February 8, 2022 | Eul Basa

Hospital Nightmares Come To Life


Hospitals are where lives are saved and miracles are performed, but it's also where weird and unexplainable things can occur without warning. Doctors, nurses, and patients took to Reddit to share the craziest experiences they've had while at a hospital, and their stories will definitely have you raising your eyebrows:


1. A Normal Nightly Stroll

I worked nights as an ER nurse. One night, about 20 minutes into my shift, a day nurse said nonchalantly, "Hey, there's a naked guy outside, I need you to help me get him." I laughed it off, thinking she was joking. She wasn’t. Not too far out of the ambulance doors, there’s a guy, soaking wet, wearing absolutely nothing but a button-up shirt…which is unbuttoned. Then, it gets even weirder.

We have no idea why he's wet but he's staggering all over the place and talking about a plane crash. So, I run back inside to get way more help, and gloves, of course. It took six of us to get the dude into a wheelchair and into the ER. I gave him some medicine and warmed him up, which knocked him out after about ten minutes or so.

He was tall and pretty well built. He didn’t look like our usual late-night straggler. His head CT and tox screen were negative, but he was still admitted for observation. That’s when we finally figured out what had happened to him. It turns out he had a cold so he took some cough syrup, then had his usual nightly couple of drinks. Then he went to walk his dog and blacked out, I guess.

He fell into a canal, which explained why he was soaking wet. Still unsure why he was talking about a plane crash though…or where his dog ended up.

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2. Incompetent Intern

I was in a multi-vehicle accident on my way to work and got what I thought was whiplash. I have a high pain threshold, so the interning doctor in the ER said that if I wasn't screaming, I wasn't hurt. When I told him I was really in pain, he started doing the “Can you feel this”  prick test.  When I couldn’t feel anything, his expression changed. After about five minutes, my ex walked in and screamed that I was bleeding.

I had a white shirt on, so it may have stood out, but this intern was so convinced I could feel something, he jabbed me repeatedly with a syringe needle until I looked like I was in a slasher movie.  A nurse dragged him out and later when my attorney reviewed the medical notes, it said that I had a violent nosebleed. I had damaged my  C5, C6, C7 vertebrae, and had a bulge on my spinal nerve. I had serious damage and the guy thought I was faking.

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3. Hope Your Brain’s Okay

I once tore out my IV and a pic line that had been in my neck. The doctors and nurses got to me just as I was going for the drain tube coming out of my head, which had been placed there because I had just had brain surgery. Blood was spraying around the room from the hole where the pic line was, and I was fighting them, calling them every name in the book.

They ended up having to strap me to the bed for my own safety. As it turns out, I had a bad reaction to the anesthesia they used.

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4. Who Am I?

I woke up from a coma and while I was in the ICU recovering, I had some really weird situations occur. One, in particular, stands out. I was having a lot of trouble sleeping, so I was watching a lot of television. One night, I put on Jamie Oliver's 30-Minute Meals. I fell asleep, woke up, and for some unknown reason, I had the strangest thought: "I am one of Jamie Oliver's sous chefs, and I am currently working on his next cookbook."

I have NO idea why I thought this. I got out of bed, walked to the nurse’s station where my ICU nurse was folding blankets, and her back was towards me. It was around 3 am and the ICU was pretty dark.  She wasn’t expecting me to be standing in the middle of the hallway. When she turned around, she nearly jumped out of her skin—I was just standing there like a zombie.

I told her about Jamie Oliver and the cookbook. After about 10-15 minutes, I woke up or snapped out of it, and I was SO embarrassed. She ushered me back to bed and had a good laugh. She told me it was pretty normal for people in comas and the ICU with head injuries to have very vivid dreams and hallucinations while totally awake.

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5. It’s All Fun And Games

My best friend spent a week in the hospital because her water broke and was having contractions one and a half months before her due date. While she was there, her husband brought his whole computer gaming setup so he could play games while he was there with her. I’m talking fancy keyboard, headset, and all the other bells and whistles. But that’s not the worst part.

He was playing his games when the nurses or doctor would come in and ask her questions. He’d also be talking and yelling at whoever he was playing with while me and her family visited. He’s most likely the reason she had their baby preterm, because of all of the stress he caused. He didn’t have a job and didn’t seem to care if he did or not.

To this day I cannot believe what I witnessed and don’t understand how she could still be with him. I understand that being at the hospital forever isn’t the most fun thing ever but honestly.

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6. Total Blank

I woke up in the hospital buckled to the bed, and I didn't know why I was there. This happened more than once because I was there for a brain injury. I couldn't remember why I was in the hospital, so I kept trying to escape. They ended up writing on a whiteboard at the end of my bed that I was supposed to be there and why (to avoid future freakouts).

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7. Try To Find A Work/Life Balance

I'm a social worker who does psychiatric intake in an ER. Last week, I had to assess a patient with some serious issues. The remote controls to the televisions in the ER have a cord, similar to a phone, so patients don't walk off with them. When I walked into this guy’s room, he was talking into the remote, like it was a phone. He goes, "I got someone in here who wants to talk to me, I’m going to have to call you back." Then he "hangs it up," and says, "Sorry about that, business call."

