" A affected role came in after what was delineate as a ' head injury . ' We realized how spoiled it was after look a plastic food market bag lying on the affected role ’s belly . It contained the brains that the folk managed to scoop up , in the hope that we could re - implant them . "
monition : This post contains mentions of drug abuse , felo-de-se , and graphical operative details that may be unsettling .
As you can imagine, working in the medical field can come with its surprises and even heart-stopping moments. So, over the years, surgeons on Reddit have shared their wildest and scariest experiences they’ve had — and even mistakes they’ve made — mid-procedure, and these will leave your jaw wide open. Here are their unbelievable stories:
observe : Submissions were pulled fromthisthread byu / YeetMasterChroma , thisone byu / Neotoric , andthisone byu / Piggy_Royale .
1.“I remove a lot of eyes. When training, I had a nasty one that I just couldn’t grip with forceps while I was making the main cut in the optic nerve. I had to resort to gripping it with my fingers. As you are imagining, I made the cut, it shot through my fingers like a grape, hit me in the chest, rolled down my gown, bounced off my foot, and rolled about 10 feet on the floor, leaving a bloody snail trail.”
" It was a tiffin break change , so about 10 people were in the elbow room flip over . I lead upstairs when I was done to fall in my don in another case . He sees me walk in , sees a flaming berth on my shoe cover , and asks , ' You did n’t drop the middle , did you?‘My head just sank . "
— PlatinumCalf
2.“We had a trauma come in from a concrete factory. I’m unsure about the exact details, but a guy fell into some machine, and his left leg got pretty messed up. We went to the OR to wash it out and evaluate if he needed an amputation or not. Once we got it all cleaned up, we saw it was pretty mangled, and there was concrete encasing part of his leg. So, we start to do an above-the-knee amputation because there’s concrete in his knee and distal femur. As we push the oscillating saw through the femur, it hits more resistance than usual and starts making unusual sounds. We had missed some concrete on the back of the guy’s thigh and tried to saw through it.”
" Almost everyone in the elbow room , the nurses , anaesthesia , the scholar , etc . , said , ' Oh f**k , ' at the same time . We end up having to go even mellow up on the thighbone . I’m not sure what happened after on prosthesis - wise because we shift the patient to the ortho service . "
— TraumatizedHusky
3.“I’m now a head and neck surgeon, but during my trauma rotation as an intern, we had an extremely inebriated guy come in who’d been hit by a car just outside of the party he’d been at and suffered a traumatic amputation (the accident knocked his leg off at the knee). So, he’s wheeled into the trauma gurney on a bed, and his leg is brought into the same room literally in a bucket of ice.”
" The guy was tops combative , trying to promote us around , and at one point , he literally yelled , ' F**k off , rent me walk it off ! ' By my calculation , he would ’ve made it one whole tone , two peak . "
— pro_nosepicker
4.“One of the worst cases I’ve had was a patient with really bad sepsis from an infection; all the blood vessels in your extremities constrict, so amputating fingers isn’t all that common. But this was catastrophic, as we ultimately had to amputate all four limbs.”
— thereisafrx
5.“In residency, I was doing a hemipelvectomy (essentially a removal of half of a patient’s pelvis with or without removal of that leg) with my attending surgeon, and we came to a crucial step. After a few hours of dissection and planning, we had made our ‘cuts’ on the pelvis — basically planning and mapping out the portion we would remove. The time came for us to complete the cuts by levering out half of the pelvis with our hands, which required a lot of force. After the levering, there was an audible ‘crack’ (expected), but then the wound IMMEDIATELY filled with blood (unexpected). My training to that point told me to immediately pack the wound and hold pressure. My attending looked at me and said, ‘Keep holding pressure,’ and then scrubbed out (took off his gown and gloves) and left the room. I’m now standing there over this young patient holding pressure with all my might so that my arms are shaking.”
" I looked at anesthesia and his P.A. and asked what the infernal region was work on . Here I am single - handedly maintain this patient role alive with no guidance or contiguous game program about how to unsex our job . This was my ' oh f**k ' moment . An eternity ( it seemed ) went by , and my attendance come back in , cancel in , and we then methodically isolated the large bleeding vas and tied them off / cauterized them . Afterwards , I asked him what he was doing . He said that over the years , he had learned that if he had a rise in anxiety from something unexpected , he would take a breather ( whether physically removing himself from the position or not ) to refocus and psyche himself up to fix the issue . This was one of my nifty learning moments of my life history . "
— LumberFlap
6.“I was called to the ED (Emergency Department) to evaluate a ‘table saw injury to arm.’ Found a mid-forearm amputation and ended up re-attaching it.
