January 10, 2022 | Eul Basa

Horrors At The Hospital


Hospitals are a hotspot for chaos. From anxiety-inducing diagnoses to heartwrenching cases of life and death, there's never a dull moment within those monotonous white walls. These hospital horrors, in particular, will make you all the more appreciative of the work our doctors and nurses do:


1. Satiating The Itch

I had a patient come to the ER complaining of severe pain "down there." On physical examination, we noted a really remarkable amount of swelling, and both the internal and external tissues were extremely red and irritated. She was so swollen that she couldn't even relieve herself until we put a catheter in. The physician did a pelvic exam and found blisters all over.

We asked her when her symptoms started, her response was horrifying. "Well, it was itching tonight. I thought I had an infection, so I poured a cup of bleach up in there to kill it. But then after a while, it kind of started to hurt." Yeah, I bet it did.

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2. Talk To Me

I was a speech-language pathologist when I saw a person who had fallen 30 feet through a disused factory roof. They had skull fractures, multiple strokes, multiple organ trauma, multiple spinal fractures, and had a tracheotomy. I was there to assess speech and review eating and drinking. Reading their notes I imagined that there would be serious issues...to say the least.

They were able to eat and drink with only slight modifications. They could speak using a speaking valve and had no problems with understanding or finding words or unclear speech. They seemed slightly amused and bored by my assessment. They even took my notebook and pen and wrote “I can write too” in flawless handwriting.

I finished placement not long afterward, but they were expected to make a full recovery!

Doctors And Patients Stories FactsFlickr,Mary Cullen

3. A Make-Shift Solution

I used to work in a medical lab in a hospital in a rural town. I received a stool sample from the ER that was basically a blood clot the size of a golf ball. Sometimes, the ER gets mixed up and sends me the wrong specimen, so I called the nurse attending to that patient and asked if it was really a stool sample they sent to me.

The nurse I talked to said the patient thought he'd eaten bad pork and to prevent food toxicity, he drank a concoction of bleach, ethanol, booze, ibuprofen, and some Tums.

Medical Nightmares facts Wikimedia Commons

4. Gut Feeling

My husband is a doctor. One night, he came home with a surreal look on his face. He had been seeing a patient and noticed that although he was in his mid-20s, he didn't seem to have gone through puberty. The patient didn't mind his state too much but my husband believes that medicine should improve your life, not just keep it going.

So, on a shot-in-the-dark hunch, my husband sent him for an MRI. The patient had a previously benign and now malignant brain tumor suppressing the part of the brain that controls puberty. The test led to a very early brain tumor detection.

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5. Vaseline Queen

When I worked as a lifeguard at my university, there was a middle-aged woman who came to the pool every day and spent hours swimming and stretching on the pool deck. Hours, every single day. Evidently, she had some kind of aversion or sensitivity to chlorine, and she self-treated by coating herself in Vaseline before she entered the pool.

She would grease up the pool deck to the point where it became dangerous to other patrons. It didn't stop there, either. For some reason, she managed to convince herself that consuming Vaseline would help as well. Initially, she would bring a tub of it, put a finger in, and eat the Vaseline whenever she took a break from her swim laps.

When she was confronted by the pool's general manager and asked to stop, she started jamming the inner lid of her water bottle with Vaseline and eating it from there.

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6. A Relief

I had a patient who was recently pregnant and was experiencing some minor bleeding. I did an ultrasound and saw a normal fetus but no heartbeat. I told her that it was likely due to pregnancy just being at an early stage. I checked her ovaries and told her that I could print a picture of the fetus. I moved the scan back to the fetus and there was a clear heartbeat.

During the minute or so that I was scanning the ovaries, the heart had started to beat.

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7. Mother Doesn't Know Best

When I was about 16, I started having these little red irritated spots show up on my arm. My mom was immediately like, "You have psoriasis is all, just go tanning." So I tanned for about a week, and they just got worse. Now, I had them all over my body. I even had spots on my eyelids. I finally went to the doctor…and it turned out that I had ringworm.

What's worse is that by tanning, I was basically rubbing them all over with the lotions and incubating while I tanned. Thanks, Mom.

Lawyers should have mentionedPexels

8. Right Place, Right Time

I'm a nurse, and this happened in the car park of the hospital where I work. A staff member got out of his car only for it to start rolling back. He reached in to pull the hand-brake. From where I was sitting, everything looked fine, but a few minutes later a lady walked by and starts screaming. Turns out he had been pinned half inside his car. He was unconscious and he wasn't breathing.

A bunch of us managed to push his car back enough for people to pull him out. Luckily all this happened at a hospital so the crash team had already been called. They did CPR. He lived.

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9. A Failed Attempt

I know someone who tried to end her life by drinking antifreeze (ethylene glycol). But that's not even the icing on the cake. She also consumed a couple of drinks and got tipsy afterward. But there was one thing she didn’t know. The funny part about ethylene glycol is that the intoxicating element in the drinks acts as an antidote, so she ended up keeping her life and just feeling like garbage in the ER for a while.

Awkward Visits To The Doctor facts Wikimedia Commons

10. Free at Last

I have a somewhat rare condition called hemicrania continua which means I have a migraine headache on one side all the time. I have a stimulator implanted to interrupt the signals. It was an amazing thing to have it turned on after surgery and finally be headache free. I was lucky to live near the syndrome's most respected doctor.

We walked in and he knew what was going on at once—but it still took five years to get approved for the implant.

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11. Quick Improvising

When I was 12, I had a really irritating case of tonsil stones. No matter what I did, I couldn't get them out and I was starting to get a little desperate. I decided to use a vacuum cleaner (not a small one, an actual household vacuum cleaner) on its lowest setting to suck them out. I ended up bleeding a lot and my uvula swelled up so much that my throat almost closed.

The hospital still wouldn't take out my tonsils. I was not a smart child.

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12. Nothing Like It

My mother was a GP in the middle of nowhere in southwest France. In the early 90s, she encountered her first case of HIV. With the medicine available at the time, they did not last long. Except one. He clearly had HIV but he never developed AIDS. He was one of the few, incredibly lucky people who are naturally immune.

Doctors And Patients Stories FactsPixabay

13. Insect Intruder

When I was an EMT student, I responded to a man who called 9-1-1 complaining of an insect crawling up his ear. Upon arrival, we asked him what ear the bug crawled into and he said his right ear. The weird part, however, was that he kept complaining about a burning sensation coming from his left ear. We noticed his wife standing next to him holding a bottle of insect spray. That’s when we discovered the gruesome truth.

Upon further questioning, we came to find out she sprayed insecticide into his left ear. She thought it would "flush" the insect out of his right ear. I had to explain to her that our ear canals are separated by our brain.

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14. Tangled Up

During my residency, I worked in a unit that did a lot of urology. We had a series of regular patients with urethral strictures (narrowing of the urinary passage) and they used to visit from time to time to get their strictures dilated. These veterans would eventually learn how to catheterize themselves. One of the patients, a young boy of 14 whose original injury had been a pelvic fracture in a road traffic accident, came to the ER on a Saturday in considerable discomfort.

I was on call and asked him what happened. He said, "I passed this catheter in and I can't get it out." I quickly figured out why: he wasn't using wasn't really a conventional urinary catheter. He was using an infant feeding tube because the conventional catheters were too big for his narrow passage. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the catheter out either.

The catheter was fitting so snugly in the stricture that he couldn't pass urine and his bladder had filled up like a balloon about to burst. We took him to the OR and did a suprapubic cystostomy (basically made an opening into the bladder from the abdomen). This relieved the pressure in the bladder. Next, we passed a scope down the SPC and found that the feeding tube that he had used as a catheter had gone into the bladder and got knotted around itself.

Every time we tugged on it, the knot was getting tighter. We had to cut it off below the knot to get the rest of the catheter out. It was a stressful day for everyone involved.

Doctors And Patients Stories FactsPixabay

15. Blood Is Thicker...

I'm a pharmacist. A diabetic client of mine went to vacation in the Caribbean and left her insulin on a cruise ship. She didn't take any for an entire week, and when she got back to the States, Medicaid wouldn't pay for her lost meds. She refused to pay for another bottle, claiming she didn't have the money anyway. Eventually, she realized that no insulin in her body meant more sugar in blood, which made her further conclude that more sugar in her blood meant that her blood was now "thicker."

So she decided to remedy the situation by taking a bunch of Plavix, warfarin, and aspirin, which are all blood thinners that cause bleeding. In high doses, such medications can even lead to internal bleeding. When she came into the pharmacy to get refills, I asked her why she needed them so early. After she explained everything, I told her to immediately go to the ER. I have no idea if she actually did...

