.
I gave a weak smile and said something like, “I think this should probably be looked at,” while pulling away the now-soaked towel. At that exact moment, everything got worse. A small blood vessel must have opened up, and with each heartbeat, blood started spurting out in little pulses that I could just see from the corner of my eye.
As you can imagine, I was making quite a mess. The receptionist’s response was to faint. I still have no idea how someone can work reception in an ER and not handle the sight of blood, but somehow this poor woman did. So there I was, standing in this bright, sterile waiting room, quietly bleeding, with the receptionist unconscious behind the desk and my mother still outside in the parking lot trying to manage two frightened little kids.
That was definitely my “oh no” moment. Luckily, someone else with stronger nerves came out, saw what was happening, and rushed me into an exam room. I ended up with 32 stitches, and now the scar is barely visible, just a faint line above my eyebrow.
78. He Wasn’t Kidding
I used to work in psychiatry, and we had one regular patient we all knew well. He had paranoid schizophrenia and often talked about spider eggs being in his brain. One time, when he was admitted, he complained that his backside hurt because he had sent a rat up there to retrieve a message. Naturally, no one believed him at first, but we still had to check.
It turned out he was telling the truth. The patient’s main concern, though, was whether the rat had delivered the important message.
79. Head Games
I’m a retired nurse, but in this case, I was the patient. Out of nowhere, I began having hallucinations, delusions, and very erratic behavior. I was taken to a crisis center, committed against my will, and put on some very strong psychiatric medications, which only made things worse. And this didn’t happen just once, but three separate times.
Every time, I begged for a CT scan of my head, and every time, they refused. Eventually, I went to the emergency department at a much smaller hospital. This time, I finally got the scan. It showed that a bone in my skull was infected and pressing on my brain, which was causing symptoms that looked psychiatric. A course of high-dose antibiotics completely cleared up my “mental health crisis".
80. Basketball Diaries
A man came into the emergency department holding his abdomen and complaining of severe pain. He seemed suspicious and kept changing his story, his symptoms, and even where the pain was. My sister’s friend, along with a few other nurses, could tell something wasn’t adding up. After about an hour, he finally admitted what had really happened.
He had inserted a deflated full-size basketball into his rectum and then inflated it. Somehow, he had pumped it up until it burst inside him. The bursting was what caused the pain, but that wasn’t actually the main reason he came to the ER. The basketball was still inside him, and after it popped, the pain, swelling, and the fact that it was still partly inflated meant he couldn’t remove it on his own.
81. An Unforgettable Thanksgiving
As a kid, I dealt with chronic urinary tract infections (UTIs). In sixth grade, I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with severe abdominal pain. At first, I thought I was just hungry, but I couldn’t eat because it made my stomach feel worse.
I barely touched my Thanksgiving dinner and ended up vomiting while everyone else finished eating. My mom took me to the ER, but they refused to do the ultrasound she asked for. They brushed it off as another UTI and told me to rest and drink plenty of water and cranberry juice.
That night around midnight, my mom took me back, insisting this wasn’t normal. I got UTIs often enough that she knew these symptoms were completely different. After sending me home and having us come back again, they finally did an ultrasound.
My right ovary had twisted and swollen to the size of a softball. After emergency surgery, I was okay for about three months—then the other ovary twisted too. This time they caught it quickly and were able to save it. They also removed my appendix while they were in there, because with my luck, that probably would’ve been next.
82. Thanks For Nothing
Back in college, I started having really strange chest pains whenever I inhaled. The pain went on for a couple of days, so I went to the campus clinic to see if they could figure out what was wrong. The RN said my lungs sounded clear and that the pain was probably just anxiety from midterms. I told her that definitely wasn’t it.
She was pretty dismissive, but she gave me an Advil and ordered blood work “just in case, though I doubt we’ll need it". Two days later, I got a panicked call telling me to go to the ER. That’s when I found out I had blood clots in my lung. The worst part was hearing an ER doctor say that if I’d waited much longer, I might not have made it.
83. Now, That Was Unexpected
My son was just a little under a year old when he hit his head pretty hard at daycare. The ER doctor ordered a CT scan just to be safe. He had no concerning symptoms and no history of medical issues. The doctor was simply being cautious.
We fully expected the scan to come back completely normal. Instead, the results shocked all of us. The scan found a lesion on the opposite side of my son’s brain. Follow-up MRIs showed it was a slow-growing tumor in his frontal lobe. Because he was so young for surgery, we had to go through about nine months of “watch and wait". During all that time, he still had no symptoms that would’ve warned us the tumor was there.
Eventually, the doctors were able to remove almost all of it, and my son has been stable ever since. It’s now been 15 years with no progression of the small amount that remained. Post-op pathology confirmed it was a grade II astrocytoma. I’m incredibly grateful we found it purely by chance.
84. They Were Trying To Milk It
I was a nurse, and one of my patient’s family members once asked me for advice. She had a son around 12 or 13 years old and wanted to know if it was normal for boys to squirt milk from their chest. I basically said, “Wait, what". Then she explained that her son and two of his friends had been trying to “milk” themselves, and now they were actually producing something. She wanted to know if that was normal.