7.“Resident surgeon. I was assisting on a below-the-knee amputation due to necrosis from diabetes. The leg was incredibly crusty with dead skin. I removed the leg and handed it to a tech to put into a box for disposal (an Idaho Spuds cardboard box lined in plastic). Tech trips on his bootie and almost falls, but he squeezes the leg so hard that the inside pops out from the skin sock. It flew across the floor, leaving a slug-like trail of purlulent slime as it skidded.”
" We wretched . We express joy . We displace on . "
— roadrunner1978
8.“I’m a surgeon. Some young guy, 21 years old, came into the ER at 3 a.m. with a stab wound. He waited hours before he decided to come in, laughing and joking around, and brought his whole family — mom, dad, brothers — and friends. Was a trauma Level 1, and we brought him immediately to the trauma room…his body was trying to compensate for the loss of volume. As soon as we brought him back, he coded, and he was never brought back. A last-ditch effort was made, and a manual cardiac massage was attempted; they crack your chest open and manually pump your heart to restart it. The knife had nicked his abdominal aorta, and it completely ruptured — liters of blood spilled onto the floor. It was like a scene from a movie.”
" Meanwhile , his friends were give a pizza party in the waiting room , laughing and having a well ol’ meter when we had to enjoin them he go . All infernal region break light , and they stormed the ER by force . Security and law were call , and puncher were thrust . His pal get a coup d’oeil of him and call , ' You kill him ! He get in , walk , whistling like nothing , and you guys murdered him for his organ ! ' Punches were thrown , and hoi polloi were tased . Good times … "
— u / Yellow_filletofish
9.“A 45-year-old came in via private car (family drove him in, rather than an ambulance) after what was described as a ‘head injury.’ We realized how bad it was when someone noticed a plastic grocery bag lying on the patient’s belly. It contained the brains that the family managed to scoop up, in the hopes that we could re-implant them.”
— uracil / pdxdaj
10.“Med student here. I watched a knee operation when the surgeon suddenly stopped, looked at the staff, absolutely shocked, and asked, ‘This is the wrong knee, isn’t it?’ He was told to operate on the wrong knee, and halfway through, he realized it was too ‘good-looking’ to be the knee that needed the operation.”
" fortunately , there was no permanent legal injury done , the squad reknit everything together , and rescheduled the surgery . "
— uracil / Icnaredef
11.“When we opened the abdomen up of this woman in her late-20s, the entire room instantly smelled like hot rotting flesh. We were doing an exploratory laparotomy because she had such severe abdominal pain she couldn’t sit still for a CT scan, and the X-ray just suggested some free fluid in the abdomen. A paracentesis (draining fluid from the abdominal cavity) didn’t really do anything, so the surgeon was kind of going in blind. But her indication for surgery was the extreme pain and the rock-hard feeling in her abdomen. When he cut her open, he saw that she was going into multiple organ failure with a ton of tissue simply rotting.”
" The smell enfold the elbow room instantly , anaesthesia was gagging , and I run to snaffle the peppermint oil to rub on our masks . The surgeon see at the abdomen for about 20 indorsement and said , ' Well , anesthesia I believe she ’s about to crash . I imagine this insistence in the belly was the only thing giving her any blood line pressure . '
She did clank , and she go there on the table . This young cleaning woman had been an extremely heavy meth user ; her mom had started her out using meth with herself when the girl was a stripling . They estimate she probably got a bloodstream infection from injection with dirty needles , and that just spread through her soundbox like wildfire . I ’m the OR nurse that was present for the case . I was n’t in charge of any diagnostic testing or any preoperative / exigency care . "
— u / mcnew
12.“I’m a spine surgeon. At the time, I was still a resident and was doingkyphoplasty. In brief, it’s a procedure in which bone cement is placed in a fractured vertebra using needles. So, during the procedure, I misunderstood the length of such needles and placed one in a position where it could have lacerated the aorta or the cava vein. As soon as I realized the mistake, I immediately removed the needle, and then I spent the longest five minutes of my life staring at the parameters with the anesthesiologist to check whether the blood pressure remained stable. My guardian angel was for sure looking down because I was so lucky that no vessel was damaged.”
" But I definitively had the intuitive feeling that I used my wildcard there and thatI will never be again so lucky in the future . Anyway , now I am super careful when doing this , and I keep telling this report to my residents to teach them . "
— u / astral_slide
13.“I have so many stories. There was an 80-year-old who came in with a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the chest. As we are fighting to get him stabilized and the surgeons are working to plug all the holes, none of us can figure out why the guy keeps oozing blood. Then, we find out that he had intentionally overdosed on blood thinners before shooting himself. We kept him alive long enough to let the family come into the OR and say goodbye.”