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16. No Relation

There was this Italian family with inherited fatal familial insomnia (FFI). This is a horrible disease that destroys the part of your brain that allows you to sleep. You die after six or eight terrible months (during which you cannot sleep, have panic attacks, rapid-onset dementia, and occupy a permanent limbo between waking and sleeping).

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17. Backed Up

My sister is an OR nurse, and she told me this story. Her co-worker was treating a patient who shoved a butternut squash up his back end and it got stuck. He left it there for a significant amount of time and when the medical team got it out, it was rotting. They had to shut down that wing of the hospital for the night because the smell was so horrid.

Now people tease that nurse by posting butternut squash recipes on her locker.

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18. Thick

I saw a patient whose triglycerides were so high that they gave him pancreatitis. That's already rare, but the really crazy thing was that when we drew blood, it actually separated. You could see a layer of fat in the vial.

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19. Planting Roots

I have a buddy that is a medic in the United States Navy. One time, when he was on leave and in town, we were hanging out with all of our mutual friends; just chilling before a night of typical tipsy shenanigans. He then proceeded to tell me multiple stories to which I could not believe. I have forgotten pretty much all of them—except for this unforgettable one...

He told me how a young woman came in complaining of severe stomach pain. He was expecting to diagnose her with menstrual cramps or something else rudimentary and to give her basic pain meds etc. She came back less than a week later, complaining that the pain had only increased. He decided to send her for an X-ray to get it checked out and he could not believe what the results showed.

It appeared like roots of some sort were twisting and turning inside her abdomen, and they were beginning to wrap around her spine. Apparently, as a form of do-it-yourself birth control, this young lady had followed her mother’s instructions and cut the end off a potato and stuck it all the way up there. Well, in a damp, moist environment, it began to thrive, as well as partially rot.

I cannot even imagine what her gynecologist must have said, but this story had me in a cold-sweat, near dry-heaving. It easily tops one of the most disturbing stories I've ever heard.

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20. Knuckle Cracking

At 3 AM on a Saturday, I was working in the emergency room of a trauma center. We heard that we were getting three people from a shoot-out—but nothing could prepare us for the carnage. The first person wheeled in...just didn't seem to have a head. There was this bloody mass at the top of his neck but it didn't look human.

I remember being so confused that we were using one of the bays for this person/body, who just could not still be alive. I was looking him over and I noticed his left thumb was calmly and repeatedly cracking the knuckles on his left hand. It would squeeze one finger and rhythmically work down the other four and start over.

He didn't have any anatomy left that we could easily intubate and yet he was cracking his knuckles. I still can't make sense of it. He didn't stay alive much longer, maybe a couple of hours, but that knuckle cracking seemed like such a human thing to do for someone that had no reason to still be alive.

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21. The Cheese Cure

I once shared a room with some medics at a small outpost in Afghanistan. Whenever they weren't busy, they'd see as many locals as they could. I was working in the back room one day when I overheard this little gem of a conversation: Patient: "I caught an STD recently during a vacation in Pakistan." Medic: "How bad are the flare ups?"

Patient: "Pretty bad, but I'm trying to treat it naturally." I leaned in at this point, ready for whatever explanation was coming. Then there was a long silence from the medic, who was trying to process the situation. Medic: "How...does one treat a STD naturally?" Patient: "I'm eating a lot of cheese."

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22. Taking Up Space

When I was an intern in the Emergency Room, a 30-something-year-old guy came in with simple URTI symptoms, essentially coughs and the flu. However, the paramedics at triage found that the oxygen concentration in his blood was low and that there were some crepitations in his left lung. Pretty standard, early-stage pneumonia.

I didn't like the sound of his crepitations, however. It was way too loud, but the patient was very comfortable so we sent him off to get some x-rays. I got my answer and the shock of my life when he came back. His left chest cavity was filled with bowels. The crepitations that I heard were bowel sounds.

The guy had no left lung, and his intestines had moved into the empty area. Judging from his comfort level and his own shock, we suspected it was congenital. We diagnosed him with a simple upper respiratory tract infection and sent him home after routine observation.

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23. Butter Me Up

An eight-year-old tripped on the cord of a deep fryer and spilled hot grease on his shoulder and arm. His grandma's solution was ridiculous. She slathered him in butter to "cool him off" and "draw the heat out." When my medic partner and I entered the house and started assessing the boy, I was saddened and hungry at the same time. The poor kid smelled absolutely...delicious?

Worst thing on the jobUnsplash

24. Baby Powerball

A co-worker's son was born with hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy. Basically, the valve controlling blood flow to and from his mother while in utero failed, and he was born with 30% of the blood volume you're supposed to have. The EEG came back showing massive anomalies—little dude wasn't quite at the threshold of brain-death, but my co-worker and his wife were told in no uncertain terms that he would never live off a ventilator, and it was pretty unlikely he'd ever open his eyes.

The hospital persisted with treatment, though, and brought in a trauma team who worked on him for nearly a week, before three more weeks in the NICU trying to control the seizures and prop up his organ function. Fast forward to yesterday, when the little dude made an appearance at a house party we threw. He's almost two and is neuro-typical.

He walked up our treacherous back staircase by himself and was talking up a storm in a language no one knows. He was a big fan of our cat. His entire trauma team came to his first birthday party, because none of them would believe it without seeing it. His entire brain basically regenerated and rewired itself after he was on the verge of brain death.

It's the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen. Guy basically won the Powerball a couple of times in the first two weeks of his life.

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25. Cracks By A Quack

I'm an MD. I saw a patient with cancer get convinced by his chiropractor to stop his chemo and just get "naturopathic adjustments" instead. He stopped his chemo and thought he was getting better because he was no longer getting the chemo side effects. He ended up passing.

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26. Ups and Downs

In the ER, we give an antibiotic called Rocephin to patients with UTIs. The only complication I’ve ever seen from it is vomiting if it’s pushed too fast. I had a patient transferred from our urgent care side who had walked in fairly healthy, but was complaining of UTI symptoms. They had tested his urine, diagnosed him with a UTI, given him Rocephin, and were planning on discharging him with oral antibiotics.

We still don’t know completely what happened, but this is our best guess. We think he had a gram-negative infection that reacted to the Rocephin by “lysing.” The bacteria essentially exploded and raced through his body, putting him into almost instant septic shock. He had to be intubated and put on blood pressure medications to keep his BP high enough to perfuse his organs.

His temperature skyrocketed A central line was placed because we kept running out of IVs to give medications. He was transferred to an ICU. I have never before visited a patient of mine in the ICU but because of his drastic decline, I had to see him and know how he was doing. I cleared it with the ICU charge and visited him two days later.

He was extubated and walking almost on his own. One of the fastest declines and recoveries I’ve ever seen.

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27. Selective Hearing

I'm a pharmacist, so I get a lot of interesting questions.. but one of the worst was when I was interning in my first year of school. A couple came to me with two kids, one of which was less than a year old. The baby had a cough and cold, and they wanted to know what they could give him so their family trip to Six Flags wouldn't be ruined.

I had to explain that there were no products for a cough and cold for children under four and that the best they could do would be to give him some Tylenol for any pain or fever, plus lots of fluids and maybe a humidifier. It definitely would NOT be ideal to be bringing the poor little guy to Six Flags. Their reaction was infuriating.

They scoffed and kept pushing me to recommend a product, but I had nothing substantial to suggest. I even had the pharmacist working corroborate what I was saying and they still didn't care. Off to the cough and cold section they went. Sigh. We tried.

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28. Missing Tooth

As a dentist, I'm used to seeing unerupted teeth still stuck in the bone, especially the third molars and canines. (We confirm tell which are unerupted by looking at x-rays). I was seeing this radiograph of a colleague's patient who had a missing canine. We were expecting to find it stuck in the bone but... we couldn't.

We thought maybe it was missing until we realized that it was impacted in a very strange place. It was just below the patient's eye, lying horizontally.

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29. Blurry Vision

Ophthalmologist here. I've had a patient who would re-wet her contact lenses when they felt dry by putting them in her mouth. She ended up with a central corneal ulcer that required a full transplant.

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30. Fixing a Broken Heart

I saw a teenager have a heart attack. This jacked, athletic kid with eight-pack abs fell on the ground and started clutching his chest during basketball practice. Everyone in the pediatric ER thought it was a panic attack except for the adult ER resident who said: “I’ve seen hundreds of heart attacks. He’s having a heart attack. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what this looks like.”

And that’s what it was.