85. A Happy Scratchy Ending
My sister had a terrible skin rash for several months. She went to different doctors and dermatologists who said it was an allergy, stress-related, and so on, and each one gave her a different cream to calm it down. Unfortunately, nothing helped. One day when I was visiting home, I looked up her symptoms online and thought I might know what it was. Don’t laugh.
It turned out she had microscopic mites living in her skin and laying eggs there—scabies. We figured it couldn’t hurt to try an over-the-counter treatment and see if it helped, and it absolutely did. One downside of the treatment was that the itching and pain got temporarily worse as the mites started to retreat.
I stayed up with her all night eating Maltesers and watching America’s Next Top Model to help distract her from the itching. I felt awful that she had to deal with the embarrassment of having scabies for months as a teenager.
Considering how long she had it and how many doctors she saw, I couldn’t believe it was that simple to figure out.
86. A Terrifying Lesson In Humility
I’m a nurse, and whenever I’m teaching, I make a point of telling this story to my students. I once had a very challenging long-term dementia patient. Some out-of-touch administrator decided it made sense to place her in a four-patient room on an acute care floor, alongside people recovering from surgery and other serious conditions.
She would regularly scream and throw herself out of bed all night. We eventually got an order for a sleeping pill and gave it to her three nights in a row because she kept yelling about rats crawling all over her. It was disturbing the whole ward, including the neonatal intensive care unit on the other side of the wall.
On the fourth night, I went in when she started screaming, sleeping pill in hand…and then I stopped. There was an actual mouse sitting on the windowsill beside her. I felt terrible. Ever since then, when a coworker tells me about something wild a delirious, dementia, or post-anesthesia patient says, I always ask, “Did you actually check? Are you sure there isn’t really a [whatever strange thing they say they’re seeing]".
87. It Was Two Too Late
My mother, who was the medical professional in our family, once treated a 13-year-old girl who was nine months pregnant, in active labor, fully dilated, and crowning in emergency triage, while insisting over and over that she was a virgin and that everyone else had it wrong. Her mother stood nearby making a scene and demanding that a “real doctor” come in. The whole situation was complete chaos.
Let’s just say that when the twins arrived ten minutes later, everyone’s story changed pretty quickly.
88. Brutal Honesty
A three-year-old with stomach issues came in. His mother said he was limp and weak, but during the exam, he was climbing on furniture and acting like a completely normal kid. Everything looked fine, at least as much as you can tell when trying to do a neurological exam on an uncooperative three-year-old.
I told her to keep him hydrated and offer small, frequent meals. I also prescribed something for nausea and moved on, because the emergency department was packed and ambulances were arriving nonstop. Then he came back 24 hours later. The difference was horrifying. This time he was completely limp. They intubated him and flew him to a tertiary care center.
It turned out he had an extremely rare autoimmune reaction to a certain infection, and I completely missed it.
89. An Apple A Day Didn’t Keep The Doctor Away
A man came into the ER with severe abdominal pain. He was admitted, and while he was talking with the doctor, he was obviously very uncomfortable. The doctor ordered an X-ray. When the results came back, the doctor just stood there staring at the image until my friend, who was a nurse, walked by.
The doctor motioned her over and said, “Come here". She was confused, but went over. The moment she saw the X-ray, she understood. The doctor asked, “Doesn’t that look like an apple to you". My friend nodded, trying not to laugh, and said, “Yes, it definitely does". The doctor then asked the man if there was anything he wanted to share.
He stumbled over his words, and it took some effort to get the full story. In the end, he needed surgery to remove the apple from his rectum. Apparently, when an object is removed from someone’s body, it has to be fully documented and analyzed. So my friend ended up reading this absurdly detailed report describing the apple. At the very end, it said: “Appears to be a Golden Delicious".
90. I’ll Show You “Tough”
I called the doctor’s office, and they told me I just needed to be tougher. At my two-week follow-up appointment, the doctor examined me and realized my body had been trying to expel retained tissue. I had basically been having mini labor contractions for two weeks.
There was no apology. No real acknowledgment beyond a casual “whoops". Needless to say, I chose a different doctor for my next pregnancy.
91. Time For An Exor-cyst
I have a lump on my face that’s about the size of an acorn. It’s been there for years, but over the past two or three years it started growing pretty quickly. I saw several doctors about it, hoping to finally get a proper diagnosis.
Most of them said it was a cyst under the skin and that there wasn’t really anything they could do. A few even suggested I just needed to wash my face better.
Then in July this year, I saw a new doctor who actually decided to check whether he could “relieve some pressure” from what everyone thought was a cyst. After 15 minutes of poking at it, he could only get a few drops of cloudy fluid out.
Because of that visit, I found out I actually have a benign tumor on my face. It still makes me angry that no one took the time to look past the obvious and figure that out sooner.
92. The Milk Is For The Baby
I once saw a patient who was worried because she was still producing milk, even though she had stopped breastfeeding her twins two years earlier. She told me, “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my husband sucking on them. He says he’s trying to help by draining the milk".
