Doctors and nurses see a whole lot of unusual stuff in their day-to-day lives, but these shocking moments take it to the next level. These Redditors from both sides of the chart—both patients and medical professionals—came together to share their stories of the plot twists that left with their jaws on the floor. Not even the writers of Grey's Anatomy could come up with stuff as surprising as this.
1. Broken Body
A patient complained of thigh and hip pain. They couldn't lie on that leg for more than 30 seconds without pain. They thought it was muscular, but I thought it might be radiating back pain. They had several x-rays and learned that they had broken their hip sometime in the past, had a floating bone chip in their hip, degenerative disc disease, a birth defect in their spine, and mild scoliosis. Surprise!
2. When You Can’t Go…
Emergency radiologist here. I see plenty of people presenting with understated symptoms that turn out to be mind-blowingly advanced diseases. There's one that still breaks my heart, though: The four-year-old boy who presented with a rigid abdomen for a few months. Was told by their pediatrician it was constipation months ago but his parents never followed up when it didn't resolve.
When I imaged his abdomen I found his entire liver was replaced with a mass consistent with hepatoblastoma (tumor). I asked the parents why they waited so long to work it up. They said they were satisfied with the diagnosis of constipation. That one left a mark on my soul.
3. Stick To The Diet
An older woman called emergency services for chest pain. Her vital signs were terrible and she had “the look” that anyone who’s ever seen a patient about to kick the bucket will recognize instantly. Her EKG suggested multiple blockages in her coronary arteries, and we had to put her on a ventilator shortly after she got to the ER because she deteriorated so quickly.
The cath lab confirmed the EKG findings, and they were shocking: a complete blockage of one artery and 99% blockage of two other major arteries. Unfortunately, it was too extensive to resolve with PCI, so the only option was to fly her to the university hospital in the city for an emergent triple bypass. It turned out that she’d had multiple episodes like this (but not quite as severe) over the last six months.
She had apparently refused bypass surgery not once, not twice, but three times in favor of a Mediterranean diet. Well, at this point she didn’t have much say anymore and her family agreed, so off to the operating room she went. I took care of her again about four months later and she actually seemed to have made a remarkable recovery.
4. It Was More Than A Two-Man Job
When I was a medical student on my surgery rotation, I was with only the attending surgeon in the OR. The residents on service were otherwise busy, so the attending impatiently decided, "Fine, I'll do it with just the med student". It was a relatively straightforward case, placing a gastric tube in a patient who couldn't eat.
The attending put a scope down the patient's esophagus, and I had a big needle to push toward the scope. He shined a light towards the skin when he entered the stomach, and I pressed on the skin and saw it dent in on the screen, showing we were in the right place. I thought I took that same position and angle and introduced the needle, except it didn't appear on the screen.
I pulled back, pressed again, tried again, and didn't see it. The attending grew frustrated and told me to push the needle in deeper. I had a twinge of concern but eventually hubbed the needle, which was several inches long. Eventually, the resident showed up and tried as well. He tried introducing the needle but couldn’t visualize it.
Eventually, he switched places with the attending and, after another try, got the needle into the stomach, and we finished placing the tube. I came back after my day off, only to make a disturbing discovery. The patient had passed from internal bleeding. One of the multiple needle pokes—or possibly a cumulative effect—had injured arteries in the abdomen.
Now, I know not to ignore that twinge. I also know that even "low-risk" procedures have a risk of catastrophe and always take care to mention that when consenting patients for surgery. I harbored guilt over it throughout medical school and still had hesitation the first time I did that procedure as a resident.
5. Weight Loss Secrets
I was called to the ER to do a psych consult on a patient that was complaining of GI symptoms but his story was sort of strange, and he had no overt abdominal signs or symptoms. He was complaining that he suffered from "Barrett's stomach" (not esophagus) and had been diagnosed by a world-famous gastroenterologist. He stated that if he could lose weight that his GI issues would resolve.
I spent some time talking with him and, other than this strange fixation on his "Barrett's stomach," he seemed okay...Until he brought up his disturbing weight loss method. He made a massive wound in his thigh so that the leg would become gangrenous and eventually need to be amputated. This would allow him to quickly lose the 20 or so pounds needed to cure his stomach ailment.
The man actually had a self-inflicted GSW to the thigh from several days before. I didn't actually assess the wound because I was there for a psych consult but did immediately alert the ER staff. I was all calm and nonchalant like, “Ohh sir, excuse me for a sec…I'm just going to pop out and let another staff member know about this so they can take a look at it for ya!”
The ER was located in a county that employed a staff of mental health social workers to place psych patients so I had to call one of them out while he was getting (thoroughly physically) assessed. I have no idea what happened to him but I hope he's doing okay.
6. His Physician Left Him Sore
A guy came into our ICU and was very septic but still talking. He had visited his primary care physician complaining of a sore throat for a couple of days and was dismissed without any intervention since he didn't appear to have strep throat or the flu. When he reached the ICU, he had pretty severe abdominal discomfort, so we sent him for a CT scan.
As the scan was finishing, he coded, had to be intubated, and had a multi-organ failure. The CT scan was like a horror movie. There was a whole bunch of stuff in his peritoneal cavity. His wife told us that he had choked on an ice cube the day before seeing his primary care doctor. Evidently, he had swallowed a whole double half-moon-shaped ice cube that perforated his esophagus with a HUGE 4.25-inch tear.
This allowed a significant portion of his swallowed food and drinks to get into his peritoneal cavity instead of his stomach. To make things worse, he had some reflux that allowed stomach acid to get in there as well. Once we realized what was going on, he went for extensive washout and exploratory surgeries to repair the damage to his esophagus and other organs. Thankfully, he made a full recovery, but he was very close to not making it at all.
7. Flip-Flop
One time, I was performing an autopsy on a cadaver and I made the most peculiar discovery. When I tried to flip the lungs into the proper position, BLOOP—it flipped right back to upside-down. After some due diligence, we realized the lung was a transplant, and the surgeons who performed the transplant had attached the organ incorrectly.
The lung had been fighting to be upside-down its whole life in this other man. After 15 or so years, the man eventually moved in a way that allowed it to flip over, resulting in this fatal injury.
8. Chipped Tooth
I work at a dentist’s office. A patient presents for an exam, concerned that part of her tooth has chipped off. On examination, it is not in fact a tooth that chipped off, but rather a piece of calculus, which is a buildup of hard tartar that covers your teeth over time when you don’t brush them. It can be small deposits, or in this case, an entire “bridge” covering her actual teeth. She thought the calculus was tooth material and was quite shocked to learn we were actually unable to see her real teeth and she’d need an extensive cleaning to remove it all.
9. He Was Wet Around The Edges
One day, I was called over by a nurse who told me a patient's bandages were wet as they were bleeding a little. The patient had recently had his leg amputated. I pulled his bandages off and couldn't believe what I found: A spurting femoral artery. At that point, the patient passed out and was sent for an emergency operation. It was a close call for sure.
10. I Was Whole-Heartedly Saved
When I was born, my dad knew something was wrong with me because of the way I was breathing—very rapid, short breaths. When I was three months old, my parents noticed there really wasn't any change. The first hospital they took me to said there was nothing to worry about, and babies just breathed like that. He was 100% certain they were wrong.
They took me to a second hospital, and they said there was something wrong, but they didn't have the technology to help. They recommended a third hospital, which was a couple of hours away. Finally, the third hospital took me right in and performed surgery that day. I had five holes in my heart. They tried to go through my rib cage, but it didn't work. They had to crack my sternum and go directly through my chest. They took my heart out of its body and patched the holes.
11. With The Push Of A Button
When I was a resident, doing a shift in the ED, we had a patient arrive who had experienced cardiac arrest in the field. The patient had a severe asthma attack while driving, so he pulled over and hit his OnStar button. When EMS arrived, he was outside his car on all fours. He collapsed as they got their gear. They were unable to intubate him in the field and they also had trouble bagging him.
When he arrived, his vitals were pretty much what we'd expect to get if we ran blood on a day-old body. But we never gave up, and thank God we didn't— We did CPR, pushed epi, intubated him, and...we got him back! Within 15 minutes, he was interacting with us, nodding and shaking his head appropriately. This man was not MOSTLY deceased—he was really really deceased—but somehow, he came back completely. I never count out asthmatics after that episode.
12. Reckless Endangerment
I worked as an operating room porter for a number of years to help me through school. I was cleaning up after an operation on an inmate who was Hep C and HIV positive, and I was working quickly and recklessly. I stuffed the blue matting and used aprons into the garbage. As I pulled up from the trash, I made a gruesome discovery. Blood was pouring from my hand.
Unseen and unknown to me, a doctor or nurse had left a scalpel in the blue matting. It was so sharp that I didn't even feel it when it cut me, but I was bleeding profusely. The nurses and doctors jumped on it right away, cleaned and prepped my cut, and got me on special meds right away. I had to get shots and check-ups regularly for the next year. Luckily, I was okay.