He had an inborn anomaly where one of the coronary arteries coursed between the pulmonary artery and the aorta. During exercise, the aorta and pulmonary artery expand with the increased cardiac output and for whatever reason, that was the day that they squeezed a right coronary artery and caused a massive myocardial infarction.

It was bad news bears. The damage was so bad, the kid needed a heart transplant. He was transferred to a pediatric heart center. A left ventricular assist device (LVAD) was implanted because his heart function was so poor. A donor heart was found and as he was being prepared for surgery, his own heart decided to suddenly start working again. It turns out that hearts can heal after a massive heart attack (especially teenage hearts in athletic kids).

This was only discovered after the advent of the LVAD because prior to that, nobody would live long enough to recover. At the time, I think this kid was like one of the first ten pediatric patients to get an LVAD at that hospital. So the kid had to get his coronary artery re-implanted so that it wasn’t going to get squeezed like that again, but he got to keep his heart. I hear he recovered and returned to playing basketball.

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31. All For Nothing

A man came in with his wife because he had been bleeding from his back end. He thought that the best way to remedy it was to self-anesthetize with a disinfectant, lubricate the area, and cauterize with a curling iron...He actually got it a fair way up before he pulled it out, judging by how much damage we were able to see. We had to remove about a foot of GI tract due to burnt, scarred tissue.

But that's not even the worst part—his actions didn't even stop the bleeding, which originated farther up the GI tract than the iron would ever reach.

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32. Testing, Testing

When I was a patient care technician in the emergency department, I often worked closely with a specific doctor. She had a habit of thinking that there was always more to symptoms than there were, so no one ever took her seriously. She paid especially close attention to kids patients and always ordered way more tests than the other physicians.

There was a 12-year-old boy whose parents brought him because he kept talking about how he hated himself, wanted to die, hated his parents and siblings and often thought of hurting them. Before this, he had no history of being mentally ill, but everything he described was typical for a depressed pre-teen. However, when the doctor spoke to him, he mentioned having frequent headaches, dizziness, and nausea.

The doc thought something more might be going on, so she got a CT on his brain. It turns out, the kid actually had an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor (ATRT), which is INCREDIBLY rare, like less than 1% of childhood brain tumors kind of rare. It’s honestly amazing that the child lived long enough for the tumor to spread so far.

I will never forget that a doctor always looked further into things than people thought “necessary.” If it weren’t for that specific doctor being on, he’d be dead right now. Eventually, he will live a normal and long, healthy life.

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33. Pop Goes The Weasel

Surgical nurse here. I had a patient whose "little guy" looked like Snuffalufagus' trunk. Apparently, while he and his girlfriend (who was very attractive and not even close to overweight—we had to go check) were getting intimate one evening, they heard a sudden pop, followed by a feeling of intense pain experienced by the man. He just shrugged it off and they continued. Later on, he went to sleep and when he woke up, everything was swollen down there.

He wasn't thrilled or convinced that he needed surgery, but he reluctantly agreed. During surgery, we were shocked at what we found—the "pop" sound came from a broken muscle that left a hole the size of a quarter that you could look through. According to the urologist, he was unlikely to retain any function. I suppose coming in early wouldn't have prevented much; however, his reluctance to have surgery certainly would have had terrible results.

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34. One in Seven Billion

I was born with a large tumor in my right thigh that caused my right femur to gradually die. My case wasn't one in a million but one in 7 billion. Why? Being born with a tumor is very rare, about 0.3 in a million, plus it was vascular. It was very large and contained more than half my blood volume. Despite its size, it was not visible. There were no bulges or discoloration.

Eventually, after I saw literally more than a hundred doctors, one figured it out. So they set up a surgery to remove the tumor, but when I wake up, it turns out that before they got anywhere close to the tumor, I started hemorrhaging and lost more than half my blood volume instantaneously. I went into shock and I almost died, at the age of 21.

It turns out that I have an extremely rare blood disorder where I can't form clots of platelets—basically, my blood just gushes out uncontrollably. Surgery started to look like an impossibility.

Less than two weeks after my 22nd birthday, I was told that had one year to live. I had two options: accept my lot in life and enjoy my year or risk everything to get a surgery with a 90% mortality rate. I got the surgery, which was the first of its kind. Now I have a huge dent in my right thigh and permanent nerve damage, but still, it's a miracle that I'm alive.

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35. Canine Cruelty

I work at a veterinary clinic. One time, we had a gruff, old country guy come in with his Australian shepherd. The dog had a huge hanging growth under his neck that was rubbing against the ground and it just looked horrible. The doctor strongly recommended he have it removed, and the owner said he could do it again. Again?

Apparently, the dog had a smaller growth in the same spot years ago that the owner removed with a pocket knife and bottle of alcohol. No closure, no antibiotics. We were so shocked! The doctor went on to educate him as to why that was NOT a good idea. He eventually agreed to let us do the procedure, but MAN, he was a difficult one to deal with.

We're still not sure how the dog survived the last removal without any problems.

Medical Nightmares factsWikimedia Commons

36. Medical Mystery

My father is an anesthetist. I remember his one in a million (way more rare actually) thing happened when I was 13. During pre-op, the patient's consultation showed no flags for anything major but then she had this horrible reaction to the medication. Her own skin started to split and peel away from her body in large chunks. Her own body was rejecting her skin.

The woman spent quite some time recovering. There was an investigation into the whole thing, but everything was done by the book and there was no reason for this to happen. The drug company was contacted and they had never heard or seen about this happening with any of the drugs. Turns out it was an allergic reaction but it was so rare that no one had seen it even the drug had been used for decades all over the world.

My father ended up writing a paper on it.

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37. It's Not Candy...

A lady in her mid-60s came in with a terrible burn on her hairline and scalp. I asked her what happened, and she said she was coloring her hair with the leftover dye from a month or so ago. Needless to say, she had a third-degree chemical burn all over her scalp. That was the first problem. Then, we asked her if she had any allergies because we wanted to give her prophylactic antibiotics. She said no.

We continued to ask about her daily meds, and she rattled off a bunch of names,  including 1,000 mg of amoxicillin. We asked how long she'd been taking the amoxicillin, and she replied, "Every day, for two years." Here's why that’s a problem—amoxicillin is an antibiotic, and she'd been regularly taking massive doses of it.

As a result, she'd developed antibiotic resistance and caused herself a wealth of problematic side effects, including oral and vaginal thrush, a massive yeast infection in her colon, malnutrition, stomach ulcers, and multiple open sores on her feet and knees. Plus, she got a superinfection on the burn site a few days later. Not fun.

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38. A Curse

As a nurse, I worked with a patient with CCHS, also known as Ondine's Curse. You know how you can generally breathe without even thinking about it? Well people with CCHS can’t do that.

The most interesting part to me is the lore. According to French and German mythology, the nymph Ondine/Undine discovered that her husband had committed adultery. Because he had promised his every waking breath to her, she cursed him: so long as he was awake, he could breathe, but if he ever fell asleep he would stop breathing and die.

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39. Quack Medicine

I once had a Type-1 diabetic come into the ER vomiting non-stop. I asked him if he had anything unusual the night before and he denied it. In his history, there was nothing else I could find that would explain the non-stop vomiting. I went back and asked the patient again exactly what he had the night before. He looked at me and said: "Well, do you think the liver-cleansing tea my naturopath gave me could have anything to do with this?"

Naturopathic teas often contain hepatotoxic compounds, so this patient was trying to cleanse his liver when in fact he was doing himself more damage. Because he was a Type-1 diabetic and vomiting non-stop, he went into DKA, which is a potentially life-threatening complication of Type-1 diabetes. He had to be admitted to the hospital.

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40. Just Breathe

I was working as an EMT when we had to take a patient back home and set him up in an at-home hospital bed. Right as we get in the door, we hear the answering machine: "This is Dr. (whatever his last name is), I just looked at his stat CT and it shows he has a collapsed lung on his left side and a partially collapsed lung on his right. He needs to return to the hospital as soon as possible!"

I pick up the phone because his wife still hadn't made a move towards the phone and I answer introducing myself as "Hi this is the EMT with EMS. We just dropped him off from his appointment, and we were about to leave until I heard this message." I tell my partner to get us to the hospital in a speedy manor, but don't hit the lights and sirens UNLESS I tell him otherwise.

What people don't realize is when we hit those sirens, the patients in the back start to get more anxious, they breathe faster and in his case it may have exacerbated the problem. In the end, we got him there and he was treated. He's doing well and is stable, but man, I had never experienced anything quite like that night.