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8. Teenage Dream

When I was about 13, I had intestinal surgery. I had to stay there and recover for about seven days to be sure that all the plumbing was working properly. On about the fifth day, I woke up to a fairly large wet spot covering my crotch and gown. It turned out I had a wet dream but was still unable to move easily to clean myself up, so I had to inform the nurse. For a 13-year-old, it was a nightmare!

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9. He Could Be An Internet Celebrity

I woke up after an operation and was full of rage, but so groggy from the anesthesia that I couldn’t move. For two hours I lay in recovery, fuming. Everything made me angry. There was a little girl in the bed opposite me, crying after her surgery and I hated her. I hated her so much, I used all the energy I had to flip her the bird.

A nurse came over and sat with me for a bit, just talking and holding my hand. I couldn’t move or speak to him but he made me angry as well. After a bit, he let go of my hand and I immediately flipped him off too. He just grabbed my hand again and held it until I eventually fell asleep. When I woke up, one of the nurses told me I looked like grumpy cat.

I’d spent the whole time in recovery glaring and growling at anybody who came near me (I don’t remember the growling bit) and that I’d flipped off quite a few people (I only remember the little girl and the nurse).

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10. Fourth Of July Fright

My wife worked as a psych nurse at a hospital. She was working on the floor on the 4th of July when I got a call from one of her co-workers telling me she had been harmed by a patient. She took a pretty good sucker punch and was down in the ER to get checked out. I headed over to the hospital to see how she was doing.

I was sitting with her as she was laying in one of the beds when I heard this awful wailing. I turned around and my jaw dropped—there was a kid in his mid-teens with blood on his arm running down, staining his clothes and the gurney. He had blown his hand to shreds playing with fireworks. The screaming was extremely unnerving. My wife was okay, but that poor kid was not.

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11. It’s a Hospital, Not A Gym

At seven years old, I had developed aspiration pneumonia after playing in a ball pit and vomiting from the smell of a very stinky kid. After several doctors telling my parents it was only a cold, it took me nearly dying for one doctor to realize something was actually wrong. I then spent several weeks at childrens' hospital lying in bed, watching movies.

I was getting antsy and ready to run around. Once my doctor gave the okay for me to get out of bed and stretch a bit, they allowed me to go to the media center they had for the children. They had it all. Board games, paints, and the almighty Super Nintendo—my little heart was in hog heaven. All these activities were definitely fun, but I wanted more, much more.

I wanted physical motion! Then I saw it, the perfect thing to jump over! The rope was just far enough off the ground and long enough, I knew I could make it. Before anyone could stop me, I ran and LEAPED, totally clearing the other side before multiple hands lunged at me. I had jumped over an IV cord connected to another child.

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12. My Blood Loss Scared The Doc!

I was going in to have surgery. I was supposed to be a five-hour outpatient; however,  they hit an artery during the procedure and didn’t know it. I was in recovery bleeding internally, and no one knew until they tried to sit me up. All the alarm bells started going off, and the nurse started screaming at me to keep my eyes open.

The scariest thing for me happened later. I was in an overflow room because the hospital was full. The resident came over to check on me because I was in pain and pushing the call button. I knew at this point that the artery finally sealed itself but they had estimated that I had lost three-quarters of my blood supply.

I was in horrific pain and could barely move. Someone had to turn me, in order to help me become comfortable. So the resident read my chart and was looking down at me, and I will never forget the look on his face. He was terrified looking at me. I’m sure to this day he thought I was not going to make it.

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13. Life Is About Having Fun

One of the patients I've worked with was an old man with severe dementia. One day he ended up missing. They couldn't find him anywhere. It was the middle of winter so of course, we were worried the old man would freeze. After two hours, he walks into the ward completely soaked and muddy with a huge grin on his face. When we asked him where he was, his answer was legendary.

He simply responded with, "I went sleigh riding."

Weird patientUnsplash

14. The Patient Next Door

I was about 12 years old when I got bitten by a poisonous spider. I had to go to the emergency room for treatment. The guy behind the next curtain had been shot and impaled, and the knife was still in him. When the nurses opened the curtain, they didn't realize that my dad and I were in the next area over...So I saw the guy scream, holding a knife in his gut.

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15. Save The Stories For Your Journal

I've been suffering from chronic pain issues for a while now and they decided to try and see what ketamine would do. It was a one-day treatment. I was supposed to show up in the morning, get the injection, get monitored, then go back home again. Except the injection didn’t quite go as planned. I ended up with one blown vein and one poked tendon.

Finally, they got the IV in. The first few hours were okay until the ketamine got cranked up. I was texting with friends all the while and they were not impressed by my stories of how time is bending my vision and there are parallel words but I can still communicate with them if I want. The nurses didn’t seem to appreciate it either…

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16. The Girl And The Machine

As a child, I was hospitalized a lot due to heart issues. One day, I was out in the halls, waiting for the playroom to open up. I was about eight at the time. There was a girl on my floor who walked with a huge machine that pumped her heart for her. She was also walking around with what looked like her mom or older sister.

