These Patients Should Have Been WORRIED
Some people just don't have ANY sense of urgency. These clueless patients simply did not take their health seriously, leaving doctors totally shocked and disturbed.
1. My Aching Back
I intercepted a young woman who was just hit by a car. Her boyfriend was standing with her freaking out. I do a basic physical exam, get a history, and make her comfortable as we wait for the ambulance to arrive. Once the ambulance arrives, they ask for the same information, the truth comes out. This time the boyfriend mentions he was the one who was actually hit by the car and was shielding his girlfriend's body.
The entire car's windshield was cracked by the impact of his back! He was just freaking out and worried about her, and was in shock and hadn't begun to feel any pain yet.
2. It’s Not That Bad
We had a male in his 50s walk into trauma to have his left thigh stitched up. It’s not an uncommon wound in an agricultural area.
Speaking to him while stitching him up, he tells me he fell off a ladder while cutting a branch and the machete sliced him on the way down. I told him I was going to write him up for an x-ray of the entire leg just in case.
He kept on saying he was fine, but his knee hurt a bit, since logically that was from the fall, I agreed, but I asked him to go to the x-ray department just in case. He reluctantly walks there and back.
X-rays showed a helical fracture almost the entire length of his femur! Besides being a dangerous fracture, the femur is supposed to be the most painful bone to break and he was walking around.
In the end, I had to show him the break to get him to sit down on a wheelchair and into the hands of orthopedics. That man's pain tolerance still impresses me.
3. Falling Apart
I had a 65-year-old dude who was diagnosed with lymphoma eight months before we saw him. He lived an hour out of the city and didn't want to drive in for treatment, so decided he wouldn't get treated at all and stayed on his little remote place in the country by himself. Big mistake. Essentially, because it didn't get treated, it spread along his skin and his neighbors called an ambulance when popping in on him.
It had spread so far that it essentially went from his head to his knees. It had started to invade his eyes and mouth membranes. He couldn't drink and could barely see.
His skin had started to slough off and he was so severely dehydrated because he was losing so much excess fluid from his open skin that we had to treat him like a severe burns patient!
4. A Serious Headache
I had a headache, and a few hours later noticed that my irises were different sizes. I went reluctantly to the emergency room. Minutes after presenting myself, I had neurologists looking at me and I was rushed to get scanned.
The artery about an inch and a half below my brain had torn. The doctors were basically just waiting for me to have a stroke. I didn’t. Somehow.