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41. A Sanitary Suggestion

In many parts of the world, from Asia to the Americas, it is a traditional practice to cover the wound from severing a newborn's umbilical cord with fresh cow dung. Many societies believe in a connection between temperature and health, and accordingly consider heat to be an important part of healing. One available material that is very warm, easily applied, and readily available is fresh cow dung. Right on the belly of the newborn with the cut cord.

Needless to say, it is a bad solution. One common outcome is neonatal tetanus. A colleague of mine, fresh out of medical school in Mexico, was doing a rural health rotation. New docs often have to practice for a couple of years at a rural health station as a part of their payment for med school. In this area, the villagers had held this practice.

He kept getting cases of babies with tetanus or other infections but he couldn't convince the villagers (who generally never bothered with having trained birth attendants present for births) to stop using the cow dung. They kept clinging to their heat belief. Here's the brilliant part—he decided to work within their belief system.

He said that dung was both unclean and unsafe but that there was something else that was very hot and available—booze. He convinced people to use the booze instead, which "burns" when applied. The benefit of his suggestion was that not only was it not cow dung, but the moonshine they cooked up was an excellent antiseptic.

The practice caught on and cases of neonatal tetanus in his district plummeted. All because of a brilliant young doctor thinking outside the box.

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42. Proof of Miracles

My brother suffered a traumatic brain injury while in a terrible car accident. His entire face was crushed and crumbled beneath his skin. His skull fractured in many places and he bled profusely. After he was stabilized enough for emergency surgery, which was already a miracle in itself, he had his entire face reconstructed, as well as metal plates placed throughout his skull. He registered the worst possible score on a scale that measures brain functionality after a traumatic brain injury.

At first, he couldn’t speak, and, after many weeks, he finally began speaking in word salad. Nonsense like, “triangle water.” He couldn't identify the names of his family or his girlfriend. We almost lost him a few times. It was a rollercoaster. I would hold his hand and sing Beach Boys songs from our childhood while he was in an induced coma, and I could physically see the effect it would have on stabilizing him. That was like a miracle to me.

Flash forward a few years, he recovered to the point that he graduated with his master’s degree in IO Psychology. He can walk, talk, laugh, read, study and has recovered so much that most people will never know about the TBI he had a decade ago. When new doctors see his chart for the first time, they all say the same thing: that they have never, in their many years of experience, seen a patient with such grave injuries make such a significant recovery.

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43. Not As Advertised

I had an old farmer come into the ER one day with a severely infected wound on his head. It turned out he had a growth developing on his head for the past few weeks (which turned out to be a tumor). The worst part? He had been treating it with Round-Up (a potent herbicide) because "that stuff gets rid of everything..."

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44. Rare survivor

A friend was living in South America 15 years ago. He had a cut on his leg and went swimming in some relatively clean water that had been sitting for a few weeks (it was a small tiled pool filled with drinking water). Enter flesh-eating bacteria on his scrotum. He was the second known case and the doctors had no idea how to treat him.

They ended up cutting his scrotum open and scraping the infected cells off, leaving the wound open. Multiple times a day, nurses would clean the wound and pour sugar on it. Not too sure why, but it worked. He ended up living, and pictures of his testicles are now floating around in medical journals as he was at the time the only survivor of this rare bacteria.

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45. Yank It Out!

My uncle had a rotten tooth and was scheduled to get a proper surgical removal the next day, but it was just too painful. In the middle of the night, he attempted to remove the rotten tooth himself with a pair of needle-nose pliers. But there was something he didn’t realize. He didn't know that the rotten tooth was very weak, so when he attempted the removal, the tooth shattered.

This made him have to get in his car and drive himself to the hospital (while biting down on a blood-soaked cloth) to get much more expensive emergency surgery to remove the shards of the tooth. That was truly idiotic.

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46. All Cleared Up

I’m an ultrasound tech and I did a third-trimester growth scan on a pregnant patient. The scan wasn’t needed, but she'd had a previous IUFD (baby died in the womb—happens later than a regular miscarriage and is thankfully much more rare) and the doctors wanted to give her peace of mind that everything was ok. What I found was a baby with a belly full of fluid (hydrops).

That’s very, very bad. The fluid was surrounding all the abdominal organs and the heart. Our doctors sent the mother to a specialist and they gave the same diagnosis. Tragically, the baby was not expected to survive. The mother came back about two weeks later for a follow-up scan and the fluid around the baby was GONE. Totally normal scan. Normal looking baby. I

f the office had not happened to schedule this woman’s ultrasound for that day, we would never have known it had been there in the first place. None of the doctors at my clinic have ever seen a case spontaneously resolve like that.

Human fetus at week 38 of gestation, illustration.Getty Images

47. For The Ladies

I work in therapy. I had a referral for an older gentleman who had minor surgery. Nurses noted that he was incontinent, but he was 95 years old, so that was no big surprise. We went to get him up for a walk, and when we pulled back the covers, we made a bizarre discovery. We noticed a large item concealed under his PJs in his crotch area.  After some circular talk slowly getting around to bringing up the matter at hand, it turned out he refused to wear adult diapers.

He was still a "man around town" in his mind and he had to always look his best for the ladies. Since the whole incontinence thing was bad for his game, he decided the best course of action was to buy extra-large underwear and place his "member" into a urinal that he would carry around in them. He said he knew when he was going, he just couldn't stop it from happening, so he'd just excuse himself as he was peeing and find a bathroom to empty his secret container.

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48. Miracle Mistake

It all started with a sudden severe pain in my abdomen. I had to crawl to my front door to yell for help. A neighbor rushed to take me to the hospital. I was given x-rays because the doctor suspected a burst appendix but instead, they found an ovarian cyst the size of a softball. The doctor wanted to consult the gynecologist but she was 30 minutes away, so they emailed her the x-rays.

She told the doctor that everything looked okay, but there was a picture missing. The technician had forgotten to take a picture of the ovary's blood flow. The new x-ray showed an unknown fluid which the gynecologist thought was the leaking cyst. When she came to the hospital, she said my body would absorb the fluid, and I'd be fine.

I asked about the worst-case scenario. She said, "if the fluid isn't cyst fluid, you might be hemorrhaging. If you go home and don't come back in time, you will die. But that's only the case if you feel shaky, weak, and nauseous." I told her that I'd felt that way in the waiting room. Her eyes got wide and she said, "We're going to do a laparoscopy."

When I woke up I was in intensive care. Apparently, the moment the camera entered my abdomen, the cyst burst—except it wasn't just the cyst. It was the whole ovary. I had been hemorrhaging all along. The next morning the gynecologist came into my room and the first thing she said to me was, if I hadn't been on the operating table when the ovary burst, I would certainly have died.

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49. Toothpick Twinge

This one guy slightly burned both his feet while burning leaves. The burns got horribly infected and he knew he needed to drain them. He pulled the toothpick out of his mouth and drove it through the wounds. A USED toothpick. He ended up in the hospital, of course.

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50. Plug the Hole

I was an intern on the trauma service. A young lady had been in a horrible car accident. She was crashing and a last ditch thoracotomy was performed. It turns out the accident was violent enough to rip a hole in her heart. The fourth-year resident recognized this immediate and stuck his finger in, literally plugging the hole.

He straddles her with his finger still in her heart and she’s taken immediately to surgery. He is literally prepped in with her until someone else can get scrubbed to plug the hole. He then scrubbed in and fixed it. She walked out of the hospital on her own less than a week later. It is the single most badass thing I’ve ever witnessed.

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51. What The Heck, Grandma?

I'm a physician here. The one medical nightmare that stands out to me most happened many years ago while I was a medical student. I was serving my rural medicine rotation at a primary care practice in the sticks. A man came in for an urgent appointment for a rash. I went to see him first to get working on the history. In the exam room, I met a very nice, young, fit man sitting bolt upright on the exam table looking very uncomfortable.

During the history, it was revealed that he was a telephone line repairman, and he was working in late summer out on the telephone lines around the county, climbing them to reach the wires. He had been exposed to poison ivy this way and had rashes over both arms and much of his torso, which had happened before. However, this time, the rash was worsening with time. I asked him to remove his dark-colored shirt, and after he did, I almost fainted.

He had open wounds all over his arms and chest. All of the blisters from the poison ivy had unroofed and the tissue underneath was destroyed. Everything was bright red, bleeding, and weeping. It looked intensely painful. It was the worst skin trauma I'd ever seen. I thought for sure this was Steven's Johnson's Syndrome or TEN, so I started asking about medication use.

He told me he took no medications at home, but that his grandmother gave him a gallon of "solution" to put on the rash, which he had been using regularly since the poison ivy began. He didn't know what was in it. We called his grandma and asked her what was in it. It was bleach. He had to go on a fun trip to the burn center. Poor guy.