Suddenly, the scariest thing happened—her machine started beeping, and the nurses rushed in. They were speaking German since this was at a hospital in Berlin, however, I didn’t speak German; only Russian. The look on her face before she collapsed was absolutely horrific. Her eyes went almost blank and her lips started to go blue. It still haunts me.

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17. A Full Moon

I was admitted to the hospital because I was having breathing trouble. I had really bad asthma and all sorts of allergies including a very severe egg allergy. My mom was visiting to see how I was doing. I had been on oxygen all night with a bunch of meds, but my breathing was clearing up the next day. I was maybe only 7 at the time and this was the third time I’d been hospitalized.

The doctor is telling my mom how I'm doing…as I fly by with one foot on the wheeled IV stand and I'm pushing off on the floor with the other like it's a skateboard. My hospital gown was flapping in the wind behind me as I flew down the hall.

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18. Not A Sight For Anyone’s Eyes

My father had terminal cancer. Towards the end of his life, we had to take him to the emergency room. We got him checked in and as we were waiting for him to be seen, we heard several ambulances. When we found out what happened, our blood ran cold. Three teenage kids had all blasted each other during some argument.

There was so much blood. I had never seen anything like that in such close proximity. All I kept thinking was that these boys had mothers, fathers, and siblings. They were rushing all three in for surgery. It was a disturbing sight.

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19. Saved His Soul And His Life

My dad got in a motorcycle accident when he was 17 and had a collapsed lung that wouldn't heal after surgery. At one point they called in a priest because there was little hope he'd make it. My dad’s reaction was seriously disturbing. He thought the priest was the devil and started yelling and thrashing about. He dislodged a clogged drain in his bad lung, started bleeding and they found that he had clots in there preventing the lung from healing.

He was told about it all afterward but all he remembers was seeing a tall, hooded figure and thought he was going somewhere bad.

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20. Up And Awake

I had surgery planned for 1 pm. It was a four- to six-hour surgery, with a recovery time of about another two to four hours before I would be discharged. I was a teenager at the time, so my parents took me in. They wanted me in at 9 am. I wasn’t able to eat anything from 8 pm the night before, and my surgery got pushed back to 4 pm, so I had gone about 20 hours with no food or drink.

I was in shape, but I was feeling rough. The surgery went well, but my body was exhausted from the lack of nutrients, as well as from the operation. It was late, and my mom and dad had gone downstairs to get some food now that I was okay and in recovery. The nurses had told them that I would be out cold for at least another hour.

But there were a couple of things that my parents didn’t know. Apparently, I had woken up during surgery and made contact with the anesthesiologist. I tried to say, "Is it over? Why am I awake?" But it was muffled from the breathing tube. The anaesthesiologist freaked out and said, "Uh, he's awake. Like really awake.” I began moving, not by choice, which caused the surgeon to nick an artery.

They had to hold me down to keep me still. They got me back under. I woke up a few minutes after they left. It was dark and silent, and I was alone. I got up and there weren’t any monitors attached to me. I was hurting, but I began looking for a nurse. The hallway was dark, and I couldn’t find anyone. I was getting spooked and started feebly asking, "Is anyone there?" Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, a nurse yelled, "Oh my goodness, baby, what are you doing out of your bed!" Luckily, all ended up fine.

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21. Hopefully She Got Quicker Service

In 2011, my grandmother had a double knee replacement. While in recovery, she had to use the restroom. Instead of calling for a nurse, that woman tried to get out of bed, failed, pulled her in-room phone off of the table to dial the ambulance, and told the dispatcher she was in the hospital and had fallen and couldn’t get up. It happened a few hours after I’d visited when she had been telling me about the monkeys performing in a circus on her ceiling.

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22. Tonsillectomy Terror

I had strep every month for weeks at a time as a toddler, so when I was four, I had to have my tonsils removed. I remember being separated from my mom for what felt like FOREVER when I was being prepped before surgery. I was just SCREAMING the entire time. I had never seen an operating room before, or doctors and nurses with the entire PPE getup.

I thought I was being abducted by aliens. I woke up alone and was terrified at the realization that I couldn't speak. I just cried and whimpered in my little crib-like hospital bed until a nurse wheeled me to see my mom in the recovery room. I was so relieved to see her that I threw up as soon as I laid eyes on her.

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23. If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say

One time I was experiencing an adrenal crisis from stress. I was sweating really hard and started getting jittery. I was in pain and super irritable. When the nurse shift change happens and I go from having just a very laid back/hands-off nurse to a very sweet nurse who is the kind that dotes on people, I went into a spiral. And it was bad.

I full screamed that she was, “VERY NICE BUT I CANNOT DEAL WITH HER CURRENTLY” and threw my shoes across the room. I only vaguely remember this. All of this happened in the ER before we knew what was going on. After I was treated, she came back in and I apologized but she thought it was really funny that I was yelling nice things about her.

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24. Contemplating The Possibilities

After going out to drink one night, I blacked out. I didn’t have much to drink, so I was either given something or had a bad reaction to hops. I’m still not sure. The next day, I threw up nonstop for about 14 hours. But it got even worse than that—when every muscle in my body was cramping bad enough that I could barely move and my heart started acting real funny, I called an ambulance and went to the ER.