13. Pain Tolerance
I had a male in his 50s WALK into trauma to have his left thigh stitched up. 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. 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, his knee hurt a bit but logically that was from the fall. I agreed, but asked him to go to the x-ray department just in case. He reluctantly walked there and back. The 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. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. That man's pain tolerance still impresses me.
14. Not Just Another Head Case
When I was a medical student on a surgery rotation in trauma, we had a patient come in after he fell on the street and bonked his head. Apparently, he had fallen once earlier that day. He was discharged when the trauma workup at the other hospital was negative for injuries. We examined him and noticed his eyes were yellow.
As part of our workup, and because we weren’t quite sure what had happened, we CT scanned his abdomen. We noticed that his common bile duct was three times the normal size. His next set of vitals showed that his temperature was 103F. The guy was floridly septic from ascending cholangitis, which was why he was falling. It was a big miss that was definitely an emergency.
15. The Impaler
As a surgical intern, I had a guy impale himself on a metal fence a good 15 centimeters deep trying to get to a closed ATM to buy a round for his mates on a Thursday night. The medical examination revealed a bone-chilling truth—it missed the left femoral artery by a hair. It did do some damage to the major vein, but he walked out of the hospital with nothing but the nickname “perineum kebab”.
16. The Real Problem Just Flu Over Their Heads
One time in college, I got pretty sick. I thought it was the stomach flu, and it would go away if I just rested and stayed hydrated. My friends forced me to go to the college health center. That place had a ridiculous intake process. They had five "symptom description" forms—one for head-related symptoms, one for stomach-related, one for breathing-related, etc. I had symptoms from at least three forms, but was only allowed to fill out one.
I chose the stomach-related because the vomiting was my most debilitating symptom. They handed me off to a pre-med student for intake. She did not seem to understand that I could have a headache and a fever because I only filled out the stomach-related symptom form. Finally, a doctor came in. I told him I thought I had the stomach flu.
He told me I was wrong and that I had appendicitis. They stuck me about 15 times before they could hit a vein for a saline IV. They took a bunch of blood for testing and sent me home with some ibuprofen, telling me they would contact me soon to schedule my appendectomy. Two weeks later, they contacted me to tell me I had the stomach flu, and if I stayed hydrated and rested, my body would heal itself after a few days, which had already happened.
17. I Labored Over This One
I had a patient years ago for induction of labor. I knew her IV was good because I had put it in myself, and it hadn't blown. I kept turning up the medicine per protocol but no contractions. Later that afternoon, I moved the bed and discovered the IV had come apart, and I had been giving the floor oxytocin for hours. I replaced the contaminated IV parts and plugged them back in.
However, I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead—and that’s when I made a serious mistake. I didn’t realize I was essentially starting her meds at ten times the starting dose. She immediately started having contractions, closer and closer together until it was one big tetanic constant contraction, and we couldn't stop it. She was rushed to the OR and had an emergency C-section under general anesthesia.
It was completely what you don't want in a birth experience, which also carries a significant risk of complications. I felt absolutely terrible, and they wouldn't let me tell her and apologize. The family never knew what happened or whose fault it was. Fortunately, there were no adverse incidents, and the mother and baby were safe.
18. Total Transformation
Nurse here. I worked in a sub-acute nursing center some 15 years ago and I saw a lot of crazy stuff, but this one has stayed with me. I started working with this patient—he was admitted as “total”, meaning he needed total care. Completely paralyzed, he had to be turned and repositioned by hand every two hours. He also had a feeding tube and everything. He was with us for 90 days.
On Day 90, the entire staff was in shock—when they visited his room, he was up and walking with no assistance. He had no cognitive or physical deficits, and he was waiting for his barium study so he could eat again. The dude had a super rare form of vasculitis where his autoimmune response attacked the lining of his nerves, but he never got paralyzed.
I’ve had the pleasure to work with three out of five cases in my state. It’s common for these patients to recover some independence afterward, but he made a total and complete recovery in less than a year. Medical miracle.
19. Not The Antidote You Were Looking For
I had a patient come into the ER with some sort of spider/bug bite on her hand that had progressed to a red line running up her arm. She stated she put Benadryl cream on and it was very itchy. We continued talking and I asked if she had any allergies… "Yes, Benadryl!" I thought, good lord what?? I'm sure she could see the shock on my face.
We washed the Benadryl cream off her arm and miraculously it stopped itching.
20. This Doctor Was Pure Poison
I had a 2-year-old patient show up in the ER. She and her dad had been out in the fields in a small town several hours away from the nearest big city, where I worked. The dad took the child to the ER in the small town with an obvious snake bite. I'm still so furious when I think about what the doctor did. He shrugged and said, “Eh, it’s ok. She probably didn’t get envenomated,” and didn’t give the patient antivenom, which they had on-site.
They then elected to send the child to our hospital by ambulance instead of by helicopter. Several hours later, the patient showed up at our hospital coding and ended up not making it.
21. Forgot To Mention…
This was one of my first patients as a medical student. We were asking her about prior medical history because she was on a waitlist for an intestinal transplant, and we asked her in every possible way if she had any history and she was like, "No, I was very healthy before this". Finally we ask her "Do you take any medications at home"? That's when the truth came out: "Oh, just the meds I take for the lupus".
I swear to god, I almost slapped her.
22. A Gut-Wrenching Ordeal
From the age of about 17, I started getting chronic abdominal pain every day and terrible gut problems. It was so bad, and I couldn’t eat much. I would get fluctuating diarrhea and constipation, and menstruation became more and more painful. I started losing enormous amounts of blood, despite being incredibly small. It seemed like a gynecological problem.
However, my doctor, who was a woman, insisted it was anxiety and said she "wouldn't bother testing for or treating a gynecological problem unless I was older and was having trouble conceiving." I'll never forgive her for that. Over the next few years, my gut and uterus symptoms slowly deteriorated. I was bounced around the system to dozens of different specialists.
I was told it was just stress, anxiety, even possible pregnancy, and was told to take various over-the-counter products. Meanwhile, my gut function slowly ground to a halt. A functional gut test showed it took me six hours to pass an egg sandwich when it should have taken 90 minutes. I was losing weight and bowel control. No treatment seemed to work.
At 24, I was unable to work because I was literally uncontrollably pooping my pants. Doctors suggested I should seek therapy and suggested I was exaggerating. One day, I saw a new general practitioner for some regular health tests. I received an abnormal Pap smear. Within two weeks, I went in for an exploratory laparoscopy to rule out cervical cancer.
They discovered I was riddled with endometriosis—on my bowel, on my cervix, on my perineum, on some ligaments, even in my gall bladder. I also had an ovarian cyst the size of a tennis ball. I had excisions and treatment and was able to get my gut function back within three months, although I would never be able to have children.
If the doctor I went to at 17 had just done her job, I wouldn't have lost seven years of my life, my gall bladder, fertility, and mental health.
23. Wear Seatbelts, Folks
I'm a doctor, and this happened during my off-hours. I witnessed a sedan with a trailer flip four times at about 120 km/h on a highway into a ditch right in front of me. The scene was shocking—A 12-year-old wasn't wearing a seatbelt and was thrown from the vehicle through an open window. He had a superficial laceration of his leg and was in shock, but otherwise, he was apparently unharmed.
We did a quick trauma evaluation of the family and everyone seemed okay. I applied pressure to the kid's bleeding leg until EMS got there. When we were running to the wrecked car as the dust was settling, I was sure we were just going to see disembodied pieces of that kid everywhere—but that's not what we saw at all. He was FULLY intact; just really, really lucky. Wear seatbelts, folks. Everyone who remained buckled in the car didn't even have a scratch.
24. Drawing Blood From A Stone
Before medical school, I worked as a phlebotomist to gain exposure to hospitals. When I worked the night shift, our daily list of blood draws would print off around 1 AM, and I would start getting blood on the floor around 4 AM. I got really good. I could sneak in, lights off, tell the patient what I was doing, quickly draw blood, and get out with them barely waking up for it.
One morning, I went into a room, and the patient had a washcloth over his eyes. I told him who I was and what I was doing before tying the tourniquet around his arm and palpating a vein. About that time, his wife walked in and said, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING"? I told her who I was and was there to draw his blood. She said, "HE PASSED OVER AN HOUR AGO"!
I ran out of the room, apologizing.
25. Is This Really Necessary?
I was working in an area with lots of Mennonites. A mom called into the clinic because a wheel had broken and one of the spokes had penetrated her toddler’s eye. The reason for the call was to ask if he needed to be seen by a doctor…she indicated they had removed the spoke and she knew he was going to lose the eye, so was there really a reason for him to be seen? The answer was yes. Definitely, yes.
26. Her Decline Was Maddening
During my residency, we had a lady in her 60s who was getting progressively more forgetful, just overall declining and getting less and less able to take care of herself. She saw her primary care physician, who diagnosed her with dementia, and a neurologist who agreed with that diagnosis. Although she could not provide an accurate history, after talking to her family and friends, it became apparent that her symptoms were progressing unusually fast.
But something was just...wrong. I remember seeing the point where her new hair growth met her bright red hair dye and also her grown-out nails with hot pink polish. I thought that it obviously wasn't too long ago that she was not only taking care of herself, but going to get her hair and nails done. However, the lady who was in front of me was far from that.
