" My honorable friend is an ER nursemaid , and she once told me about a patient who completely shattered her ' seen - it - all ' learning ability . A middle - aged human race came in with mysterious , worsening abdominal pain … "
1.“A patient’s insurance company refused to pay for a PET scan. When the patient said they would pay for their own PET scan out of pocket, the insurance company said they would refuse to pay for any treatment, testing, or further workup based on evidence from the PET scan (if she paid for it herself).”
2.“This guy kept coming to my unit because he was aspirating on something. He had a tracheostomy and a feeding tube in his stomach, so we were confused why he was being admitted every few weeks for aspiration if he wasn’t consuming food orally.”
" We eventually learned that his sister / wife ( yes ) had been pullulate whisky down his trach .
To top it off , he fumble or tried to grope every female nurse and technical school that had him . "
— thesevenleafclover
3.“Worked in a NICU. This woman had a very premature baby at home, like 25-26 weeks of gestation. She and her partner decided to put the baby in a tube sock, and then in a shoe box to bring it to the hospital. But they got hungry and went through a McDonald’s drive-through with said very tiny baby in his sock box. It wasn’t so much that they did the drive-through, but that they told everyone about it and didn’t think it was an interesting choice. Kid turned out reasonably okay.”
— anope4u
4.“I’m a firefighter who does a lot of animal rescues. Saw a pitbull jump off a 4-story roof and land on the concrete driveway. The dog was totally fine and ran up to us wagging his tail like it was game. Not a single injury. The fall must have been at least 40 feet. Why is it that when I miss a step off a curb, I’m out for a week?”
5.“Ultrasound tech here. I saw alithopediononce. The patient was last pregnant in the 1960s but miscarried. However, the miscarriage was incomplete, and most of the fetus was still in her uterus. After a time, it calcifies. Hence the name, stone baby. It’s super rare to find one.”
— Angrbowda
6.“Psychiatrist here. Had a 6-year-old child with behavioral problems who had a breakthrough with his therapist, that he feels unloved and needs more affection from his mom. The very next day, in his appointment with me, I tell his mother this, he looks at her, and she replies with ‘okay’ and goes back to playing on her phone.”
" As a begetter that collapse my heart into a million little pieces . I ’ve learn murderers , psychopaths , even interview sequent cause of death , and learn the settlings of mankind . But a mother ignoring her tyke ’s yell for affection in front of me ? This is how we make colossus . "
— bopeepfoundthesheep
7.“Years ago, I was a ward clerk. One of the nurses I worked with was a former ER nurse. She had a photo of her ‘favorite’ X-ray from the ER. Some dude put a glass Coca-Cola bottle up his butt and it had got stuck, so he’d pushed harder and harder but it just wouldn’t come out. So he’d gone to the ER. The bottle was in his transverse colon (that’s the bit that goes across the abdomen). He needed surgery to get it out.”
8.“Emergency physician. I thought I had seen it all until a few months back, I had a septic lady where I couldn’t figure out the source. Admitted her and she was a boarder in our ED overnight. Next shift, a nurse comes out of her room. ‘Doc, I literally just caught the woman injecting something into her PICC line.’ Woman was injecting a slurry of her own shit into the picc line. Yeah.”
— poopyscoopy24
9.“Our ICU had both a woman whose ex had attacked her by trying to make her drink bleach and the ex, who tried to kill himself afterwards by drinking the rest of the bleach. I took some satisfaction in seeing how much worse off he was.”
— surgeonmama
10.“Ex EMT here. I always thought babies took time to be born, well, that’s not always the case. I was helping a woman who wasn’t English speaking. She was very pregnant, and we kept trying to tell her to calm down, to breathe, but she was just screaming, and in a blink, a baby popped out into her sweatpants. We cut off her blue sweat pants, and there was a baby girl. Just like that. It just popped out.”
11.“We had a lovely, devoted lady who visited her barely conscious elderly parent for a long time. She came to see them every 72 hours. She was stealing the fentanyl out of the patient’s patch and taking it. We only found out after she collapsed a few times and had to be revived. Really sad, she stopped visiting when the patch stopped being used.”
— xmo113
12.“Last winter, during a really cold spell coupled with snow, I had a resident in the locked memory care I work in decide that the building was on fire. At 2 a.m., he took a suitcase from his closet and threw it through the window in his room. He had a roommate who slept in a bed directly under the window. Suitcase guy crawled over his sleeping roommate and out the window to the firehouse down the road to get help.”
" They hollo the police because they thought a roofless man was hallucinating . NOC geological fault did n’t notice ANY of this until the roommate come in out MUCH later and said he needed another blanket because he was so moth-eaten , and IT WAS play false ON HIM . They checked and certainly enough , his bottom was covered in chalk , and ol' Helpful Harry was gone . It was a shit show . "
— supreme_dictator_66
13.“I saw a guy whose blood pressure was so high, it caused a nose bleed so severe he was bleeding out of his eyes.”