My parents had to come, and the three of us were sitting in the room. At that point, I was fine. The doctor walked in and said, "We got some tests back. Your white blood cell count is a little high. It could be leukemia," and then walked out without another word. That moment, when we were sitting there contemplating the fact I may have leukemia, was terrifying.

Luckily, it turned out that I don’t have it.

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25. Fifth Time’s A Charm

This teenage boy came in with a split philtrum all the way up to his nose. He was in a lot of pain. It turns out that he had been riding a four-wheeler without a helmet and smacked into a tree. But then we noticed something bizarre. He had on a hospital gown from another hospital. So it turns out he was at another hospital, got mad at the wait time, then his dad drove him here.

But that’s not the funniest part. On the gown were these little holes, about 4 or 5. We didn't ask, but figured out it was burns. His dad told me that he had put a smoke in his mouth while they drove to our hospital, and normally you can just hold it in your mouth. But since his philtrum was split, it couldn't support it, and it fell out. It got a good chuckle out of everyone.

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26. The Scent Of Searing Flesh

I had developed a blood clot behind my knee after surgery a few years ago. I was at the hospital when they found it, so they wanted me to stay until a specialist could check me out. I was laying in a bed for hours and heard a lot of talking and preparation going on, but there was no one checking on me, and was wondering what was going on.

Then I overheard some of the peripheral conversations between the staff, EMTs, and officers about a patient that had just arrived. Their discussion was chilling. A young woman with a history of psychiatric issues stood in a kiddy pool in front of her house. She doused herself with tiki torch oil, then lit herself on fire. The hospital I was in was definitely not equipped to handle burn victims, so they had the entire staff ready to help care for her until they could find an appropriate hospital to take her.

From three or four beds away, I could smell the seared flesh. I could hear them pump her as full of painkillers as they dared, mostly through her feet, and the whole time she was screaming bloody murder, as I don't think the meds helped much. I can't imagine what the burn unit she was transferred to looked, smelled, and sounded like.

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27. A Medical Marvel

When I was first in the hospital, it was about a year ago, I was there with critical skin damage from atopic eczema, one of the worst cases in the country. I had a severe infection all over my body, the torn skin caused me so much pain that it caused me hallucinations. According to the doctors, it was a miracle that I survived because 3 out of 5 people in a similar case are said to go their own routes of numbing the pain or they succumb to infection.

The doctors estimated that I would need to be treated for a month, and if that wasn't enough, I'd then go to specialty treatment under constant supervision. When I was 22 years old, after taking medication and being in bed, I recovered in six days. According to the doctors, I did something impossible.

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28. A Mother’s Cries

I was in a car accident with my mom. A large van ran the red light at a four-way intersection and T-boned us. The accident was so bad they took us all by ambulance to the emergency room. The people who hit my mom and me were in the room next to us. The woman was heavily pregnant. She explained to the doctors that something felt off for many weeks before the accident, but that her doctor said the baby was fine.

When the ER doctors did an ultrasound, they were shocked—apparently, her baby was no longer alive, and it wasn’t due to the accident. They figured that the baby had been dead for WEEKS. I’ll never forget that woman’s screams. It was heartbreaking. She kept screaming, “Get it out of me, get it out of me.” I’ll never forget that moment.

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29. It Started Out Fine

I went to the donation clinic, perfectly healthy, because I had decided to give blood. Some new 18-year-old nurse hit my vein first try and everything starts flowing. I'm just sitting in a normal chair and I start feeling woozy, just as the nurse was leaving. I pass out. Thankfully a nurse saw me pass out and basically caught me in time. I came to, passed out again, came to, passed out again, then they wheeled me to a bed. But that’s not the worst part.

During the whole ordeal, I had wet my pants and had no change of clothes. I called my wife and she didn’t pick up. So I had to walk home with my pants completely wet. When I walked in the front door, my wife was sitting enjoying a coffee and a biscuit.

 

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30. A Surreal Experience

I had to go to the ER for seizure-like symptoms. However, I had been in medical lockdown during the pandemic because my asthma was out of control. Over the summer, my doctor had said, "You can't get sick, do you understand? Your lung functioning can't drop any further. You have no wiggle room left." However, seizures are an emergency, so I reluctantly went to the ER and sat in the waiting room.

Ten minutes later, my worst nightmare walked in—it was a COVID patient. She announced to the front desk that she had been diagnosed and was having trouble breathing. She was instructed to take a seat and wait. Now, with all the social distancing, there were limited seats available. The only one left was exactly six feet away from me. There was no place left for me to go.

I listened to her cough, wheeze, and struggle to breathe for about half an hour, absolutely terrified that I was going to get sick. I was called back for some tests and was given a bed in the non-Covid area, but it was in the hall. The hospital was so full that all of us non-Covid patients were crammed together in one ward.

I was right by the doors that led into the COVID area and watched doctors in full hazmat suits walk around. I kept thinking it looked like a movie in there. Then, a trauma patient was brought in and wheeled into an observation room. The curtains were pulled, but it was a glass-walled room, so you could still see inside. The sight was absolutely horrific.