The neurologist I was training with recognized this and had her admitted. He did every test, including a lumbar puncture. The workup eventually showed Creutzfeld Jakob disease—mad cow disease, which unfortunately has no treatment. She passed a few months later, but at least we were able to prepare her family for her inevitable decline so that they could make the proper arrangements.
27. Legless Lumberjack
I helped take care of an old dude who had one leg amputated, and the other leg broke into two. He was on oxygen and not very compliant with using his wheelchair. We were talking with him and he was getting really argumentative. “How am I supposed to chop wood in a wheelchair”? That was what he kept demanding.
When asked how he was chopping wood with one leg in the first place, he responded that he’d crawl into the woods and hop up to chop the wood. This was even more concerning. When the doctor asked how he was carrying his ax, oxygen, and the wood all at the same time, he looked him straight in the eye and said, “I carry ‘em on my back”. Not sure if he was serious, but he was pretty dang grizzled and he looked like he may have been crawling through the woods.
28. A Negative Experience
I did HIV testing, and I once showed up to work super tired because I couldn't sleep the night before. This guy came in for a test. We went through the pre-counseling, and then I told him to step out for a few minutes while the results came up. When he returned to get his results, I told him to take a seat. The first thing that came out of my mouth was, "Your results are positive".
Then I saw the look on his face, and that's when I realized I had messed up. I said, “Oh, no, no, no, I meant to say negative". I almost gave the guy a coronary.
29. Fullmetal Toe
I did a bunion and hammertoe surgery on a lady with no allergies. They had a new patient packet, and the primary care notes all had “no known allergies". I always ask about metal allergies anytime I plan on putting in hardware. The surgery goes great. I’m on call for the practice and receive a phone call for the group 18 hours post-op.
Her nerve block has worn off and she is in excruciating pain. I give instructions on what to do. The next morning she shows in my office before I even arrive. I took one look at her and knew something had gone horribly wrong. Ten out of ten pain, sweating profusely, blood pressure elevated, foot is massive. Clearly not faking it. I have to send her to the hospital for intractable pain. Blood work indicates elevated eosinophils but everything else normal. No blood clot or infection.
The hospitalist is convinced it’s complex regional pain syndrome. I rack my brain and think of what could be going on. I am only five months out of residency. My butt is puckering so hard. Since eosinophils are elevated, I ask if she is allergic to jewelry. “Yeah, my tongue swelled up when I had it pierced. I had it removed the next day".
She had a freaking NICKEL allergy. No allergist will see her to confirm so this is all speculation but makes sense with the hardware I used. Once the hardware is removed and exchanged for titanium, her pain is resolved. There was one case in my residency of hardware allergy (1/3,000 cases I was first or second assistant on). If I did not scrub into that case, I don’t know if I would have figured this out so quickly. Crazy case.
Now I always ask: “Have you ever had any reactions to jewelry?” A lot of patients won’t tell you about problems with jewelry and may not know they have metal allergies!
30. Keeping Abreast Of My Health
When I was 26 years old, I found a lump in my breast. I had learned how to do self-checks, and I knew this lump felt different than a cyst. It felt exactly like the tumors I had been taught to recognize. The first doctor said, "You're too young for breast cancer.” I didn't accept that and went to a second doctor where I got, "It hurts when I mash it, right?" It didn’t.
They also said, "It gets bigger with your period, right?" I told them, no, but they insisted, saying, "Sure it does!" The third doctor told me, "You'll have an ugly scar if I biopsy it." By this point, I wanted to scream. I finally told the fourth doctor to call 9-1-1 to get me off his table because I wasn't leaving without scheduling a biopsy. It turned out I had Stage 2 cancer. After surgery, nine months of chemo, three months of radiation, and being told I couldn't have kids, I survived, had three kids, and had a long life.
31. A Long Way Down
Med student here. My most memorable patient was a particularly pleasant middle-aged man who was flown back to my hospital in the midwest after suffering a six-story fall from a hotel balcony in the Caribbean. The poor fella had just arrived at his hotel planning to spend a week in paradise. Immediately upon arriving at his hotel, he stepped out on his balcony to watch the sunset and leaned on the railing only to have it collapse underneath him.
He fell six stories straight down and suffered bilateral open tibial pilon fractures (which are particularly high energy and difficult to heal). The aftermath was ghastly—the poor guy apparently fell into a locked backyard and his wife and kids had to listen to him screaming in pain and bleeding for over two hours before they could get the fire department to break down the gate.
He was taken to the hospital on the island where he was staying, and he was stabilized. The doctors recommended that he have both his legs amputated. He begged to be shipped back to the United States, and apparently, the government got involved and flew him to Miami where he was externally fixated and transfused several times.
About a week later, he was shipped up to the midwest to my hospital. It literally blew my mind the stuff this poor guy went through. Sadly, I think that he ended up losing one of his legs anyway because his wounds wouldn't heal and he ended up with osteomyelitis (bone infection).
32. Paper Trail
I worked in palliative care, and I sent a patient home to see if he could spend his final moments there instead of in the hospital. We weren't very hopeful but thought it would be worth a try. To no one's great surprise, he ended up coming back a couple of days later for whatever reason. Since I knew him, I re-admitted him.
I knew he wanted to be a DNR (do not resuscitate), so I wrote it on my notes. But there was one crucial thing that I forgot. However, I didn't re-fill out the hospital paperwork. The next day, I got to work to discover he had coded and was on a ventilator in the ICU. Instead of passing peacefully, his wife had to make the decision to turn off life support.
My entire job at the end of life is to ensure as peaceful a passing as possible. In one simple omission, I messed that up royally.
33. Family Matters
While I was a psychiatry resident I did a graded 30-minute interview in front of my attending on a new patient without knowing any previous chart history. I spent 29 minutes collecting high-yield medical and psychiatric history, and since I had an extra minute to spare, decided to ask him more about his childhood. "Well, it was pretty terrible after I watched my dad off my mom and then off himself". Needless to say, I did not have enough time to unpack that and failed my exam.
34. They Finally Saw The Problem
For years I suffered from migraines. They were mainly behind my eyes, but I chalked it up to stress and hormones, as did the neurologist I was seeing for them. She seemed annoyed that I kept saying the pain was behind my eyes, in my temples, and the pressure was insane. She gave me Imitrex and sent me on my way. I went to visit my eye doctor for a check-up.
She asked if I got headaches. I told her yes, but it seemed like I always had one. She told me my optic nerves were very inflamed, and excess spinal fluid or a tumor could be the cause. She sent me to a neuro-ophthalmologist, where I had a brain MRI, a spinal tap, and new medication to help keep my spinal fluid in check. The neuro-ophthalmologist told me I was about six months away from having vision loss and that I was lucky I mentioned my headaches to my eye doctor.
35. One Too Many
I’m still fairly new in my training but this was one of the first crazy recoveries I’ve seen: A college kid was out drinking with his buddies and he drank a bit too much. He presumably aspirated some of his vomit and it caused this massive inflammatory reaction in his lungs called ARDS. He went from perfectly healthy to being close to the grave within an hour.
He got transferred to our ICU in the middle of the night, completely unstable, on a ventilator, and maxed out on five pressors (life support meds to keep your blood pressure up), He was being considered for ECMO (basically like a temporary machine bypass of your heart and lungs, used as a last-ditch effort to save someone). Things only got more chaotic from that point on.
His parents were on a last-minute flight from out of state with no bags packed to get to their son. Our team was concerned that he wouldn’t make it through the night and braced his friends for the worst. The treatment for ARDS is actually something called proning, which is when you literally just flip the patient onto their stomach.
And miraculously, two hours later, he was off all pressors, maintaining his own blood pressure, and—while very sedated from all the meds—he was able to respond to voices and shakes, and he could nod his head in response to questions. He made a full recovery four days later! (And vowed to stay away from booze for a while).
36. Not So Routine
I had a guy in his 50s who had been seeing an acupuncturist for an area of numbness and weakness traveling down his legs. He’d had two months of acupuncture for them with no improvement, so very reluctantly booked a routine GP appointment. At that point, he’d started to have issues with his urination too. As soon as I started speaking to him it became obvious that the symptoms he presented with were consistent with spinal cord compression—an absolute medical emergency.
We got him straight into the hospital, and imaging showed cancer, with a tumor pressing onto his spinal column. Although he started treatment and steroids that day, by then it was too late. He lost the ability to walk, and a few months later the cancer won. It was enormously sad and frustrating as that constellation of symptoms would have raised an immediate reg flag with anyone with medical training.
37. Dental Dilemma
I went to a dentist's office for several years and was repeatedly told to get braces and remove my wisdom teeth. Both of these posed an issue since I played trumpet for a living. Performing at a professional level would have been difficult to impossible with braces, and having my wisdom teeth out would put me out of work for at least a month during recovery. I told this to my dentist repeatedly.