14.“Had a patient who swallowed crayons, pens, and glasses. Nice guy with a bit of developmental delay. They had me do a swallow eval on him (which he passed with flying colors, of course), and he mentioned that his abdomen hurt.”
" I require , ' … So why do you think your stomach bruise ? '
' The crayon , probably . '
' Yeah … that would make sentience . '
I let the nursemaid know . Still take them way too damn long to do the right imaging to find the crayon . "
— a_chewy_hamster
15.“I’m an ER doc. As a med student, I saw at least two people put on involuntary psych holds because no one cared to verify that English wasn’t their first language. I found one because I went to round on the ‘psychotic man found wandering a parking lot.’ Realized he wasn’t speaking jibberish, just Korean. Fully oriented and wandering that parking lot looking for someone to help him with his flat tire.”
— centz005
16.“I was a medic in rural Nevada. Got a call for an old timer who took a spill in a casino parking lot. Not major, but he had a decent laceration on his forehead, and old people and head wounds bleed a lot. I’m getting him patched up when there is a knock on the ambulance window. Probably a friend or relative, I think. Nope. I open the door of an AMBULANCE covered in old man blood and this entitled cunt tells me I’m blocking her car.”
17.“I was working in the COVID ICU, and people were coming in still thinking COVID was make-believe, refusing to be tested for COVID because it was a liberal lie. We would then place them in the COVID ICU since we couldn’t be sure that they were COVID negative. They would be surrounded by people who, quite honestly, were most likely going to die intubated from COVID. A lot of them, shortly after arriving, would quietly suddenly agree to being tested.”
" It was infuriating and discouraging to see so many people so deep into Fox News that they would n’t take heed to anything else until they were already in the unit . I used to think zombie picture show were n’t naturalistic because people could n’t be that dumb , but now I think they are n’t realistic because half the universe would be screaming ' How dare you attempt to keep the zombie from biting me ! ' "
— mysquirtlesquirts
18.“I was security at a hospital. A guy was driving down the highway and caught a round to the temple. He was rolled in, just chilling, looking through his phone like nothing had happened to him. Thats not the most fucked up but it surprised me how he seemed unfazed.”
— HairyRump
19.“Two times in 38 years, I had two different patients castrate themselves by sexual pleasuring with a vacuum hose.”
20.“I treated a man covered head to toe in splinters. Not like the tiny slivers you work out with tweezers. He looked like he just came off set from a horror movie where the villain blasted through a wall or something. Just large pieces of wood up and down his body.”
" He said he see a sound like a gunshot and was abruptly in pain . Apparently , it got cold enough that the sap in a tree diagram froze and the whole affair just exploded while he was walking to form that morning time . "
— Galaxymicah
21.“Woman was admitted to inpatient psych also complaining of vaginal pain. GYN consult did pelvic exam and found a) a rubber duck and b) her change purse behind the duck. When I came home and told my husband, he matter-of-factly asked, ‘Well, did she squeak when she walked?'”
— turkeyman4
22.“Not a doctor, but I once overheard a nurse calmly explaining to a patient that no, they couldn’t cure their broken leg with essential oils and positive thinking. The patient asked for a second opinion. I still think about it.”
23.“I had a patient who was scheduled for bowel obstruction surgery climb out of her ICU bed in the middle of the night. In the time it took us to race across the unit to help her, she was already squatting and screaming. She passed the biggest ball of feces that was pure evil. The turd baby was hailed like childbirth. She looked like she had been through hell, but said she felt better. Obstruction surgery cancelled. Rectal repair immediately. The charting on that one was wild. Vitals stabilized, though, so it was a good night.”
— PumbaKahula
24.And finally, “My best friend is an ER nurse, and she once told me about a patient who completely shattered her ‘seen-it-all’ mentality. A middle-aged man came in with mysterious, worsening abdominal pain. Scans showed a strange shadow near his intestine, but nothing concrete. During exploratory surgery, they found a fully intact, rusted Hot Wheels car lodged in his gut.”
" turn out , he ’d apparently swallowed it as a tot decades earlier . His parents never conceive his childhood title of ' eating a race car , ' chalk it up to notional kid account . The car had silently migrate through his soundbox for 30 years before causing a blockage . The integral operative team just stared at it — nursemaid , operating surgeon , everyone . She order it was like unearth a excommunicate archaeologic relic .
Her precise words : ' You give up being surprise by OD ’s or trauma … then liveliness pass you a guy who ’s been hauling around a 1993 Toyota Celica in his quick temper . ' "
— A - CommonMan