There were a lot of nurses and doctors running in and out. There was so much blood, it was pooling on the floor. The patient was yelling. Not screaming, but making deep, loud, animal-like groans that said they don't have the air or energy for a full scream. All of us who were stacked up in beds along the wall, tried not to look because it felt like we were witnessing something private.

However, the groans carried across the entire ward. It was terrifying. I could see some of the other patients trying not to cry. I got out a couple of hours later, but I don’t have the words to describe the entire experience. It was surreal and I had never been so afraid in my life. Afraid for myself, afraid for the patients, afraid for the doctors,  just afraid for everyone going through it.

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31. A Little Privacy Please

I was in the hospital once for a span of ten days and when my ex started texting me to check up on me, then she started flirting with me, sending me racy pictures. It was funny because when my heart rate would get too high, my monitor would start making noise so I’d have to calm down before a nurse came to check on me.

But then my ex sent videos, so I just disconnected the red sensor thing on my finger and had to have a private moment, hoping a nurse wouldn’t walk in trying to take my vitals or something. But little did I know, the sensor being off my finger also alerted the nurse to come in…Yeah, that was embarrassing.

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32. Am I Going To Look Like HIM?

When I was three or four years old, I had to have emergency abdominal surgery for a blockage. The scariest thing was seeing my parents as they were stopped at the double doors while I was rushed into the surgical area. My mom was crying on my dad's shoulder, and my dad looked very concerned. To top it off, there was a guy wheeled next to me being prepped for surgery. There weren't any curtains between patients, at least not at this hospital.

But what really traumatized me was what came next. The guy next to me was an elderly man, unconscious with tape all over his face. I had no idea what the tape was for—probably just to hold an intubation tube or something—but in my mind, it looked like they carved his face up and used tape to put it back together. It scared the daylights out of me! I didn't know what they were going to do to me. I thought I would end up looking like that guy.

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33. Ready To Go

A few hours after giving birth, my husband and I were enjoying our new baby and were getting ready to head home. Outside my room, we heard an argument between a patient and nurse. The patient wanted to leave and take her baby, the nurse told her she could not take the baby so soon after birth. The patient was insistent she was going to leave. What she said next made me freeze in my tracks.

She said that if she couldn’t take her baby, she would take someone else's. I gave my husband a steely look and told him that if she came for our baby, she be in the hospital for a completely different reason. I was filled with maternal protectiveness and would have fought off a grizzly bear if it came in. I rolled the bassinet to the far side of my bed and sort of crouched in a protective stance between the baby and the door.

I heard the door begin to open and tensed up. That’s when the doctor walked in with a startled look on his face.

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34. Incoherent Thoughts

I had hepatic encephalopathy, which meant I had an altered level of consciousness due to ammonia buildup in my brain. I couldn’t make coherent sentences. I didn’t know who I was, or who my wife was. Surprisingly, that’s not the worst part. The most terrifying part happened as I started to get some of my memory back. I kept thinking I was saying I had five kids, which was true, but my mouth was saying I had six kids.

My wife kept responding, “No you have five kids.” However, my brain kept hearing, “No you have four kids.” So for about an hour, I was panicking because I thought one of my kids didn’t exist or had ceased to exist, or something. I wasn’t exactly rational. It was terrifying. As I continued to get better, I would make sure we had the right number of kids, would repeat their names, and their birthdays.

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35. That’s Not How That Works

As a med student, I had asked a to collect all of her urine for a time period of 24 hours so we could run a specific test. When the woman comes the next day, she has four full liters of urine in the sample bottles the hospital gave her. My teacher then asks her how she could possibly have gotten that much in such a short time period. And the woman answered, "Well, the bottles were not even half full so I asked my sister to help me fill them!"

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36. The Look In Her Eyes

My mother was in the hospital. She had been intubated.  The scariest thing was hearing the doctor say, "There is nothing we can do to save her," and then, looking over and seeing tears coming out of my mom's eyes. I knew that she could hear everything but she couldn't respond to us. It was terrifying and is something I still struggle with.

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37. But Did They Pass Their Test?

Four years ago I had an important school exam and I was overexerting myself with studying. My head was already hurting a lot, but then my vision went blurry and I faint. When I woke up, I was in the hospital and my father had a wound on his finger. I asked him, "How did you do that to yourself?" He looked me in the eyes and said, “I didn’t.”

Apparently, when I passed out, I fell out of the chair, and when my parents came up to see what was happening I was having an epileptic seizure (we didn't know I was epileptic until then). My father had to put his finger in my mouth to get my tongue out of my throat because I was choking. It was pretty serious at the time but now every time he sees the scar he asks, “Remember when you bit me?”

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38.  I Was Left Drained

I had to have my gallbladder removed.  After the surgery, I had to have a drain put in. The next day, the nurse came in to take it out. That thing was in there about six or seven inches deep, right up into my stomach. She just slowly pulled it out. It was the most awful thing I have ever felt. I still shudder thinking about it.

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39. It’s Called Fashion

I had tumors when I was a kid. I was one of those children that basically lived in the hospital. When coming out of one of my many surgeries, I thought things were pink. Not everything, but random things, the sheets, the walls, everyone’s clothes, and my mum’s hair. The first thing I said to my Mum was that I hated her hair that color. Her being used to my post-surgery ramblings just smiled and told me to have a nap and she will fix it.

