"OMG" Medical Encounters
Every day, medical professionals see a lot of shocking things and generally, they take it all in stride...but sometimes, they end up in situations so bizarre, they're unforgettable.
1. Papering Over The Crack
I was working as a surgical junior when my team was called down to A&E to see a patient who had come in with a complication from a recent hernia operation. When we came down, we saw that the patient was holding a plastic bag over their abdomen.
When this was removed, we found that their wound had opened, and their intestine was visible to the air. But that wasn't the worst part. It transpired that this was not something that had happened overnight; it had taken several days.
The patient had started using plastic bags and newspaper to dress the wound when they ran out of dressings.
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2. She Had A Bone To Pick With Him
This middle-aged married couple in rural Alabama had presented to the ER after they had been drinking for almost the entirety of the evening and got into a heated argument.
Things got intense, and the woman eventually fell off the porch of their trailer into the shrubs a few feet below.
The husband, in his plastered state, suddenly dropped the argument and came to his wife's aid.
She didn't suffer anything too serious, just a couple of scratches here and there, except for what the man said looked like a piece of glass, pipe, or something that became lodged in the woman's arm when she hit the ground.
He decided not to come to the hospital because he could remove this object himself. He got his largest pair of pliers and gripped onto this glass/pipe-looking thing lodged in his helpless wife's arm.
He clamped down and pulled and pulled, cranked and cranked, trying to remove this object, and it wouldn't budge.
After his masculinity was defeated and the booze wore off on both of them, they decided it sensible to come to the ER finally. Upon arriving at the ER, the doctor immediately made the most disturbing discovery. He realized this poor woman had a compound fracture of her humerus.
This "pipe or piece of glass thing" was her bone sticking through her skin that her husband was trying to pry out with a pair of pliers.
3. On The Fence About His Care
I was a nurse and worked in a very rural hospital. We had a patient population that seemed to avoid the hospital at all costs. My favorite was an elderly farmer who came in with chest pain that, “Wouldn't go away”, as he put it.
When we asked him if he had it before, he said that he had been having chest pain on and off for years, but it would typically go away after he grabbed his electric fence.
Apparently, the first time he had the pain, he was standing out near an electric fence on his farm. He reached out to steady himself and accidentally grabbed the electric fence, which shocked him, and made the pain go away.
So after that, whenever he would have the pain, he just went and grabbed the fence and it made him feel better.
He had literally been cardioverting himself for years.
4. An Unwelcomed Vacation Souvenir
A friend, who is a family doctor, was treating a pre-teen girl who was complaining about pain in the back of her neck. He did a preliminary examination and found a lump, and thought that it was likely a cyst that had become infected. The parents agreed that he should remove it. That's when he noticed it move.
It was a large botfly larva that the girl had picked up while vacationing with the family in South America and was the size of a nickel.