14.“There was a 30-something patient addicted to meth who also had a permanent catheter infusing lifesaving medication directly into his chest for pulmonary hypertension. He came into the ICU with PH (pulmonary hypertensive) crisis, and then we found out why: He had been injecting meth into the catheter, creating a hole through which his lifesaving medication leaked out.”
" Medicine is a lot of things . Sometimes it ’s just tragic . "
15.“I’m a veterinarian, and we do quite a few surgeries. ‘Mistakes’ likely happen all the time. From nicked blood vessels to skin/organ tears. Most are probably fairly minor. In the veterinary world, I’ve certainly heard stories of male animals having an abdominal incision during a neuter since someone thought it was a female for a spay. Wrong limbs can be amputated. Surgical instruments and sponges/gauze can be ‘forgotten’ in patients. There are many pre- and intra- surgical checklists to help prevent these, and I’m sure it’s even more developed in human medicine.”
" as luck would have it , for me , the fully grown operative misapprehension is likely a sutura slipping when removing an Hammond organ , resulting in nonaged internal bleeding — it ’s fairly easy to obtain the hemophile and get thing stopped rather quickly . Or , having a small bone fault when repairing another geological fault . thing happen . We come up to it and learn from it for all future patient . "
— u / WildlifeDoc
16.“This was my very first day of surgery rotation when I was still in medical school. A middle-aged lady was brought in, unconscious, pale, and possibly bleeding internally; she was stabbed multiple times in the abdomen. We immediately cut her abdomen open trying to find the source of the bleeding. After a few moments, we were able to stabilize her and checked every segment of her intestines for any bleeding. We located a few and were able to cauterize and suture and whatnot. There was actually one stab wound that missed a major artery by millimeters. As we were placing back the guts into the cavity, my chief resident decided to take one more look underneath, and he accidentally opened up a big artery (most likely had an initial slight damage to it due to the patient), and it started bleeding like wild.”
" Reminded me of that famed scene fromThe Shining . We had to call the chief surgeon stat , even though he was on vacation , but he answered and was unagitated and separate us what to do in a calm mode via the phone . I was so frightened — really thought the patient was a toast when I ascertain that massive hemorrhage happen before my own eyes . We were able-bodied to manipulate the bleeding by a compounding of fast-growing cautery and some pressure level and suturing . Definitely something I wo n’t forget . The patient was able to live , and I was able-bodied to babble to her a few days later as she recovered in the ICU bed , but man , that was a wild experience in the operating room . One of the more action - carry twenty-four hour period as a aesculapian scholar . ( I ’m now a alumna , planning to put down a residency somewhere this bike . ) "
— u / ghost_haha
17.“I have many stories. One is when a healthy, 23-year-old male came into ER with chest pain. Normal vital signs, never a smoker, normal chest X-ray. The pain started after eating something spicy, so we tell him it’s probably GERD. Five minutes later, he drops dead in his bed. We start CPR and get a pulse back. He gets stabilized, gets a CT scan, and has an aortic dissection, and then he dies again in the CT scan and never makes it to the OR.”
" The guy wire ’s major blood vessel fundamentally just exploded . This happens to men in their 70s with a recollective smoking history and high stock pressure . This healthy 23 - year - quondam had perfectly zero risk ingredient for this ( no evidence ofMarfan syndromeorEhlers - Danlos syndromefor the med people learn this ) . Still makes no sense to me . "
— uranium / crazycarl1
18.“Med student here. I was going to be watching a procedure of a 60-something-year-old lady getting her pacemaker leads changed on a Monday. Well, right before the attending began the procedure, and she was still a little awake before the anesthesia was completely administered, she let everyone know that she had smoked crack the day before. The procedure had to be postponed to Wednesday of that week to let the cocaine get out of her system.”
" Then , when the attending called the sister of the patient role to let her know the result and any forethought they had to take , the sister require the doctor ' if her sister could fume again . ' Because the phone was on utterer , the entire way just facepalmed . "
— uracil / sirmaddox1312
19.“From my days as a vet tech about 20 years ago, we had a small dog in for surgery because he (if I remember correctly) hadn’t peed for days, but was otherwise healthy. Some sort of blockage that couldn’t be handled in the exam room. So, we get him sedated and prepped for surgery. The dog is splayed open on the table, and his poor bladder was as full as the best water balloon you’ve ever seen — except this is full days-old urine. And of course, like a good water balloon, the slightest pressure caused it to burst all over me and the doctor. So, I’m in shock. Pee dripping off my face and covering my scrubs. No mask, face shield, etc.”