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40. A Full House

I had to go into the hospital because I had injured my hand and thought it was broken. The hospital was completely packed; so much so that I couldn't even get a room. I was treated in the hallway, and as I was waiting, I saw some of the local EMTs hanging out. I got to chatting with some of them and I found out they were stuck there too, so I asked why.

What they revealed to me was startling. They told me that because the hospital was so full, they ran out of beds and needed their gurneys. The paramedics couldn't leave until they got one back. I asked them what would happen if there was an emergency and they needed to transport a patient? They hung their heads and just replied, “Let's not hope it comes to that,” because they had no gurney for them.

If worse came to worse, they would have to call another city to see if they had some, which would increase their wait time for pickup. The horror of seeing what budget cuts could do, and the overcrowding situation in the hospital was sad and frightening. I was glad, for my own sake, that I was able to get out relatively quickly and didn't have to stay there overnight or be transported elsewhere.

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41. Small But Scary

My mom broke her hip and had it replaced. I get a call from the hospital early in the morning, asking me to come down to the hospital, they are having a hard time controlling my mom. I rush down and there is my ninety-pounds-soaking-wet mom sitting in a wheelchair in the nursing station calling the nurse all sorts of terrible things.

My mom is 80 and deep down is a total nutter, but she usually hides it well; she comes across to most strangers as a sweet old granny. Apparently, she got herself out of the bed in a post-operative psychosis, on a freshly replaced hip, and started telling everyone off. They got her in a wheelchair, but she refused to get back in bed.

She saw me and told me, very loudly, that all the nurses were evil and trying to get her. She was not going back to her room. I had to get her a private room which she said she wasn't paying for because they forced her to take it. She didn't really come back around for about three days.

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42. Out of Control

I spent some time in a psych ward as a kid. It was a bad place and the people were pretty abusive. One of the staff members broke another kid's arm and I remember hearing the boy screaming as it happened. It was scary, especially because we had no agency to act as a go-between, so the staff had total control.

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43. They Call It Self Care

During surgery, the anesthesiologist had a hard time putting me under for my ankle surgery, and then once I was under, I suddenly sat up and tried to get off the table. After I was wheeled into recovery, the nurse went to get some ice chips and when she came back to remove my breathing tube, I was sitting up in bed trying to remove it myself.

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44. Slowly Slipping Away

I was in the ER and was given an IV push for pain. They left me alone in a treatment room, but I had a bad reaction to the medication. I was having hallucinations while bleeding heavily, and whatever they gave me seriously slowed my heart rate. My blood pressure started to tank as well. I'm not sure what was more terrifying: being fully conscious and aware in a body that was slowly shutting down, or being convinced there was a 7-foot tall shadow demon standing at the foot of my bed to take me.

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45. Wrong Idea, Right Result

Recently did a shift at a facility where they had combination call buttons and TV remotes which basically means there were lots of buttons. I went to answer a pleasantly confused elderly lady's call light, and opened the door just in time to see her holding the TV remote up to her ear, saying: "Hello, I'd like to go to the bathroom please..."

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46. Ignorance Was Not Bliss

When I was four, my mom took me to the ER. The doctors said there was nothing wrong and that I probably had food poisoning. My mom told them to do a scan and they finally agreed. The scan was terrifying. I was so scared and wouldn't stop moving, so I had to be strapped down which, of course, made it worse. By the time it was done, my grandparents and brother had arrived and were in the waiting room.

They then put me on a bed and rushed me to the operating room. We passed my family on the way and I could see my grandfather crying, which I had never seen before, and haven't since. I didn’t understand all of what was happening at the time, but I knew it was bad...and it was. It turned out, I had appendicitis and my appendix was about an hour away from bursting.

My mom was able to follow me to the door of the operating room. For about ten seconds after she let go of my hand I was reaching out to her screaming for help and we were both crying. Then one of the doctors put their hand on my shoulder and gently laid me down and I fell asleep. I don't remember anything after that, but it's still one of my worst memories to date.

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47. Choices Were Made

There was one incident where two separate patients were brought into the ER, strapped to their beds. For some reason, one of them is allowed out of his restraints, as long as security remained at their bedside (or in this case, by the nurse's counter nearby). The patient begins getting clearly agitated and starts shouting mean things about the hospital.

The security guard tries to reassure him that he is fine, but by the time the guard finishes his sentence, the patient is already running down the hall screaming. Security chases him down the hall and tackles him, holding him pinned until more guards came to help.

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48. A Friend’s Anguish

When I was about 12, I was in the ER for a little ingrown nail removal or something, and we were waiting for the doctor for a really long time. While we were waiting, anguished screams were coming from some other part of the building. They lasted a long time, and I remember my mom suggesting it might've been someone hallucinating.

I had my procedure done and we were walking down the hallway to be released when I saw the mom and brother of one of my good friends. They seemed upset, so we walked up and asked if they were okay. Their revelation was shocking—It turned out the anguished screams we had been hearing were from my friend. He had accidentally fallen into a campfire while chasing his younger sister around. He lived but he had to have skin grafts over a huge portion of his body. It was awful.