I decided to get a second opinion about the wisdom teeth, so I went to an oral surgeon to have them look at it. That's when I finally learned the truth. They took X-rays and looked at the records from my dentist. He said, “So, you're experiencing a lot of pain in your wisdom teeth, according to your record.” I told him I was not and never had. He then told me, “So, I'm just going to assume your regular dentist falsified the rest of your record too, so I can put this folder down and do my job.”
He then explained that the way my wisdom teeth came in, they were sitting on a nerve that would be next to impossible not to cut in the process of removal. That would leave me without feeling in the lower half of my face for the rest of my life—obviously a major issue, given my career. I was advised not to worry about them if I was not in pain.
I eventually needed to extract a tooth adjacent to one of my wisdom teeth, which my regular dentist completely blew off when I asked about it. I never went back to my original dentist.
38. Do The Dew
ER nurse here. The case that immediately stands out in my mind was the diabetic who was, of course, noncompliant with her regimen and came in feeling horrible because her blood sugar was high. How high? Try just below 1,300. For reference, diabetics are supposed to manage their blood levels and keep them no higher than 180, and even that’s kind of pushing at the limit.
By all accounts, this girl should have been in a diabetic coma at best. Yet SOMEHOW, fate was on her side—she was conscious, walking, talking, and arguing with us every step of the way. Despite the fact that her pee was almost pure sugar (and resembled crystallized honey), it was a 20-minute argument to get her to stop drinking her diet Mountain Dew (she firmly believed that the fact that it was diet meant it was fine).
Her blood was syrup. How we got enough to run blood tests was a minor miracle in itself. She kept complaining and asking for snacks, and she was just not a pleasant person at all. Obviously, she had to go up to the ICU. 20 minutes after we got her up and transferred, she walked out of the hospital. Why? She was mad that they only would give her water to drink. Priorities, I guess? Haven’t seen her since, but I still wonder about her from time to time...
39. Tooth Tales
I had to take out the remainder of this guy's teeth. He was in his 60s, and told us verbally as well as on his health history that he didn't take any meds. So I took out his last eight teeth, all easy extractions due to infections and periodontal disease. But I couldn't get him to stop bleeding. I asked him again if he was taking anything. I finally got the clots stabilized, but it took almost an hour and I had to consult our surgeon.
When he saw the surgeon a few months later about placing implants, he told the surgeon he was on BP medication and blood thinners. I refused to see him anymore after that.
40. It Wasn’t All In Her Head
During my psychiatry residency, I was working in the Psych ER when we got a transfer from the main ER. Her family had brought her in for altered mental status that had been getting gradually worse over the previous two weeks. All her labs and vitals were normal, so she had been "cleared" by the ER doctors, and I was told she was likely having "a mental break-down" or psychotic episode.
I went to assess her. She was non-responsive, staring off into space, crying and shaking her head back and forth and mumbling. She could not answer any questions and seemed to be having a tremendous amount of anxiety. One of the biggest lessons my mentors taught me was to assume that a change in mental status was always a medical condition until proven otherwise. Then you could think about psychiatric causes.
Within a couple of seconds of seeing her, I had an intense gut feeling. This was not psychiatric in nature. I looked through her chart and saw she had a history of blood clots in the past. Her vitals were rechecked, and again they were totally normal. At that point, I made an executive decision and ordered a stat CT of her chest to look for a possible clot.
The technicians who came to take her for the study were slightly confused as to why a psych resident was ordering this. The radiology team even called me and wanted to make sure I had not ordered it by mistake. Thirty minutes later, I got a call from the on-call radiology resident, and she said, "Are you the psych resident that ordered this CT?"
I said I was, thinking I was about to get some comment about wasting their time. She continued, "And this patient is in the psych ER?" I confirmed. She then told me, "Well, you better call the ER and have her transferred STAT because this lady has the most massive pulmonary embolism I have ever seen and will likely code any second.”
With that, we transferred her back to the ER. She was admitted to the hospital and treated for her clot, and within a few days, she was back to normal. From then on, whenever someone would make a joke about psychiatrists not being "real" doctors, I would tell them this story, and that would settle it.
41. The Outlier
I followed this patient with my attending. The patient was a 19- or 20-year-old African-American with sickle cell anemia. He was stroked out and he was in a coma. They had him intubated and put on a ventilator because he couldn't breathe on their own. The MRI was so, so bad—it looked like somebody emptied out an artillery magazine and scattered the pellets around the brain.
I still haven't seen another MRI like that one. With the brain, there is essentially a three-day rule. If you have a little chance of survival three days after a neurological injury, the chances of meaningful recovery are slim. Week one went by and his daily spontaneous breathing trials failed, so the patient was kept tubed and vented.
The second week went by and there was still no change in the patient's status. My attending and I were reviewing his case, and we decided that the next morning we were going to encourage the family to withdraw care. Friday morning, we went in. The spontaneous breathing trial had failed but the patient's eyes were open and following us around the room.
His eyes hadn't been open before. My attending and I were absolutely shocked. We were convinced this kid was essentially deceased based on the lack of brain function, but we'd just been proven wrong. Still, we didn't hold out much hope for more improvement. That Saturday or Sunday, we were able to safely remove the breathing tube. Another week went by, and the patient was able to move his head, arms, and legs around. Another week went by, and they were able to sit at the edge of the bed.
During this time of rapid improvement, he still lacked fine motor skills and could not produce coherent speech. He would get frustrated, tearful, and despondent. In discussion with the family, I made the comment to my attending in private that the patient appeared depressed. My attending brought up the likelihood of depression and the mom just scoffed. Her response was unbelievable.
"He has nothing to be depressed about! He is alive!" We argued our case for depression with her. "A month ago, he could walk, talk, and eat without assistance. He cannot do any of those things now. His life won't ever be the same. He has every reason to be depressed". She was still in denial about the prospect of her child being depressed in that situation.
The patient was discharged to rehab a few days after that conversation, and I don't know what happened to him after that. I don't believe in a higher power, but that was a very significant and completely unexpected recovery. Everybody involved in the care of that patient was sure that he wasn’t going to make it, and we were all proven wrong. It's a nice reminder that there are outliers.
42. Trash Day
I was working in the ER as a paramedic intern. An older man came in with his hand bandaged stating he couldn't get his thumb to stop bleeding. The nurse unwound the bandage and revealed a horrifying sight: There was a gaping wound oozing blood from where his thumb USED TO BE. The nurse asked him where his thumb was and the old guy asked what day it was. The nurse said Thursday or whatever day it was.
The guy said well, I guess the thumb went out with the trash this morning. He'd lost his thumb to his lawn mower three days ago and only now was coming in.
43. My Original Diagnosis Was Hard To Swallow
When I was in college, I got to where I couldn’t swallow. It started with difficulty swallowing and progressed to me having to swallow bites of food multiple times and regurgitating it. It then got to where all I could swallow were broths and mashed potatoes with no chunks. I went to the doctor numerous times and was told every time it was acid reflux and part of my anxiety disorder. I had lost 30 pounds and was just generally miserable.
Finally, my grandma was tired of watching me be sick all the time, so she called the GI doctor herself. They said we needed a referral, but she explained the situation, and they got me in the next day. They did an endoscopy and found my esophagus was 95% occluded at the gastroesophageal sphincter. For some reason, some of my primary doctor’s notes ended up in my discharge paperwork. They showed me, and I've never been so angry.
She had told them it was acid reflux and that I was being over-dramatic. She stated she did not recommend they do the procedure. I switched doctors.
44. Riding The Rails
My resident called me urgently one night and said I needed to come to the hospital. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw that night—a young man was cut in half by a train. I asked why I needed to come in, as there was no way he could survive that. She explained that somehow he was maintaining his pressure and wasn’t bleeding out. When I arrived, I found that the force of the train had sealed off all the major vessels from the pelvis down!
45. Not Just The Flu
I was an internal medicine resident who had a patient come to my clinic for “persistent flu". I had never seen her before, and she was a healthy-looking woman in her 60s. About a month before seeing me, she was seen by her PCP with persistent coughing, and otherwise had no shortness of breath or other infectious symptoms. Just a dry cough.
She got tested for flu and was negative, but got tamiflu just in case it was a false negative. She had a chest x-ray which was normal. She came to me a month later because her cough persisted despite completing her therapy. Everything sounded great. Heart, lungs, everything. To be honest, I don’t usually do this, but something in my gut told me I had to keep looking. So I started to feel for lymph nodes.
I felt around and found something above her left clavicle. It was hard, round, and she was completely unaware of it. I told her it was probably a reactive lymph node, but just in case, I wanted to get an ultrasound. This cascaded into her getting a biopsy, which showed squamous cell lung cancer. A CT scan showed stage IV lung cancer, not seen on her chest x-ray.
All diagnosed because of a lymph node that, almost by chance I was lucky enough to find by being thorough. I checked her chart about a year ago, and she was doing well. She got therapy and was in remission after a very long road and many obstacles. I’ll never forget her or her case. It was such a close call, and a good reminder for future cases.
46. Don’t Forget To Make Your Meds
I had to perform an extraction, so I took a detailed medical history. The patient said they were diabetic and hypertensive. Both big contraindications in extractions due to uncontrollable bleeding. Unless they're meticulous about taking their medicines and you stop the blood thinners five days prior to surgery, it's usually a blood bath.