" This was a vet office in Alabama . We did n’t expend PPE , except I urgently need PPE at that moment . We cleaned up the frankfurter , puzzle the rupture bladder repaired , and stitched him back up . I ’m pretty certain that was the moment when I decide my childhood dreaming of being a vet was n’t quite as glamourous as I think . "
— u / BigCrawley
20.“I was a medical student, on my anesthetics placement. I went to see a patient due for surgery that morning. On my way back for briefing, the nurse comes running down the corridor to tell me that the patient had been fullyanticoagulatedthe night before because the surgeons had forgotten to un-prescribe it. If nobody had stopped us before we gave her the epidural, she would have bled into her spine and become paralyzed even before the surgeons opened her up — and that would have been even worse because had she bled, we wouldn’t have been able to stop it.”
" It ’s heavy as a medical scholarly person to know your home and when to speak up ; you ’re surrounded by professional , and when you see something like a full alterative Lucy in the sky with diamonds of anticoagulants on the patients drug inclination , you do n’t require to question it because sure everyone above you live what they are doing ? The adviser I was do work with distinguish methere have been stories of medical students not speaking up when sawbones have begin operate on the wrong side , give drugs where it is contraindicate , etc . ,and they have known . "
— u / yagokoros
21.“I’m a surgeon, and I also do litigation work. So, most ‘errors’ in surgery are not related to someone slipping and accidentally cutting the wrong thing, although that can happen with misidentification of anatomy such as bile ducts during gallbladder removal (a surprisingly common error) — it’s usually errors in decision-making, such as the timing of surgery. There are, however, sentinel or never events that you hear about (retained objects, operating on the wrong organ, wrong side, etc.) — that also are surprisingly common. These are considered systemic errors — on root cause analysis, they usually aren’t due to just one person, but a series of mishaps involving multiple people and multiple processes.”
" Despite time - outs ( everyone verbally agreeing to the demographics , mathematical operation , allergies , laterality , etc . ) before starting , double counting instruments and operative sponges , and even RFID - embedded instruments and operative parazoan , surgeon marking of the situation , and patient scoring of the site , object get left behind , and incorrect sides get operated on , still . The field has not figured out how to get that number to zero . As you could imagine , ORs can be super busy and complicated places . I’m super paranoiac about these types of erroneous belief since I ’ve done research and litigation work in them , but the error that stalk me are the ones regarding decision - fashioning — particularly waiting too tenacious to operate on someone because you ’re trying to determine if they truly have the diagnosing that you suspect , or even if they do , if it can be easily handle non - operatively because they are a poor surgical candidate and might give-up the ghost from the operation anyway . But it ’s tough because you ca n’t just make a personal insurance — like , in ' ex ' situation , I ’m always belong to operate ! ' just to avoid the misapprehension of waiting . Because you will have execute morbid subprogram on more patients that require it . This is also why pure algorithms or objective data from science laboratory and imagery studies , even with machine learning , ca n’t always make the right decision . There are subtle , nuanced component that experience , instinct , feeling out what the patient role want , and guessing what will make more damage ( operating or not operating ) that play into it . "
— Anonymous
22.“Eviscerationis always a great surprise on rounds — imagine walking by your post-op patient and seeing their intestines out. The worst was when a nurse called me into the ICU, saying there was bleeding coming from a guy’s neck. He just had surgery on his neck after getting stabbed there. Walk into the room, and they are holding pressure. I take down the bandages and blood starts shooting out of his neck; it was a decompressinghematoma. Turns out, they didn’t fix one of the holes in his carotid artery.”
" Another guy got stab in the neck and had low pressure when he arrive . As we give him blood , he pop out pour it out of his neck opening . I am hold pressure hard as we run to the OR . Transected his jugular vein . He lived .
Another guy cable got tear in the chest . ab initio , he was hunky-dory , but then he starts pall in front of us . We snap exposed both sides of his pectus and clamp his lung where the blood was leaking from . He was lecture to me a day later ; he went home to see his new-sprung two weeks subsequently . "
— u / brawnkowskyy
And finally…
23.“Surgery resident here. The frightening moment doesn’t really happen in the OR, but it can happen after. One consideration is always, ‘At what level do you need to amputate?’ The toe, a transmetatarsal, BKA or AKA (below- or above-knee amputation). If you decide too much, some sicker or older patients may never regain mobility again.”
" If you choose too little , the disease procedure , infection , or ischemia , might not be control or wo n’t heal , and you terminate up going back for more . The realization you have to go back for more is the scariest moment . "
— zekethelizard
Note : Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity .