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49. A Wild Ride

I was getting my gallbladder removed and a hernia fixed when I woke up in the middle of surgery. It was the most surreal experience ever. I couldn't exactly see because of the bright light, everything was like an over-exposed picture, and the people were just kind of shadows. I wound up fighting off two nurses, pulled my breathing tube completely out, and tried to get up.

That's when I realized my legs didn't work and panic set it. All I heard was the anesthesiologist say, "Hold on, I've got something that will help, count to..." The next thing I remember was being in the bathroom peeing, turned around and my wife was standing there.

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50.  Sleepless Nights

I was in the hospital. The guy in the bed next to me was there because of a urinary infection.  The infection had gotten so bad that they had to operate and remove part of his scrotum. The nurse had to go in and clean the area two times a week; once while under general anesthesia, and the other time with local anesthesia. I couldn’t see what was happening, but it sounded like they were rubbing sandpaper on a piece of wood.  The screams were so bad, they made me lose sleep.

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51. A Dog Day Afternoon

I was brought into the ER for an atrial flutter as a child. They tried a couple of different medications to stop it but none worked so they had to use a deregulator. This was nowhere near the first time they did this to me, but because it was so late at night, there wasn’t an anesthesiologist available to give me the good stuff.

So they gave me something different than usual to put me out. While I was only out for a few minutes, I was absolutely wired the rest of the night. I was talking to my dog, playing fetch with him, petting him. We were having a blast playing in a field. Except I was still at the hospital. At night. Apparently, I was making the motions of throwing the ball and petting him and everything.

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52. Out Of Body Experience

I was seven months pregnant at the time the swine flu hit. Early one morning, I woke up so violently sick and struggling to breathe. I was usually very fit and healthy. I passed out on the bathroom floor and came round to paramedics moving me. I felt okay when I came around and was chatting away in the back of the ambulance.

I insisted it was just a funny turn, but my husband was panicked. I was terribly pale even though my obstetrics seemed fine. They insisted on taking me to get checked over. We got to the hospital, and I was put on a bed in a side room; everything again seemed fine. I was impatient to get home, but they still wanted to observe me longer.

I felt a little bit light-headed, so I laid down. That's when things got scary—I started shivering, but any sort of movement to call the nurse felt like I was going to be sick everywhere. I began having these weird visions, like the hospital bed being on top of a snowy mountain, climbing it, then crashing through the roof back onto the bed. All the while, I could hear the heart rhythm on the machine.

I looked at the machine, but it was as if I had gone too cold to move. It felt like I was watching it go slower and slower. It was weirdly peaceful like I was letting myself go. As my eyes started shutting, I was being shaken and shouted at. It was as if I was crashing back down to the bed in a jolt. I felt as if I was trying to keep up and everything would go black.

My name was being called and I would find myself back on the bed looking up at a nurse then would fall off the bed out of my body. Every time my name was being called, someone was picking me up from a big height and throwing me back down onto the bed. Then I woke up in intensive care, after being in the resuscitation ward for 10 hours.

I didn't know where the time went at all. All of that seemed to be happening in the blink of an eye. It wasn't the swine flu. They couldn't say what caused it, but I was put on complete bed rest and fitted with a catheter for a few weeks to prevent whatever was causing it. I certainly wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t been in hospital at that very time, and my baby was absolutely fine.

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53. Hospitals Are Full Of Ghosts

I had a thing for elevators as a child because I lived in the countryside so elevators were like magical boxes to me. When I was in first grade, I got sick and was sent to the hospital. I was quite small for a first grader and I was skinny and pale. I was there for about a month. When I was discharged, I didn’t want to change back into my normal clothes.

I had come to enjoy the freedom of the hospital gown. While my mom was filling out the paperwork, I went to the elevator and just stood inside and kept pressing buttons. I was just riding up and down. I've always wondered why no one came inside the elevator when I was riding it. I mean, whenever the door opened there were people but they didn't come in. Later, I realized why.

I guess at that time it never occurred to me that seeing a skinny and pale child alone in a hospital elevator would be terrifying.

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54. I Would Be Dizzy Too

After successfully and cleanly breaking my ankle in three places, I was taken to a hospital and was operated on two weeks later. The night after the operation, I was left with a pain medication drip that required a button to activate it, but it could only be activated every five minutes. When the nurses came in the morning to check on me, they could see how many times I had pressed the button (with and without it being activated).

Apparently, I had pressed it a grand total of over 300 times, and had just been pressing it all night. I only remember being in bed with a lot of pain and clicking it shortly before passing out. Either way, I was very dizzy the next morning.

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55. At Least Someone Found It Funny

I was having my wisdom teeth pulled. I've had a few shots to numb things, the IV is started, and I've been given laughing gas. I'm left with the rookie nurse while they wait for everything to kick in. I notice my IV is backing up and giggle it to the nurse. She sets to work trying to fix it. I continue to giggle at her while she tries to get it reset.