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52. Drinking Hurts

When my grandpa went camping, his stomach started to hurt. (Being him, he only really cared when it hurt so bad that he couldn't drink beer.) My grandma drove him to the hospital where they discovered that he had severe colon cancer and a burst appendix. The weirdest part: the cancer growth had essentially held his burst appendix "shut" up until that point.

He had been tested for colon cancer multiple times and it had all came back negative, and without his appendix bursting it would have likely gone unnoticed until it was terminal. He survived the surgery and beat the colon cancer within the next two years.

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53. Foot Problems

ER nurse here. I was working in triage. Another triage nurse called me over to show me a horribly rotten foot. I immediately knew something was off. The first thing I noticed was that there was no detectable odor. Normally, the smell is quite pronounced. I wondered out loud why there was no smell. That's when the patient spoke up. She said, "Bleach. I've been soaking it in bleach every night."

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54. Two of Hearts

Heart Transplant RN here. We had THE only patient in the world that this has happened to: Back in the 90s, I did a particular kind of heart transplant where you implant a donor heart NEXT to the native heart instead of replacing it. Later on, this man came back because the extra heart was failing. He’s a young guy with kids so we did all we could but we didn’t really have an end game strategy because most of these patients don’t make it this far anyway.

The surgeons then brainstorm and decide to implant a total artificial heart. So they implant the TAH, and sew shut the donor heart from the 90s (which has to stay in his chest as it’s scarred on to his lung). He recovers from that surgery, and then finally gets a second heart transplant (with a kidney). So, this man now has two donor hearts in his chest (one not working).

He’s recovered and gone home.

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55. Instructions Not Clear

A friend of mine is a nurse and they had a young girl come in that had severe cramps and abdominal pain. They asked if it was her time of the month (they thought it might be her first one and that maybe she didn't know what it felt like yet). She explained she had had her first one-two weeks prior and the pain had gotten consistently worse since then.

Upon inspection, they were dumbfounded—they found 11 feminine hygiene products and they had to remove them one by one. She thought biodegradable meant they dissolved on their own, so she hadn't removed them.

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56. Painful Reaction

It started with a standard allergic reaction to an antibiotic: hives, swelling of tongue and throat, difficulty breathing. I panicked and went to the hospital. When I got there, they gave me a shot. Now, I handle pain and take shots quite well but hear me when I say, "it hurt." I started cussing a blue streak. I thought the nurse broke the needle off in my butt (where the shot was administered), it hurt so badly.

Then it felt like someone was turning up the volume on the pain. The intensity went up and up and, every time I thought I had a handle on it, it just got worse. I jumped off the table and even started hopping from one foot to the other in some sort of comical "make the pain stop" dance. The terrified nurse went to get a doctor who told me I was having a rare reaction to the shot.

So rare, in fact, they had only read about it and most doctors never see it. The pain lasted for two weeks at varying levels. I will still get that shot if I ever need it but that pain makes death look tempting.

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57. Snake Charmer

I'm a triage RN. I had a patient come in with back pain. I was going about my normal assessment and I asked if he had taken anything for the pain, to which he replied, "Cobra Venom." Turns out, he had read about cobroxin, a topical treatment for pain made from cobra venom...but he decided it would be more effective to simply let a cobra bite him.

I have no idea how he got hold of a cobra.

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58. Never Before Seen

ER nurse here. One of my veteran docs, who is a former Army doc, and I were caring for a patient found face down in, and I'm quoting the paramedics, "thick, nasty goop" outside his home. Medics intubated on scene and when he arrived we found he was having signs and symptoms of increased intracranial pressure (ICP from here out).

Neurosurgery came down and walked with us to CT scan, looked at the images, and had me run back to prep a crash room for an emergent ventriculostomy. The procedure went textbook but we still couldn't get his ICP under control. As we're getting ready to get him into the ICU I attempted to clean him up and get some of his airway cleared of the aforementioned goop.

My suction device suddenly stopped working. When I examined it, I saw a pair of maggots. I yelled for the ER doc. Later on, he told me, "I've seen horrible stuff. I've seen war injuries. I tell you that to give you context for my next statement. The tunnel wound in our maggot-in-the-mouth patient was full of flies and maggots.

The tunnel went all the way to his brain through one of his sinuses. I've never, ever, seen stuff like that."

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59. Parenting Fail

I work in a hospital lab. A couple of years ago, I worked the night shift and would routinely get called up to the Emergency Room to draw blood. I got a call, went up there, and what I found made my blood run cold. There was a two-year-old boy, completely unresponsive. His mother was screaming frantically and hopping around. I drew the blood, went down to the lab, and started my tests.

What I found was shocking—an ethanol level of 350 mg/dl, which was possibly fatal even for an adult. I called up the doctor and they immediately brought in Social Services to question the mom. Apparently, she found her son in the garage with a bottle of antifreeze and he was acting kind of weird, so she figured he was drinking it.

She went online and saw that the cure was ethanol, so she went to her booze cabinet and started POURING a bottle down the poor kid's throat! Then, of course, he passed out and she decided maybe they should go to the hospital. Luckily, the kid lived.

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60. Luck of the Draw

Just over four years ago my dad was driving to work in peak hour traffic when he had a heart attack. He sideswiped a few cars, ran a red light, and hit the traffic lights. One of the cars he sideswiped was a paramedic on her way to work. She pulled him out of the car and found him unresponsive. She couldn't find a pulse, so she started CPR.

People were all over the place trying to help and divert traffic and out of nowhere comes a fire and rescue department car with two trainer firefighters who were on their way to some training event. They had a freaking defib in their car! It took another 10 minutes or so for the paramedics to arrive. My dad was in a coma for almost two weeks before they could bring him out.

He had heart surgery a couple of times, and the sucker still lives on even though he should be dead.

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61. Sharp Objects

In my first year going to Boy Scout camp, I wasn't able to go during the same week that the rest of my troop was going, so I had to go with the provisional group. I didn't know anyone but I soon made some friends. This one kid loved holding his extremely sharp pocket knife in his hand and then throwing it into the ground in front of him.

One day, he got the idea that the ground wasn't fun enough and he decided to try and stick it into trees. We were all just sitting around, relaxing in between classes when he suddenly threw his knife directly at the tree in front of him. It didn't stick into the tree. Instead, it ricocheted off of the tree and sliced his shin. But that’s not the worst part. Since he was working toward his first aid merit badge he decided he could handle it himself.

So he tied a tourniquet below the cut. We tried to tell him he was wrong, but he assured us he was fine. He started limping toward the first aid hut with someone helping him. He passed out on the way there.

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62. One Heck of a DIY

About 20 years ago, a boy hit his head skateboarding. He was initially ok, but then lost consciousness. The ER doctor realized he had a brain bleed, and the pressure had to be released, or the kid would die. Problem was, this all happened in a small country hospital. The ER doctor was not a neurosurgeon, had never done brain surgery, and the kid had to have the surgery RIGHT NOW or he would die.

The hospital was also not equipped for such surgery. The doctor rang a neurosurgeon in Melbourne, put him on the loudspeaker, and knew he had to drill into the skull to relieve the pressure. But there was no equipment...So he got the drill from the maintenance closet. Like, a hardware drill from Bunnings.

Sterilized it, and with the verbal instructions from the neurosurgeon, drilled a hole in the kid's skull to relieve the pressure. He had to do it in exactly the correct spot, and if he went too far, the kid would've died anyway. He succeeded. The kid was taken by helicopter to Melbourne once he was stable enough. I don't know what happened after that, but as far as I know, he survived with no long term complications.

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63. The YouTube Surgeon

I saw this patient last year. He had a long history of abdominal pain that was quite non-specific, and his previous workups were negative. He was convinced that he had intestinal parasites that caused the pain—which, as an aside, he believed that he got after an "encounter" with a woman he met on the internet. So, despite having seen several physicians and gastroenterologists, and numerous investigations including gastroscopy and colonoscopy, no diagnostic source for the pain was found.

But he was undeterred from believing it was intestinal parasites. He decided to order surgical instruments and a local anesthetic online. Then, he watched YouTube in order to figure out how to perform a laparotomy (to get into his abdomen). And so, after his preparations, he performed a self-surgery using a video camera to watch himself and he managed to get into his abdominal cavity.

He had trouble completing his self-surgery and called an ambulance.

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64. Toxic Food Poisoning

When I was a neurology med student at UCLA, we had a patient brought in from LAX airport, who'd collapsed on a transpacific flight from Japan. He essentially stopped breathing and wasn't moving his arms and legs. We did a massive work up with MRI and CAT scans of the brain and spine, blood work, spinal taps, etc etc. Nothing looked wrong, but he remained unable to move, breathe, or do anything.

Finally, after a week in the hospital, we found the cause: he'd brought a bento box on the flight of sashimi made from fugu, aka blowfish. The chef that had prepped it obviously had done a bad job, and the fish's poison, a potent paralytic, had tainted the sashimi and slowly paralyzed the patient after he ate it on the flight.

He luckily hadn't suffocated before the flight touched down and the waiting paramedics could intubate him and bring him to the hospital.

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65. Out On A Limb

Orthopedic nurse here. When someone breaks their hip, the typical presentation is a shortened and externally rotated leg. I had a lady who thought her hip had simply popped out, and so she had her kid pull on her leg to try and pop it back in. That didn't work, but regardless, she didn't believe anything serious was wrong at the time.

She waited three months before coming to the hospital, but that would end up being a huge mistake on her part. She only came in after she couldn't feel her foot anymore and her leg was swelling up from deep vein thrombosis.

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66. Great Motivator

A family friend had an accident when he was younger (I don’t remember what it was) and he was eventually hospitalized because he was paralyzed on his right side. He couldn’t move no matter how much he tried. One day when my parents went to visit him, he was denied a second cup of pudding and he made a full pouty face and crossed both of his arms without any motivation other than wanting some pudding.

I am not a doctor but I thought this was still something that y’all might enjoy.

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67. The "Antidote"

I work in the ER and not too long ago, I had a lady come in with a huge swelling on her arm, along with a really, really upset stomach. As we began to examine her arm, we found two small puncture wounds. I asked her what had happened and her answer knocked me off my feet. She said she was out working in her garden when she was bit by a snake...THREE DAYS PRIOR!

She had heard that drinking vinegar would cure the bite, so that's all she did as a remedy. Not only did the bite become infected, but only drinking vinegar for three days was not a very good idea! She ended up adding an ulcer to her list of health issues.

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68. Before His Time

I am an occupational therapist working with babies and toddlers. I had a very, very premature child as a patient, like 24 weeks old at birth. Somehow he made it without residual deficits. No tone abnormalities, no torticollis, no CP, no visual deficits, no swallowing troubles. His head is perfectly round. He just started walking last week. His social interactions are wonderful.

This is beyond belief.

Doctors And Patients Stories FactsFlickr,Elin

69. Off The Mark

I had a lady ask me for compression stockings without any mercury in them. I was confused...I didn't think there could be mercury in any of these socks. Turns out, one of the nurses told her to avoid mercury in socks. For those who don't know, mercury is extremely harmful to the body. Then, as I was showing her the boxes, everything made sense.

It says "mmHg" on the box. Millimeters of mercury are a measurement of pressure, which some stockings have to show how tight they are. The dumb nurse interpreted this as actual mercury in the socks!

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70. Great Odds

My mother was a nurse in Los Angeles during the craziness of the 90s. Apparently, it was not uncommon for a gunshot victim to be brought in with the guy who shot him, only there to threaten to shoot up the ER if they saved him. They essentially had to keep operating while the police and hospital security tried to stop a shooting from happening IN the emergency room. Fun times.

This one time, a guy came in from a construction site. He had fallen like 40 feet and landed on exposed concrete rebar. He was impaled by FOUR bars, each of which went clean through his back, through his chest, and out the front of him. He was brought in, in shock, still on the piece of concrete (they cut the wall and brought the entire thing with the dude and all into the ER).

She thought he was a goner for sure. Turns out, ALL FOUR BARS went through his chest, and NONE of them hit a major artery or organ. They removed the bars, stitched him up (internally and externally) and kept him pumped full of antibiotics for a week or so while everything healed. She says to this day, that was the most unexplainable thing she ever saw.

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71. All Tubes Are Equal

Nurse here. A mom was caring for her son who had a gastrointestinal tube for most of his life. It's a feeding tube that goes into the belly. Sometimes, when it would get clogged, she would put Coca-Cola into it to dissolve the clog, which is actually common practice with G-tubes. At one point, however, the child went home on IV antibiotics.

The IV goes into the bloodstream as opposed to the stomach. At home, his IV got clogged...so the mom tried injecting Coca-Cola into it in order to dissolve the clog. Thankfully, it did not work and the clog prevented any of the soda from entering his bloodstream. Coca-Cola in the blood could probably have killed the child.

In the mom's defense, I guess all tubes look the same to her.

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72. Point Blank

My dad works in an emergency room. He once had someone come in who was shot point-blank in the head. They gave him a ton of antibiotics, and the surgeons were able to remove the bullet and skull fragments from his brain. He walked out later that week.

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73. In Stitches

I once stitched up my own wound. I was under the impression that if my dad took me to the hospital, I wouldn't be covered by my mom's insurance. So, I took some string and a sewing needle and stitched it up. It hurt so bad. Afterward, I wrapped it with gauze and no one was the wiser. Then, one day, my grandma asked about it. I, being an evil child and fully aware my grandma was extremely squeamish, took the gauze off and showed her. Well, we were both in for a disgusting surprise.

I myself was taken aback by the gruesome state of my wound. She promptly told my mom and I was taken to the hospital. The doctor told me I did a decent job with the stitching, but to let a professional take care of it next time.

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74. He’s Back!

Guy came in about 10 minutes away from death. He had been run over by a car. By the time we prepped him, he had passed. But per the doctor's moral code, we tried to save him anyway. After hours of constant work, we gave up. We declared him dead and were packing up when he woke up. Like some horror movie type stuff. He just sat up straight and inhaled loudly.

It still gives me goosebumps.

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75. Unequal Substitute

I was working in a clinic when a man came in with his blind wife. She is diabetic, and during my questioning, I found out that she had had a few episodes of low blood sugar in the past few months. And by low, I mean low enough that her ingested food failed to raise her blood sugar. The husband told me he had to inject his wife to bring her around.

Usually, in these cases, you would inject glucagon, which is basically the opposite of insulin (it raises blood sugar). He proceeded to tell me that the glucagon was too expensive, so he had been dissolving sugar in water, drawing it up, and injecting it into her thigh. I tried to hide my shock, but it must have been obvious. He just looked at me and said, "Well it worked, didn't it!?"

I tried telling him all of the reasons he should use glucagon and not sugar water, but he wouldn't have it. I even told him that the pain of the injection is probably what woke his wife up, rather than any increase in blood sugar. He said the glucagon was too expensive. I called around to a bunch of pharmacies and found it for $20 for two injections, but he still refused to buy it. We ended up calling adult protective services.

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76. Holy Cow!

I'm a veterinarian. In my humble opinion, I believe that cows are capable of surviving just about anything. They're the hardiest animals on the planet. One day, I walk into the clinic and stop by a stall to see a cow, completely calm and chewing her cud. The problem? Two legs protruding from her hind end. She had gone into labor ONE MONTH prior and was unable to deliver the calf for whatever reason.

The calf had since died in the birth canal and had been rotting there since. My lucky job that day was to dismantle and pull out rotting calf pieces (brain here, leg there, liver, etc). About three people threw up because of the smell. Turned out that during the delivery, the calf had perforated into the mother's abdomen and she was septic!

With the removal of the calf, some heavy-duty antibiotics, and lots of care from the staff, she survived. Cows are amazing.

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77. Dairy King

While working in Buffalo, NY as an EMT, I once responded to the scene of a fireworks-related injury. Upon entering the premises, it noticeably was filled with only very tipsy, very scared, and very high school-aged kids. No adults. After convincing one party goer that we were not the authorities, he showed us the injured boy.

We were shocked at the sight. He was 14 and in bad condition—his hands were charred, his chest skin was peeling, and his face was very bloody. Apparently, the kid made a makeshift explosive out of at least 20 motor ball fireworks...He thought it would be fine, but when he lit it, things didn't go as planned. Now, third-degree burns are indeed very, very painful, but under no circumstances should you try to alleviate the pain as this young kid did...

His solution; chocolate ice cream! Freaking chocolate ice cream everywhere—on his face, on his chewed-up hands, smeared on his chest. It was like a chocolate BBQ child! Dairy products are never the answer to serious wounds, folks.

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78. Breathing Problems

I work at a trauma center, so I see a lot of crazy stuff. People surviving stabbings, gunshot wounds to the head, a freeway collapsing on someone during construction. But one case will forever stick in my mind. I got called down to the ER to help a woman who had a splintered piece of wood in her airway. Apparently, the little old lady lost control of her car and ran off the road into the side of a house.

She ran into a wooden porch that was positioned almost exactly at the level of her nose. So I approach the lady to see what we're working with for an airway and she legit has a chunk of wood that has smashed her nose and is sitting right between her eyes. Thing must have been three inches wide, god knows how long, and about 1 inch from top to bottom. About four inches of board is sticking out of her face.

My immediate instinct is to say "holy crap." Fortunately, I didn't because it turned out the woman was conscious at that moment. I intubated her, she went off to the scanner, and then to the OR. Last I heard, after a series of reconstructive surgeries she was doing pretty well. I occasionally think back to that moment and just wonder how the heck that woman was alive.

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79. Too Far Gone

I had a homeless patient in medical school with venous stasis bilateral lower limbs. He had a wound that got infected and was spreading to other parts of his body. For some reason, he thought that he could beat the infection with toilet bowl cleaner. By the time we admitted him, not only were his legs stained blue from the cleaner, but they were also completely infested with maggots.

The smell was something I'll never forget...I had to put a mouthful of Altoids in before I put my mask on just so I could huff on my own spicy breath. The poor guy wound up leaving against medical advice because he didn't want an amputation, and he passed from deep vein thrombosis that week.

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80. Guy Got Lucky

Guy falls drunk down a flight of stairs and wakes the next morning and goes to the ER. Considering the circumstances, everything seems fine—but then he starts having trouble breathing. At this point, we find air in his abdomen and take him to surgery. While in surgery, we get the x-rays back and it turns out he has a broken neck.

What? But we still have to find out where that air in his belly came from. Turns out, when he had been intubated, they had accidentally intubated his esophagus, pushing air into his stomach instead of his lungs. Even worse, they'd been so vigorous that they'd punctured his throat with tons of little holes. They were too small to stitch so all we could do was feed him directly into his stomach and let the neurosurgeons fix his neck as best they could.

When they opened up his neck, they found the real reason for his difficult breathing: a ton of blood in front of his broken neck was compressing his airway. With the plates in place, all we could do was hope that he wasn't paralyzed and that the perforations in his throat hadn't infected his vital organs. He wakes up, not paralyzed.

A few days later, not dead of infection. Lucky SOB that one.

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81. You're So Vein

I work at a needle exchange and harm reduction station at my clinic. We have IV substance users come in pretty frequently to get their abscesses cleaned out and dressed properly. One time, a patient came in wanting to get her infection treated like many other patients before her. We took her back to the procedure room and got everything ready to start.

She had a bandage covering up this spot on her arm, and we thought that was better than just keeping her wound open to the air. But then she proceeded to take the bandage off and she revealed not only HUGE abscess, but a FOUR-INCH LENGTH OF VEIN sticking out of her arm that was rotting away and drying up.

We all gasped when she explained that she says she took the vein out of her abscess and left it out because it made injecting easier. So basically she ran her own IV with a vein she cut out of her abscess. We immediately sent her to the hospital.

Medical Nightmares factsShutterstock

82. Accidents Happen

One night, I was at my job (I'm an EMT) when we got called to a traffic accident. When we got there, there was a guy hanging naked from a branch nine feet in the air with a pool of blood below him. Apparently, he lost control of his car, it started spinning and eventually hit a barrier before coming to a sudden stop. Due to the centrifugal motion of the car and the fact that he wasn't wearing a seat belt, he came flying out of the back window, landed on top of the tree, and kept falling downwards losing clothes on his way out.

So we get him down, put him on a stretcher and sent him to a hospital. At the time, there were no vital signs so we didn't have high hopes but somehow he survived. He comes and visits us at the station every now and then.

Doctors And Patients Stories FactsWikimedia Commons

83. Helping Hand

A vertical sliding window once fell on my hand and cut my palm very deep. I put pressure on it and called an ambulance. A few minutes later, an officer showed up and decided he needed to be the one to put pressure on the wound. Instead of applying pressure the same, normal way that I was, he decided that he was going to go fishing for arteries.

Before I knew it, he had his blue gloves on and his thumb inside of the wound. At that point, I was screaming in pain and telling him to get his dang thumb out of my palm. He wouldn't listen and insisted that if he did not keep the pressure, I would lose a lot of blood. Luckily, minutes later, the paramedics arrived and took me away from that maniac.

I needed to get about 15 stitches and physical therapy.

Worst Misdiagnoses FactsUnsplash

84. Oh, Worm?

I inserted a urinary catheter to a female patient. She complains of pain in her bladder. Turns out it was distended and there was no drainage in the catheter. When we pulled the catheter out, we found out why: a worm had gotten stuck inside the tube.

HOW THE HECK DID THE WORM ENTER THE BLADDER?

Bug Infestations factsWikimedia Commons, Entomology, CSIRO

85. Mr. Gullible

Former archaeologist here. A guy on our crew doing contract work in Mountain Valley, CA got a puncture wound right in the middle of his hand when he slipped and caught himself on a rock. An old hippy on the same crew had told this guy a few weeks prior that super glue was a great way to treat cracks in the skin, which was ridiculous.

Anyway, this idiot decided to put super glue on his puncture wound, wrap it up, and go back to work the next day...and he spent the entire time digging square pits in the clay using hand tools. After about three days of everyone telling him to go to the hospital, the crew boss demanded that he take off the bandage and show it to him.

When he did, everybody gasped. It was totally green and borderline gangrenous. He drove him to the hospital immediately, and as soon as they got in to see the nurse, he showed her the hand. She started yelling: "OH MY GOD, WHAT DID YOU PUT ON THAT?" "Well, my buddy said that superglue—" "SUPER GLUE? SUPER GLUE? WHAT ARE YOU, AN IDIOT?"

We know this exchange occurred because when the boss got him back to the hotel that night, he told the entire crew the story...five or six times. We ended up getting T-shirts printed for everyone that had "WHAT ARE YOU, AN IDIOT?" printed above the front pocket. I never get tired of that story.

Doctor Visits Took A Horrible Turn factsShutterstock

86. Lifesaver

I work as an ER nurse and had a patient with a little dizziness, a little nausea, and a swollen abdomen. She was fairly bright, able to talk, and nothing seemed too horrific. But she was turning a grim gray color and breathing quickly. Our average wait time today was two hours. I could have put her back in the queue and moved on.

But I had a little dark feeling that there was something sinister happening here. So I called our most senior doctor out of a consultation and asked him to see her. Right now. Ever heard of your abdominal aorta? Enormous blood vessel that can pouch out, suddenly rupture, and make you bleed internally to death in minutes?

It’s called a burst AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). You’ve heard of it now. That’s what she had. I’ve never seen one before. But now I have. Within five minutes, she was barely responding. Within ten, her blood pressure had dropped to a barely sustainable level. Within twenty minutes, I was pouring blood into her and eight people were around the bed.

Within an hour, she was on an operating table clinging to life. But because I raised the alarm, and because my team worked their butts off, that woman is still, somehow, alive. Feels good, man.

Memorable Patient Experiences factsShutterstock

87. Extra Precaution

This is my favorite tale from my EMT friend. His crew received a call out for a possible cardiac incident at a local resort. When they arrived at the room, the door was closed but they could hear muffled rhythmic sounds from within. They knocked on the door and got something back like, "C-c-c-come in-in-in." When they entered, they found an older gentleman laying on the floor with his shirt off, giving himself chest compressions.

They asked him to stop so that they could check him out. His reaction was shocking. He looked at the EMTs like they were crazy, and he refused, saying, "I-I-I'll di-di-die." Apparently, his physician had told him previously that he was developing some heart issues. This led the patient to periodically check his pulse for irregularities. When he couldn't find a pulse, he naturally assumed that his heart had stopped beating and he'd better get busy with some resuscitation.

It took them quite a while to convince the poor guy that had his heart actually stopped functioning, he would not be able to self-resuscitate. He kept banging on his chest over the entire discussion, getting angrier and angrier that the EMTs wouldn't just take over and do their job.

Memorable Last Words factsNeedpix

88. Not Too Sick to Not Have Feelings

I work at a hospital, so does my mother. We had a forty-three-year-old woman who had a very rare form of cancer that spread incredibly fast to just about everywhere in her body. From diagnosis to death was about twelve weeks. The medications and therapies and the general lack of mobility caused her to become swollen and obese.

She was a terribly sweet lady. They took her down to Radiology for a scan and the technician made a bunch of really mean comments about her weight because she was too large for our machines. They had to arrange for a transfer to another hospital for her scans and then have her transferred back. The technician thought that because Miss Jeannie was dying and sick that she was deaf or didn't understand English any longer, and so while they were alone, she made so many mean comments.

Miss Jeannie waited until she was back in her room waiting for her transfer before, she started crying. I'll never understand people who feel the need to make others feel less than or badly.