I asked the well-educated, 50-year-old woman a number of times if she took her diabetes medicines on time and if she does rapid tests at home to check her blood sugar. She said she takes them every day without fail and hasn't missed a day in over two years. She said she's super disciplined about her health and would tell me if she hadn't taken them.
I sent her in for a rapid blood sugar test anyway, as a precaution, and lo and behold her values come back as 282mg. Almost twice as much as the normal value so it wasn't even like she was JUST off the mark. I asked her to explain and she gave a shocked expression and insisted that she took them. I ask her to physically show me her medicines instead of listing them. That's when I finally get the truth out of her.
She says, “Oh I don't have it right now, I make it when I need it". MAKE. She drinks bitter gourd juice one time every day instead of her diabetic pills because they are too big. And she 100% believed bitter gourd juice was the only medication she needed. She's a high school teacher.
47. Mixed-Up Meds
I was verifying a second refill of a prescription for a patient when I realized that a different pharmacist, who had verified it a month prior, had mistakenly allowed Pantoprazole to be dispensed instead of Paroxetine. It wasn’t fun explaining to the patient that instead of getting an antidepressant for the last month, he had been given medication for acid reflux. It had been a new medication for him, so he didn’t know the name and didn’t question it.
48. Case Study
When I was in college, there was a kid that exited a freeway at near freeway speed. But there was one big problem—it was a construction zone at night, with no lights, and it wasn’t supposed to be an open exit. He drove right into a pile of rebar. One of the poles went through the car into his face and pinned him to the seat through his head. A couple of years later, I was in grad school in an anatomy seminar, and the surgeon presented that kid's case as a study.
But here's the crazy part— not only did he live, but the rebar had also slid right past the base of the brain and spinal column. It was so close, that they had to twist it out like a screw because the ribbing on the bar threatened nerve damage. They literally rebuilt this kid's skull around his brain. His recovery photo was of a totally normal kid smiling. He had a small scar on his chin. I say kid, but he was like 17, just to be clear.
49. Check The Calendar
When I was in my final years of med school (English division of a European University in a country where I speak the native language fluently) we were to do patient interviews and physical examinations on our own and then circle back to our supervisor. I was translating back and forth between the patient (infectious diseases department) and a fellow classmate whom I was doing the interview with.
The patient said, "So you guys are coming in on a Saturday to do patient work? Good for you for going the extra mile"! (it was a Friday, which I initially brushed off as a mistake). My classmate asked me to ask the patient if he could tell us the date. I was like, "Are you sure? He's here for an infection not head trauma, he might think it's a bit degrading".
I thought it wasn't important but she insisted so I translated the question. The patient replies, "Ah well it's 2002, of course"! (it was 2018). After more questioning we realized all of his replies were as if it were 2002 (eg. "The last trip I went on was to Africa in the '80s, so about 15 years ago"). As it turns out he had neurosyphilis that went unchecked for many many years.
50. Bump On The Head
When I was a recent grad while working with the army, a soldier came to ER. He had just returned from vacation and complained about a severe headache—he had been hit with a bottle the previous day. I didn't think much at first because he was conscious and there wasn't anything more in anamnesis. That was until the medical examination, where I found that he had high blood pressure and bradycardia.
I sent him to a larger hospital and surprise, surprise, he had quite the subdural hematoma (brain bleed). I still wonder how that man was walking as if nothing was wrong with him.
51. His Symptoms Didn’t Fit The Mold
I had a patient who was thought to have a fungal infection in the chest. However, after many pulses with an antifungal, the plaque was still present and growing. So, the original physician called me to check the patient. The chest plaque was indeed very suggestive of a fungal infection. The direct examination even confirmed the existence of the fungus, but the treatments were doing nothing. When I rechecked the file, lo and behold, their leukocyte count was quite low. A quick HIV test later, the patient was diagnosed with AIDS on top of the fungus.
52. Eat It
A guy forgot his keys and was climbing back into his own apartment through the window. His cousin thought that he was an intruder and he acted rashly in a split second—pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. The round went into his mouth and exited clean out the back of his neck. After surgery, he was totally fine in a few days. It somehow missed all major structures. Didn’t even chip a tooth. He was really angry at his cousin, though.
53. Under The Covers
I was working on a general medical unit. I saw a patient in his 20s with new joint pain, UTI symptoms, and a painful eye. We were thinking it was reactive arthritis. Me: “Sir, I’ve got your lab work back like we talked about this morning. As we thought there seems to be some inflammation going on. The most common cause of this condition is food poisoning or an STI like chlamydia. I asked earlier but just to confirm, have you had any recent tummy bugs”?
Patient: “No”. Me: “So no recent dodgy takeaways or barbecues? No random vomiting or diarrhea”? Patient: “Not at all”. Me: “Okay, have you ever had intercourse”? Patient: “No”. Me: “Just confirm that means any activity at all which includes…”(I listed some options). Patient: “No”. Me: “Okay, that’s unusual. I’m going to go chat with my consultant and I’ll come back”.
Patient: “I have got something I’d like to talk about though. I’ve started urinating what looks like pus. Could I have caught chlamydia from that girl I slept with a few weeks ago”? Internally: “Yes sir. Yes”.
54. Scarred
A couple of years ago while I was a student, during an exam I had to physically examine a patient. I talked to him about his medical history: “Have you ever had surgery”? “No”. “So you were never hospitalized”? “No”. I finish with the history and tell him to remove his shirt to do a physical. The first thing I see is a big scar in the middle of the chest. “Sir, how did you acquire this scar”?
“Oh, that! That's from my open heart surgery a few years ago”!
55. Matters Of The Heart
While in residency, I saw a cardiologist miss a heart attack. By the time the patient came to us, some of the muscles supporting one of his heart valves had completely perished, and he was in cardiogenic shock. Basically, his heart function was so bad that it wasn't circulating his blood enough to support life. It was awful, but happily, he made it through.
56. Overly Prepared
I was a respiratory therapist. I was working on the hospice floor and we got a patient who was admitted for end-stage esophageal cancer to the point that she couldn't eat without a tube. The doctor gave her no more than a few weeks. So, the weeks went by and she seemed to be looking better. A few months went by and they took the tube out because she passed a swallow evaluation.
But the biggest miracle? They did a scan and she was cancer free. She was so angry. She had sold her home, given personal items away, etc as she was preparing for the end. I still remember her yelling, "Well, where in the world am I supposed to go"? Weirdest case I have ever seen.
57. Same Problem, Different Hospital
We had a lady attend the ER with abdominal pain. She was from Pakistan and did not speak any English at all. Her abdomen had a few oddly placed scars on her right side that she said were from an appendectomy several years ago. We asked if she had ever had gallstones or had surgery related to her gallbladder. She insisted that she had not and that she had never had pain like this before.
Anyway, in the hospital, she was in pain, and was having all kinds of tests. Her liver panel was normal, abdomen x-ray was inconclusive, US inconclusive, and the CT suggested multiple adhesions leading to difficult interpretation (not uncommon as appendicitis was really bad). ERCP (an endoscopy test designed to specifically image the bile duct/bladder etc., stands for endoscopic cholangiopancreatography) could view the common bile duct and hepatic duct but not the gallbladder as the duct appeared blocked by maybe a stone, consistent with her symptoms.
We decided to be as conservative as possible as surgery in an abdomen with potentially many difficult adhesions might create more problems than it solved. Her son arrived after several days. Yes, she gets pain like this often. No, it is not bad, she exaggerates it, the scars were from gallbladder removal. He said that while she genuinely did not speak English, she was also always attending hospitals in Pakistan with this problem.
58. Baby Blues
We had a patient who had come into our obstetrics and gynecology department with complaints of bleeding for the second time in a month and vague abdominal pain. She assumed it was irregular menses probably due to some hormonal imbalance or stress and wanted some medication for it. While she was talking to us, she suddenly felt weak and collapsed.
Once she gained consciousness, she assured us she was fine and it was probably because she skipped breakfast that morning. We asked her to get a pregnancy test done just in case, along with a routine ultrasound. But she said she was absolutely fine and just needed some medicine to regularize her cycle. On insisting, she got her pregnancy test done and it was positive.
Turns out it was a ruptured ectopic and she was going into shock because of the bleeding, hence the fainting. Thankfully we were able to manage her immediately. On probing further, we realized she has a previous history of ectopic pregnancy but didn't think it was significant enough to mention. Yes, that would have been helpful to know.
Flickr, Marco Verch Professional Photographer
59. A Grave Mistake
My wife found a lump under her breast that was concerning. It took her about two months to get a proper appointment to have it looked at. The doctor diagnosed it as a cyst and fibroadenoma. She drained the lump, and it was fine. It grew back a week later and was bigger. Finally, after being in pain for weeks, the doctor decided to remove it. Upon going in for the check-up after surgery, it turned out she had Stage 2A triple-negative breast cancer.
The surgeon was floored. The most upsetting thing was that while her primary doctor was on holiday, another male doctor told her, "Any surgery would be merely cosmetic, and the lump clearly didn't bother her because he could touch it." Despite doing eight months of therapy, the cancer returned seven months later and ultimately took her life after it spread to her brain and spinal fluid. She had switched doctors twice because they wouldn't take her lump seriously. She was only 27 years old.
60. Perseverance
I once had an elderly patient come to the hospital. He was apparently enjoying his day at a lake around 5 km away from the town. He started to feel dizzy and weird around the arms (general signs of heart attack) and surprisingly decided to "swim through it". This dude proceeded to swim across the whole lake. That was strange enough, but it gets even stranger.
He then started to feel even worse and went to the town hospital all by himself on foot. He was pretty screwed up when he got there. They later found out he had gone through a relatively severe heart attack and had to get surgery the same day. The guy managed to live but man, it still sounds pretty wild to swim through a heart attack, then walk to the hospital by yourself.
61. Just A Headache?
I was still a student when this happened. A male in his 20s or 30s came to the emergency with a headache. He said it was terrible, and it seemed so. Everybody thought it was a bad case of migraine because he started vomiting (even my superior, which I obviously had to report). After that, I was just asking if this happened before and he told me that he had been seeing neurology like a year before but lost the appointment and never came back.
I saw the guys from neurology and told them about the patient, even when my superior had told me to send him back home (something in my gut was telling me that there was something more). When they examined him they ended up sending him to do a CT on his head. It turned out that he had a tumor covering almost half his brain.
62. Don’t You Put It In Your Mouth…
I’m not a doctor (yet) but I have been an ER tech for about two years. A mom comes in with her baby plus two more older kids. She complains that the baby hasn't pooped in a while and won't stop crying. As I'm settling them in with one of the nurses, the baby is bawling, like opera singer lungs bawling. Suddenly the mom whips out a white plastic shopping bag and sticks an end in the kid’s mouth.
She says, "This is the only way she stops crying". The nurse and I share a look horrified look. We immediately order an emergency x-ray on the kid's stomach. Turns out she had ingested a good amount of these bags and it was blocking up in her stomach. Big deal, potentially life-threatening. When we confront the mom about her baby feeding habits her only words of defense are "Well I checked all over the bag and I couldn't find anything that said “non-edible".
63. Not Just Butterflies In The Stomach
When I was an internal medicine resident I came across a very nice 50-year-old Dominican lady. She was well mannered, but one could tell she was not the sharpest tool in the shed. As I was prepping her chart for our first visit, I noticed that she'd been seen by every single digestive disease MD in our hospital system. Not only that, she'd had EVERY SINGLE PROCEDURE IN THE BOOK.
Ranging from endoscopies up both holes and culminating in an exploratory laparotomy (you're opened up to basically look inside you when we have no clue what's going on). All of this because for years she had one single complaint: She reported severe gnawing pain in her stomach. At this point, I should mention that she was Spanish speaking only.
Not only that, she had a very heavy Dominican accent, and I was the first Hispanic doctor to ever see her. My first language is Spanish and even I had difficulty understanding her. So she comes in and after exchanging some first-time pleasantries I politely ask her how she's doing. Sure enough, although she was smiling and said she felt well she pointed at her belly and said "it" was biting again, and asked for the cream to kill "it".
At this point, I got intrigued. Her medication list only mentioned a cream used for herpes breakthroughs. The previous fellow only mentioned in his note that during every single visit, she only asked for the cream and nothing else. I asked what she meant by the biting and what she intended to do with the cream. The answer made my jaw drop. She very calmly told me she intended to stick the cream up her rear end in order to kill the bird living inside her.
After delving more deeply into her story, it turns out she didn't have a medical condition. Ever since she was a little girl, she believed that after eating a whole quail egg, the bird had spawned inside her and gnawed away in her insides whenever she was very hungry. After a short visit to psych, she was diagnosed with a somatic type delusional disorder.
No amount of medication or psychotherapy will cure her, but she was still a fully functional mother of two who paid her taxes and had two part-time jobs. I reached out to every digestive disease doctor in our hospital system once more, to make sure she never receives an inappropriate invasive intervention. I've been following her now for three years and she's happy as one can be, considering she has a bird living inside her…
64. Open Wide
I am a student doctor and on placement at a small town doctor's office. I had a 70-ish-year-old woman come in with complaints of a small but painless growth that was visible at the back of her throat. I took a look, and had to try really hard not to burst out laughing. It turns out it took her 70 years to notice her uvula.
65. Born That Way
During residency in an urban northeastern US city, I was in the clinic. A very pleasant 50-something lady came in for a physical. Everything was going fine when she casually asked if there were any new vaccines out. She was up to date with everything so I asked if she had any specific concerns. She was casually asking to see if she could vaccinate her gay adult son against his particular orientation.
She was very nice, and always had a smile on her face, even when I broke the "bad" news to her.
Flickr, Asian Development Bank
66. Stomach Ache
A patient comes to the ER, a 19-year-old male. I'm getting his history. “Why are you here today”? "Every morning when I wake up my stomach hurts". “How long has it been hurting”? "All my life". “Well what is different today that's made you come here”? "My girlfriend doesn't think that is normal". More questions, exam by ER physician, lab tests. The abdominal pain always goes away after he eats. Always.
He wakes up hungry. He thinks it is pain.
Flickr, Marco Verch Professional Photographer
67. Just Some Soreness
I was working in GP and had a patient scheduled for an appointment. I looked through his notes to gain an idea of why he may be seeing me and saw he'd been seen a few times with knee pains/shoulder pains and the like. The guy is in his 70s so probably just arthritis. I'm thinking I'll do an examination of his sore joints and ask a few questions, prescribe some painkillers and it'll be a quick one.
I call him in and he walks in, sits down, and is cheery as anything. "What seems to be the problem then, sir? I notice you've had some issues recently with sore joints", I ask. He then proceeds to tell me about this sore knee. So I check his knee and take a history and it all seems fine. Ask anything else and he's like oh actually my neck is sore too.
So I check his neck and nothing untoward to be found there either. At this point he's like, “Ok well thanks doc I'll be off then”. I say to him, “Oh good glad we could help. And you have no other pains at all before you go”? Thank god I asked that question. He then sits back down and tells me he's been having central, crushing chest pain radiating down his left arm and into his jaw since last night and has been feeling breathless, and when it happened he had "an impending sense of doom".
I know a lot of you won't be doctors here but I'm sure you all recognize signs of an MI (heart attack) there. He had all the classic textbooks symptoms. I called an ambulance and he was rushed to the hospital for PCI (Percutaneous coronary intervention. They thread a catheter up the arteries into the coronary artery to find and then treat the blockage).
68. Picture The Elevators In The Shining
I delivered this woman's baby and it came out in good condition. A few minutes later, she experienced a major postpartum hemorrhage. I could not get the bleeding under control. We were pumping blood into her as quickly as it was pouring out. She went into DIC and became delirious. She lost more blood than she had in her and eventually she had a full hysterectomy.
She was black and blue from where we had tried cannulating and the room she was in was basically red. I have never seen so much blood in my life. But even after all that, she made it through. In fact, she was out of intensive care after two days and was allowed home after a week! I still do not know how she survived.
69. Name Game
I'm a paramedic. I delivered a baby in the back of the ambulance and placed it on the mother’s chest. I asked her what its name was (can't remember if it was a boy or girl) and she looked at me with a confused look and said, "I thought you named it". I really should have run with it but I was too surprised that she actually thought that.
70. Minty Fresh
I saw a patient for a follow-up after three ER visits in as many days for asthma. He was from another country, so this was the first time I ever met him. His lungs sounded absolutely terrible, but he swore he was taking the
every two to four hours with no relief. This raised suspicion to me, as the same meds were working in the ER. I asked him to show me how he was using it. He held it about a foot away from his mouth and did two puffs like a breath freshener, then swallowed. I felt really bad, he had never received any education about his illness or medications.
71. The Math Checks Out…
I was working in a rural OB-GYN clinic. I told a patient to try vitamin B6 to help with her nausea and morning sickness. She called back a few weeks later complaining that there had been no improvement. I asked about the vitamins. Her response was my favorite thing ever: She told me that Walmart did not have vitamin B6 so she bought B12 and has just been cutting them in half.
72. Parched
Here in México we have something called social service (Our college education is free in some institutions, so we have to pay for it with one year of free work in a rural area). So, during my first month, a woman in her 30s came to consult because she she always felt "weird" in the mornings. I asked what her symptoms were and she told me that every day she wakes up with a dry mouth, but that the feeling disappears in about one or two hours.
"Well lady, how much water do you drink a day”? "Hmm, one or maybe two glasses, one at breakfast, and one in the middle of the day". "Do you know what thirst is"? "Yeah, when you drink water so you can pee". So I had to have an hour-long conversation about what thirst is and how it feels. Also, I had to tell her she needed to drink more water.
73. Hormone Imbalance
I’m a pediatrician. I once saw a teenage boy (around 13 years old) who was referred to me (for something unrelated, can't remember what). When I asked him if he was on medications, the boy's mom pulled out some birth control pills. I couldn't believe my eyes. Apparently, his family physician suggested birth control as a way to treat his acne. Yes, you read that correctly. A licensed doctor told a teenage BOY that was just going through puberty to take female hormones as acne treatment. I think he had been taking them regularly for the past year.
74. This Diagnosis Was As Hard As Nails
I was working nights, and a patient came in for a nailbed repair and insisted on having it done under general anesthesia. He had no clue what was coming. He aspirated as he was going under, so we did a chest X-ray to see if he had any saliva or blood in his lungs. We didn't know that prior to this emergency surgery, he had been going to his doctor for over six months complaining about chest tightness.
They had put him on various asthma medications, but none had any effect on him. The X-ray showed a giant mass in his left lung. We kept him asleep and transferred him to the ICU. His wife and three-year-old daughter were waiting for him in the ward. We had to tell them where he'd gone, why he'd gone there, and what was going to happen. He lost his life to lung cancer within the month.
75. It’s A Sign
I’m a paramedic. I had a guy walking in the street who got hit in the head with a stop sign that flew through the air after a motorist slammed into it. He was literally impaled in between his eyes with the sign. Like part of the “S" was in his skull. The security video showed the sign and the pole swinging through the air before hitting him. But he took us all by surprise—he was talking and alert the entire ride to the hospital. Walked out post-surgery a few months later. Amazing.
76. Follow Directions
When I worked as a nurse in urgent care, we had a guy with a bad abrasion on his leg stemming from a fall down a flight of steps. He was prescribed a topical cream, among other things. Directions on the tube: apply to the affected area. Sounds simple enough, right? During the follow-ups, we noticed the wound was gross and not healing at all. He insisted he put the cream on the affected area and it just wasn't working for him!
The doctor suspected something, so he had the patient demonstrate how he applied the cream so we can maybe offer some further help. The patient says he can't, because we're not at his house. And that's where the stairs are. This man was rubbing the cream on the stairs he fell down because the instructions said to "rub on affected area".
77. Brothers Who Herniate Together…
When I was a medical student, a patient and his brother came in together. The patient was just a post-op visit after a hernia repair. I found out he had another, baseball-sized hernia. His brother, on the other hand, literally had a FOOTBALL-sized hernia visibly coming out of the left leg of his shorts. It looked like an inguinal hernia, and he was able to use it as an armrest. I asked him if that bothered him at all, and he straight up said, "My brother's hernias were painful but this isn't, so I thought it was just a quirky defect". I hope he was lying to save face, but we recommended he get it taken care of.
78. Unplanned
I’m doing my internship, and one night I was attending at triage in the ER (triage is the area where you check the patients and decide how urgent the attention they need is). Context here, I’m in a third-world country and I’m at a public hospital that attends to an uncovered population, and instead of one hospital with all the specialties we have three: the “main” one, the OB-GYN hospital, and the children’s hospital.
So I had this woman in her late 30s, and she started telling me that she had extreme pain (ten out of ten) in the lower abdomen. No other sign that food could be involved, neither kidney stones nor urine infection. I proceed to ask about the last menstrual cycle. She doesn’t recall the exact date, but she says that was like four months ago.
Without hesitation and without asking more or anything else I told them (she and her familiar) to go right away to the hospital that was across the street, because if it was something obstetric we didn’t had any OB-GYNs in this hospital, and if it was something of general surgery they had general surgeons there. We got a call like 20 minutes later. That woman delivered her baby in the triage of the other hospital.
Flickr, The White Ribbon Alliance
79. Bodily Tricks
A patient was asking why she gets rib pain so often, and literally reached under her own rib and jiggled it with her fingers. I'll never forget that sight... Turns out there were a lot of other things she could do that she shouldn’t ever be able to, and she had a variant of Ehlers Danlos. Literally, I was so distracted by the popping in and out of her rib I didn’t even notice how horrifying it was that she could get her hand under there to begin with, until I retold the story to a coworker.
80. Giant Junk
I’m a nurse, and one day another nurse asks for my help putting in a urinary catheter on a patient. I walked into the room to see the biggest ball sack I have ever laid eyes on. I’m talking as big as a basketball. The other nurse couldn’t get the catheter in because she simply couldn’t find the urethra hiding under all that.
I open a new catheter kit, start poking around in there for about 15 minutes, still no urethra to be found. Urology was called in to place the catheter. Anyway, I get talking to the patient about how this happened and why he waited this long to come in. It had been swelling for months. He was a computer programmer who barely left his bed. Even worse, his fiancé was standing next to him the whole time. Neither had thought that he might have needed to go to a doctor or the hospital when his ballsack started swelling months before. Needless to say, it was infected.
81. We Found The Root Of The Problem
I worked as a dental assistant and had a patient come in whose color was off. His jaw and a tooth hurt. He had just come from the doctor, who told him to see us. I was suspicious of a heart attack. I put the pulse oximeter on him and almost fainted when I saw 82%. I grabbed our emergency high-flow oxygen yelled for the AED and an ambulance.
The guy was having a heart attack. Luckily, he survived and brought me a big old heart-shaped box of chocolate on Valentine’s Day. I had never been so scared or angry at another person before. The dentist I worked for called his doctor and said, “My 25-year-old assistant just saved your patient’s life.”
82. You Are What You Eat (Or Don’t)
I was in the ER and this woman, about 26 years old, went to my consulting room. She told me she had been feeling really weak and that she just slept almost all day with constant nausea...but what was really odd to me was that she was incredibly pale, almost like a ghost. So I decided to ask regular questions, like when her symptoms started and the like.
Apparently, she hadn’t eaten for almost a month. I decided to request some tests. She had 2.4 mg/dL of hemoglobin, which is super low considering the normal range is above 12 mg/dL. Not only was that pathological, but based on physiology books, that level is incompatible with life. How that woman was alive is beyond me.
83. Stroke Of Luck
I admitted a guy last week who came to the ED with a chief complaint of some right-sided numbness for the last few days (presumably had a stroke). Turns out he also had a rapidly progressing gangrenous infection of his scrotum/thighs/perirectal areas which required emergency surgery. He wouldn’t have even sought out medical attention if it wasn’t for his stroke?!?
84. Not Pregnant
I was doing an OB-GYN rotation and this woman presented to get a hysterosalpingogram to determine why she could not get pregnant. Reading the conclusion of the report showed that they began the process and terminated it, simply saying "IUD is in place". She wanted to have another child but forgot she had something stuck up into her uterus to prevent pregnancy...
85. Second Skin
Healthcare worker here. I was completing a screen in a falls and balance clinic. I asked the patient to take their shoes and socks off. The shoes came off alright, but they were struggling to get the socks off. I let them flail around for about five minutes and finally offered to remove their socks, whilst asking how they normally got their socks off.
In the process of pulling the socks off they told me they can't remove their socks, those socks had been on for a couple of months. As I peeled the sock back there was a plume of dead skin. I had to be firm to pull the sock off and the skin had actually started to grow into the cotton pattern of the sock. Their nails were so long they had curled around the toes and were digging into the underside of their toes. The skin had started to break down. Safe to say the socks were binned and burned with a very hot flame.
86. Not Normal
Oncologist here. This was in medical school. I was examining a patient for foot pain. I rolled up the patient's pants and saw a huge tumor called a basal cell carcinoma. I asked him why he did not come to another doctor when the tumor started growing. He said that he thought it was normal. A RED TUMOR RED GROWING ON YOUR FOOT IS NOT NORMAL!
87. Putting On A Show
Nurse here. A 67-year-old woman thought she was pregnant. I have to say, she looked pregnant in that it was all in her abdomen, like some pregnant women who look like they're carrying a basketball when they are at the end. But she was 67. It turns out it was a 37-pound ovarian cyst. I asked if I could watch the surgery.
That thing came out all in one piece; I'll never forget the sound it made. This was at a community hospital many years ago, before HIPAA, so naturally, the lab announced that anyone who wanted could come down to the lab and view this incredible thing before it was dissected by pathology. The line at lunchtime was so long you'd think they were giving away free concert tickets.
88. She Got Off On The Wrong Foot
I worked in EMS. We got a call for a female with leg pain. When we arrived on the scene, this woman’s leg was three times the size of her other one, blue and purple, and she had no pulse in her foot. A few days prior, she had fallen on some ice, and the urgent care she went to didn’t do any X-rays. They told her she had a sprain and gave her a walking boot. In reality, her tibia and fibula were both so severely fractured they were cutting the blood vessels and muscle tissue. She lost her foot.
89. Take A Breath
I’m a nurse, and I worked at a small county ER. I had a guy drive himself to the ER and while he was checking in, he suddenly went into respiratory arrest. He was a big guy with not much neck plus angioedema (swelling in the mouth), so we really struggled to get an airway on him. We lost his pulse numerous times and had to perform many rounds of CPR. We also performed several defibrillations and used every medication in the code cart plus a few others.
I personally broke at least three or four of his ribs. We somewhat stabilized him after an hour or two, and the only available ICU that could take him was a two-and-a-half-hour ambulance ride away. We finally shipped him out, all of us having to clean our scrubs due to blood splatters, and none of us were optimistic. Then, a month later, we were surprised by some shocking news—he called us from rehab and thanked us for saving his life.
90. Checking In
I am a medical assistant in a pediatrics office. Like two years ago, a lady came in with a gash in her heel. She'd had the gash open for weeks. I undid the wrapping the lady put on her foot and there were maggots eating at the lady's flesh inside her foot. The lady thought that the tingling was a bad sign and that she should get a checkup.
She said that she thought the tingling was normal and just wanted to check. Me and another MA had to dig out six maggots from this lady's foot. I was dumbfounded by how stupid this woman was not to go to a doctor once she got the gash.
91. Free Vitamins
I'm not a doctor, but I am a Spanish medical interpreter. Basically, I help doctors, nurses, techs, social workers, etc. to speak with a Spanish-speaking LEP (Limited English Proficient) to communicate. I don't only get to witness a lot of weird and straight-up dumb stuff, I get to Interpret it in a first-person manner, which sometimes can be rather affecting.
I have a lot of stories, but here's the wildest one I can remember: A young female LEP once came to a fertility clinic to see why she couldn't get pregnant. Doctor: "So I understand you're here because you can't get pregnant, is that right''? Patient: "That is correct, I already have a four-year-old child and for some reason, since I came here to the USA, which was a year ago, I have not been able to get pregnant, please help me, as far as I know I am not infertile, so what is happening? Please help me".
Doctor: "Sure thing, you're in the right place". He proceeds with some general medical questions. Doctor: "Ok, now let me check your medical record, Hmm...funny, it says here that you are taking a birth control injection treatment also known as Depo-Provera every few months, is that correct"? Patient: "That is correct. I've been taking it for a year now, since I came to the USA, I just had my last shot last week".
Doctor: "Well no wonder you can't get pregnant, you're under a birth control treatment, as long as you keep taking it you will not be able to get pregnant. That's why it's called 'birth control'". Patient: "Ohhh so that's what it's for, well I didn't know it was for that, how was I supposed to know? I just saw it was free and accepted it. It's not my fault that all treatments have such unclear and complicated names. I thought it was some kind of vitamin". Things like this slowly make me lose my faith in humanity.
92. Special Elixir
When I was a med student we visited a clinic in the country where I studied. Lots of people would get horrible injuries and use the local elixir of dirt/motor oil/saliva from the local old lady to patch up an exposed arm bone, or whatever. I had one woman in her 20s come in with a fungating breast cancer that looked like a hard mushroom/mold growing through the skin and to the outside world, that constantly bled anytime you touched it. Her family shamed any injuries or “impurities” and she thought she just needed to keep it covered until it got better. Ya…not true.
93. Lucky Break
A patient came into the ER. He and his wife were messing around and he chased her through the kitchen, took a hard left turn and lost his footing. He fell on his side. He’s a big dude, so falling is a bit more harmful for him. He couldn’t put pressure on his leg and knew immediately he was hurt pretty bad. He told me that he was able to crawl to the couch, and once settled said he wasn’t in too much pain.
He decided to sleep on the couch that night so he wouldn’t have to go upstairs. They made an appointment in the morning for the ER so they wouldn’t have to sit there all day, but we didn’t have an opening until two o’clock, so they just hung out at the house. He was in a decent amount of ambient pain, but it didn’t seem emergent.
Once they got to the hospital, we examined him and discovered that he had broken his hip, in this case breaking off his entire ball joint from the top of his femur. We couldn’t believe that he was conscious, let alone able to sit up. He'd even slept on it! We told them that they should have come the night before (and probably by ambulance). It required surgery with some hefty bolts to put it back into place.
But the crazy part is that apparently a healthy 30ish-year-old man breaking his femur from standing is highly unusual. After several tests and an MRI, it turned out he was in the early stages of osteoporosis due to a pituitary tumor in his brain. So we discovered a benign brain tumor all because the dude was wearing slippery socks.
94. I Should Have Trusted My Gut
When I was in training, I saw a child suspected of having meningitis. Although I was new to pediatric medicine, I had a gut feeling just by looking at the 4-year-old patient that he was too sick to have a regular childhood illness. The thing that tipped me off was the child was having a slight delay in his pupillary reflexes. Something was seriously wrong.
After seeing him, I asked the head pediatrician to do a lumbar puncture to investigate the spinal fluid for signs of infection. She said there was no need, and all signs pointed to some airborne virus that was roaming around at that time. She believed that an unnecessary lumbar puncture could scar a child for life and whatnot.
While I disagreed, I mistakenly doubted my own assessment and assumed the doctor with more experience surely knew better than me. I shrugged, wrote everything down in the dossier, and asked the pediatrician to read my evaluation afterward. I went home after an exhausting evening, having worked almost 14 hours straight.
Three days later, the child returned with fulminant meningitis that had taken a bad turn. When discussing the patient, she remarked she noticed abnormal pupillary reflexes in the patient. Not only did she discount my suggestion of doing a diagnostic lumbar puncture, but she also did not read my evaluation of the patient three days earlier.
95. A Tickle Under The Rib
I saw this one patient with a really odd condition. While she was asking me why she gets rib pain so often, she literally reached under her own rib and jiggled it with her fingers. Turns out, there were a lot of other things she could do that she shouldn’t ever be able to. I attributed it to a variant of Ehlers Danlos syndrome, which causes connective tissue abnormalities.
I was so distracted by the popping in and out of her rib that initially, I didn’t even notice how horrifying it was that she could get her hand under there.
96. Odd Anatomy
I’m a biomedical scientist, and my officemate was a medical doctor working on his PhD. He once did an appendectomy and cut into this person’s abdomen—only to find no appendix. He started freaking out. The support nurses in the room, however, started snickering at him because they knew right away what the problem really was.
Occasionally, they see someone with a rare genetic disorder where all their left-right asymmetries are reversed. This patient’s appendix was on the other side.
97. Too Close For Comfort
About four years ago, my girlfriend randomly developed a sharp pain in her upper thigh one night. She was in decent shape so it came out of nowhere. Her left leg swelled up and the pain kept getting worse. Being the self-proclaimed medical expert that I am, I somehow came to the conclusion it was a pinched nerve and that she should just walk it off.
I came up with a believable explanation and that was that for about another hour. We were visiting my parents, and the pain had been getting worse. My mother insisted I take her to the emergency room just to be safe, and she even offered to pay and all. I was unsure but decided it was one of those things where I should just take the motherly advice.
We made it to the hospital emergency room, and it was like 9 pm on a Tuesday. She got helped relatively quickly and they ran an ultrasound on her thigh. What they found was utterly disturbing. Turns out, she had a giant blood clot that got stuck in a vein on the way to her brain. If it had made it there, she would have lost her life, guaranteed.
So a quick surgery was ordered, and they found out yet another pressing issue—she also has a condition called DVT, and daily, self-injected shots were prescribed. Not long after her first hospital visit, she required a second surgery to sever one of her main veins, which the doctors then stretched and reattached at its two ends.
98. Some Things Can’t Be Put Back
When I was in EMT school, we were told about a paramedic student (the instructor was a paramedic as well) who observed a stabbing call. They arrive at the bar and see a dude with a knife in his abdomen. Medic student takes lead and pulls the knife out, something you never do, as I’m sure you know. Senior medic loses his freaking mind at this dumbass, asking him what the heck he was thinking.
Student freaks out and, you guessed it, puts the freaking knife back in. The patient died as a result, student lost any chance of having a good job (not even just in EMS) and was charged with the death of the patient (might’ve been manslaughter I don’t remember). His entire life was ruined because he freaked out and made a mistake on a call, not a rookie mistake or a common slip-up, but in about half a minute, he ruined his life.
99. Feel My Pain
My friend had a horrible moment when he was going under the knife. Two minutes into surgery, the doctors noticed his pupils dilating or something. He said it was horrible, he could feel the scalpel cutting into his flesh, the agonizing pain, and the oxygen thing only gave him air every few minutes. They noticed he wasn't under and fixed it. But then the dark truth came out.
Turns out, the anesthesiologist who put him under was his ex-girlfriend, though no one knew about it, and she likely did it on purpose. The surgery went well, the recovery was a bit longer than expected, but he's all good now.
100. Below The Belt
This guy in his 20s came into the hospital. He had a lot of conditions where he wouldn't make it past 40 and he currently had some infection. We kept giving him antibiotics which helped, but not as much as we would have liked. After about a week of being in the hospital I walk in and I'm talking to him and he tells me that he got a medically necessary circumcision on his last admission to the hospital.
I ask if it's okay if I take a look to make sure it's healing okay. I wasn't prepared for the horror. It was black with all kinds of infection. I'm just not sure how a married man in his 20s (or his wife) never thought to tell anyone about this for the past week.
101. Heroes Don’t Feel Pain
I intercepted a young woman who was just hit by a car. Her boyfriend was standing with her freaking out. I did a basic physical exam and got a history, and made her comfortable as we waited for the ambulance to arrive. Once the ambulance arrived they asked for the same information, and that's when I realized what REALLY happened.
Turns out, the boyfriend was actually 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.
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