I had to explain that breastfeeding her husband was the reason she was still lactating.
93. Shut My Mouth
I’m a dermatologist. While reading a patient’s notes, I saw that he had been diagnosed with a fatal form of skin cancer and scheduled to have his entire upper lip removed. Naturally, that would have left him badly disfigured.
At the last minute, he decided to see a dermatologist at our hospital, who told him it was only a cold sore. He prescribed medication, and the issue cleared up.
94. Always Check The Decimals
One day at the hospital, I almost gave a premature baby with Down syndrome ten times the dose of Lasix he was supposed to receive. I had put the decimal point in the wrong place while calculating it. If I had administered it, the baby very likely would have passed on. I had already drawn the medication into the syringe and placed it in the port, ready to push it in, before I looked at the chamber and realized it seemed far too full.
IV doses for babies are tiny, no matter what the medication is. I was supposed to give him 0.1 mL, and I almost gave him 1.0 mL. I definitely needed a very large cup of tea after that.
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95. Fancy Seeing You Here
One of the most upsetting experiences I’ve ever had was being called into the ER as an interpreter and realizing the patient was someone I knew outside of work. In a normal situation, they would have brought in someone else to avoid that conflict, but because it was an emergency, I had to stay and help. I did my job, of course, but I spent the whole time wishing the situation would end as quickly as possible.
96. Feel My Pain
A friend of mine went through a terrifying experience during surgery. A couple of minutes after the operation began, the doctors realized something was wrong with the anesthesia. He later said he could actually feel the scalpel and the pain that came with it, while the oxygen mask seemed to give him air only now and then. Once the team realized he wasn’t fully under, they corrected it.
Later, an even more disturbing detail came out. The anesthesiologist was his ex-girlfriend. No one else knew about their history, and he believed she may have done it on purpose. Thankfully, the surgery itself was successful. His recovery took a little longer than expected, but he eventually turned out fine.
97. Odd Anatomy
I’m a biomedical scientist, and my office mate was a medical doctor working on his PhD. He once performed an appendectomy and opened a patient up, only to realize he couldn’t find the appendix. He started panicking, convinced something had gone seriously wrong. The nurses assisting him, though, immediately understood what was happening and started laughing.
Every now and then, they treat someone with a rare genetic condition in which the body’s usual left-right layout is reversed. In this patient’s case, the appendix was on the opposite side.
98. No Privacy When Your Memory Is An Open Door
In 2015, when I was 27, I was in a coma for two and a half months after a serious car accident. When I woke up, I still had a tracheotomy and couldn’t speak. I don’t remember anything from the time I was unconscious, but what really shocked me was seeing my boyfriend at the time standing there with my parents.
They were talking like they already knew each other. I’m a very private person, and I had gone out of my way to keep them from even knowing about him, so that was unsettling. I also couldn’t remember the accident for months, and for the first week or two after waking up, every time I drifted off and woke again, someone had to remind me where I was and what had happened.
For months, I had no real sense of where I was, and I thought I was 23 instead of 27. I also struggled badly with recognizing faces. I would see people I knew I must know, but I couldn’t remember their names or why they were familiar.
About a month after I woke up, my parents took me in my hospital bed for a walk through the courtyard. As we passed a big mirror in the lobby, I panicked. I saw my reflection and understood it was me because I recognized my parents pushing the bed, but I didn’t recognize my own face. There were no injuries to my face—I just didn’t know myself.
It also felt surreal that I had gone into the coma in late winter, with snow everywhere, and woke up in spring to see it all gone outside my hospital window.
The thing that shocked me most, though, was learning that my parents had gone into my apartment and packed up my whole life. Like I said, I’m very private, so the thought of them boxing up my things and ending my lease was hard to process. It made practical sense, but emotionally it was a lot to take in.
99. Who’s The Baby Daddy?
When I was an intern on my ER rotation, a woman in her late 30s came in complaining of nausea and lower abdominal discomfort that had been going on for a few days. I took a careful history and, as part of that, asked whether there was any chance she could be pregnant. She completely lost it. She told me she was a lesbian and hadn’t been with a man in more than 10 years.
She demanded that I get my supervisor and let an “adult” treat her. I went back to my attending and explained the tests I thought we should run. He said, “I didn’t hear a plan for a pregnancy test". I told him, “I don’t think that’s necessary. She’s a lesbian and hasn’t been with a man in 10 years". My attending just smiled and said, “Humor me". The patient turned out to be very pregnant. When I went back into the room, two men were glaring at each other like a fight was about to start.
100. Let It All Hang Out
I used to work the overnight answering service for a large medical group that covered all kinds of specialists. We weren’t allowed to give medical advice; all we could do was contact the doctor on call. One night around 2 AM, a woman called and was speaking very quietly. I asked her to speak up because I was having trouble hearing her.
She started over and explained that she was in the garage because she didn’t want to alarm her family. Then she told me that her intestines were hanging out of her backside and asked whether she should go to the ER. Even though it went against my training, I told her she absolutely needed to go to the ER and that I would contact her doctor right away. I was stunned that someone would call to ask whether organs outside the body counted as an emergency.