Human Attraction quizShutterstock

89. Double-Checking

I'm a urology resident. I went to see a patient in the ER who had priapism, which is basically when a man's "little guy" doesn't come down. His girlfriend, who wasn't the prettiest thing, was sitting next to him. Basically, he was like that for eight to 10 hours before he came in. Most people choose to come in way earlier than that, but some people choose to wait. It makes the job more difficult for me when they wait too long.

Anyway, the first step in treating him was to drain the priapism. I let him know that a side effect of the procedure is possible dysfunction, but if he refused the procedure, there would be residual scarring and fibrosis that would make things worse for him in the future. So he agreed to proceed, and I got started. I stuck a needle in and drained as much as I could, then irrigated the inside.

I repeated the process over and over. Because he had waited so long, it took about two to three hours for this entire process. I also injected him with phenylephrine repeatedly, which constricted the vessels so that no more blood could flow. This was all pretty standard stuff for any urologist. I used lidocaine of course, but it worked only up to a point.

Finally, after multiple punctures, aspirations, and injections, it was down to about 40%, which was excellent. Keep in mind, the guy was completely awake in the ER. I told the guy that I wanted to give him about an hour in the ER, and I'd come back to ensure that the problem hadn't returned. He agreed to rest up after the ordeal. I took care of a few other things on my list of things to do and returned in about an hour.

I asked the guy about his status, and he told me not to worry about it, as he felt great. Still, I wanted to play it safe, so I asked to take a look. To my horror, his "little guy" was back to about 90%! Again, he told me not to worry. Then he told me why. He was so worried about the side effect of dysfunction that I had mentioned at the very beginning that he decided to fondle his girlfriend in the ER to make sure everything was still working.

He was thrilled, but I, of course, was so worried that I was going to spend another two or three hours curing another priapism. Luckily for the both of us, I came back half an hour later and all was good, so he went home.

Medical Nightmares factsShutterstock

90. That's No Scratch

I'm a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and "feeling drowsy." We start the usual workups and this dude's blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within ten minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the "scratch" was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round. The guy didn't even know he'd been shot.

When the coroner's report came back, we found that he'd been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could've done, but that was a serious "what the heck just happened" moment.

Rarest Cases ExperienceGetty Images

91. Lemon Squeezy

I'm a 9-1-1 dispatcher. I heard the story second-hand, but my colleague had this one kid with a crazy high fever and he wouldn't stop crying. When the paramedics arrived at the scene, they were shocked. The mom was squeezing a lemon while rubbing it all over the baby's forehead because she claimed it was "supposed to keep the fever down."

The mom was completely at a loss as to why the baby wouldn't stop crying. She kept saying that it couldn't possibly be the lemon juice that she'd been squeezing into her son's eyes for the last 20 minutes...No siree.

Law Enforcement Creepy Calls FactsShutterstock

92. Sun And Moon

The most outrageous thing I've heard was about a boy who was in his early 20s. He came from a very poor, illiterate family. The boy had a bad case of tonsillitis and refused to take any meds. Instead, he came up with his own harebrained plan. He believed all he needed to do was "bite the sun." Basically, at noon, he would look up to the sun, open his mouth as wide as possible, and "bite" the sun several times so that it would "burn" his tonsils and cure him over the course of a couple of weeks.

When that wouldn't work, plan B was to do the same thing at night but only under a full moon.

Medical Nightmares factsShutterstock

93. The Wrong End

While working in the ER, an older woman came in and complained of a headache and back end pain. Nothing too out of the ordinary by themselves, but an odd combination of complaints. A few questions in, we made a disturbing realization. We found out that the patient has been attempting to treat her headache with over-the-counter ibuprofen...from the other end.

She was pretty embarrassed when we told her over-the-counter meds can't be taken that way unless specified.

Medical Nightmares factsShutterstock

94. Let It Burn

One of my patients had put Nair on his back end and left it on overnight. As one would think, when he woke up, he had burns that looked like a pressure ulcer. Instead of coming to the ER right away, he decided he would soothe the pain with honey. When that didn't work, he tried to remove the honey using booze. Teaching his roommate how to do those dressing changes was the most awkward experience I have ever had professionally.

Medical Nightmares factsShutterstock

95. 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.

Lowest Point factsPixabay

96. Losing Sleep

I’ve been a night nurse for four years now at an old folk’s home. I had a palliative patient who couldn’t sleep because of her incredibly vivid hallucinations. She would describe voodoo people around her room who would just stare at her, waiting for her to pass. I didn’t take it seriously until the lady across the hall (who rarely ever spoke) started seeing them in her room too.

Legitimate shivers.

Creepy hospitalShutterstock

97. Run, Don’t Walk

The nursing home I worked in used to be an orphanage. The seasoned staff would say offhand stuff like, “Sometimes the residents see kids,” and I’d always laugh it off. But then, one morning, I was getting some of the residents out of bed, and one of our ladies started staring out the window. She stopped me and said, “Give those kids a blanket. They’ll freeze out there.”

Then another night, we had a resident who wouldn’t stay in bed. She had bed alarms so we would hear her get up because it wasn’t uncommon. This woman shared a room with a non-verbal stroke patient named Maggie. One night, she was way more active than usual, with her bed alarm going off every few minutes.

So, I went in there, and I was like, “Mildred, what’s up?” She answered, “There’s a man under Maggie’s bed.” I squatted down next to Maggie’s bed, and I said, “I don’t see anyone!” Her reply made my blood run cold. This woman said, “I don’t see how. He’s looking right at you!” I was out of there immediately, and I didn’t go back in.

Creepy hospitalShutterstock

98. Peekaboo

I once got a fast bleep (i.e., drop everything you’re doing and attend this emergency, please) one night to a side room on the ward, only to find no patient in the bed. I was just about to leave the room and go back out to the nurses’ station when something caught my eye. When I looked up, my blood ran cold: I saw a face with wide, slightly wild “psych eyes” peering down at me from a gap in the ceiling tiles.

It was a lady waiting for a bed in the psych hospital who’d clearly thought that the ceiling was the best place to hide from the people trying to poison her. I honestly can’t think of another occasion where I’ve been quite so terrified. The worst thing was that I had to walk (well, dash) back out underneath her to get help from the nurses and security to get her down.

Creepy hospitalPexels

99. Painting The Ward Red

I spent 16 years working in mental health and consequently saw a ton of traumatizing stuff. One of the worst was a woman who shanked herself in the wrist with a shard of plastic from a clock she broke in the doctor’s office. She then proceeded to run laps around the unit, spraying blood literally everywhere. The floors, ceiling, and walls were just covered in blood. But that wasn't all.

My brain has blocked out some of the details, but I think she may have been naked from stripping her clothes off. We ultimately had to wrap a blanket around her and take her down so we could stop the bleeding. I felt terrible for all of the other patients who witnessed it.

Creepy hospitalShutterstock

100. A Lost Soul

I’m on an on-call victim support team, so I often end up at the hospital at odd hours. This was around 4:00 am. I’d just finished doing my thing, and I was sitting in my car in the parking lot collecting myself and writing notes for my report when I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. I clearly saw the blue of a hospital gown, but when I looked over, no one was there.

I figured I was just tired and riding out the adrenaline of the call, so I went back to doing my thing. But after a few minutes, I once again spotted something out of the corner of my eye. This time when I looked up, someone was there. Standing on the curb in front of the hospital, I saw a man in his mid to late 50s, with thin hair up top and no facial hair.

He was wearing a hospital gown and holding on to something metal, but I couldn’t tell if it was an IV pole or a crutch from my angle. He wasn’t leaning on it. He had this expression on his face of wide-eyed shock with his mouth slightly open, like he was trying to think of something to say and had totally stalled out.

At this point, I started glancing around for staff or something because this man didn’t look like he should be outside alone. His skin was a messed up pale color, and he was barefoot. I couldn’t see his feet well in the shadows, but his hands and fingers looked bruised. As I was looking around for staff, our eyes met, and I knew he saw me.

I started thinking, Okay, this guy can’t wander around alone, half-naked and unmasked. I had huge chills, but I turned to grab my mask and get out of my car to help guide him back inside. But when I looked up again, he was gone. I looked all over the parking lot for him, but he was definitely gone.

There was no way he could have vanished like that in the split second it took me to grab my mask. I don’t know how to explain this without sounding dramatic, but my skin crawled when he looked at me. He looked like a guy who was slowly realizing he’d passed and didn’t know what to do now. I still think about it.

Creepy hospitalUnsplash

Sources: Reddit, , , , , , , , ,


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