She is stabbing my arm more and more frantically trying to get it restarted. I'm now laughing at the point of physically shaking, which I'm sure isn't helping. Then, chaos breaks out. She jabs at my wrist and hits a major nerve. My arm seizes up and I start screaming at the top of my lungs. She passes out onto my legs and hits the floor.

Everyone comes rushing in while I'm still screaming. Another nurse pulls the needle out and I'm out like a light. Next thing I remember I'm loopy in the car ride home asking for some pudding and milkshakes.

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56. Medication Mixup

The scariest thing that ever happened to me in a hospital was when a nurse brought me my medication in a cup and plunked it down, demanding I take it. She told me the name of the medication, to which I responded, “I don’t take that.” She became instantly annoyed and told me that if my doctor had ordered it, he wanted me to take it.

I asked her what condition it was prescribed for. She insisted I had to take it RIGHT NOW. I told her I wasn’t taking it without knowing the reason it was prescribed, and that I would be happy to wait until she was able to look that up for me in my chart. She made a huge show of being furious having to do this. She looked up my record on the computer in my room, said not a single word, and snatched it back off my tray table before stomping out in a huff.

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57. A Weird Reaction

I was recovering after deviated septum repair and every time I got up to pee, which was often, a nurse had to be present. So here I am, peeing in front of this nurse (who I'm sure did not care) then because moving made me nauseated, I would also vomit immediately following. I was just out there peeing and vomiting in front of everyone.

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58. His Screams Echoed In The Silence

I was in the ER for mental health stuff. At about 2 am, an older man was brought in with officers in tow. His situation was utterly disturbing—he had just escaped being taken advantage of for TWELVE HOURS by his supposed close friend. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on this very sensitive conversation, but he was (understandably) wailing loudly. He was in the bed directly across from me and was bellowing in pain and emotional anguish in an otherwise pretty quiet hospital.

From what I heard, the accused and a couple of other people just kicked down his door while he was chilling at home. I didn’t get many other details, nor did I want to, but I always wonder about the motive a “friend” could have to do such a thing. It crossed my mind that it was a hate crime. It was probably the most depressing thing I have ever witnessed personally.

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59. Stick To The Plan

In 2019, my dad got a vesicular infection. First, he went to a hospital that decided to not remove it and just clean all the nasty stuff around it. Less than two months later, he was feeling ill (fever, weakness, and pain). He realized the pain was coming from the vesicle, so he went to another hospital and had it removed.

This is where I come into the story, he forgot to bring spare socks and underwear to the hospital, so my stepmom asked me to go with her and drop him some off. The thing is, it was night time and visitations were already over. So we went into the emergency room, my stepmom was asked by the security guard at the front what was the issue and she immediately answered, “I have chest pain.”

As soon as she said that, I knew that something was afoot. We were accepted into the ER, but it was pretty full and when she saw that she wasn’t getting called, she told me that she noticed what door the nurses were using to go inside of the hospital rooms. That’s when she grabbed my arm and literally took me with her inside.

I was really scared, doctors and nurses were looking at us the whole time, out of nowhere we saw a bunch of security guards walking around and I got even more scared. A few minutes later, we found the stairs to go to my dad’s room. However, a nurse was walking down those stairs and asked us what we were doing there. My stepmom feigned chest pain again and told me to run.

The security guards had followed us into the stairwell and while the nurse was trying to assess my stepmom’s condition, the security guards were trying to escort us out. Long story short, my dad never got his things because we were banned from the hospital.

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60. Trapped With Nowhere To Go

My mom was in the ICU after surgery to remove a glioblastoma brain tumor. My dad, aunt, uncle, and I were all gathered around her bed when suddenly a nurse came running down the hallway outside. Nurses never run in hospitals unless something is wrong. We all looked at each other in fear. I looked back at the doorway just as an elderly man in a hospital bed was wheeled by.

I locked eyes with him for two seconds that felt way longer. I can still remember his face and eyes. When they put him in the room next to my mom's, all chaos broke loose. Alarms were going off, nurses and doctors were appearing out of thin air, and the whole hallway was full of people and machines on carts. His family was in the hallway screaming.

They worked on him for a long, long time and finally called it. We were literally trapped and had to listen to the whole thing because we didn't want to push our way through the hall to leave. I know nurses deal with this every day, but that was the first and only time I have seen someone about to pass away and it had a big impact on me.

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61. That’s Not How This Works

We had one woman come in and her chief complaint was constipation. Going into her chart, I saw that she had been previously given some suppositories to take, and in the triage note, she said her meds weren't working and she wanted some different ones. So the doctor is asking her questions, making sure nothing else is wrong, and they get to the part about the medication. Her reaction was unforgettable.

She says, "Well yeah, the pills I got last time were huge! I have to break them in half to swallow them!" And then we had to explain that suppositories are not meant to be eaten, and that was why her medication was not relieving her symptoms. She thought “Suppository” was the name of the medication, like Tylenol is for acetaminophen.

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62. Anesthetic Adversity

I was five at the time and had to have my tonsils removed. Due to a genetic condition,  painkillers or anything type of anesthetic doesn't affect me. So, when I woke up from the anesthesia, I was in a huge amount of pain. I was surrounded by strangers and couldn’t talk. I saw the bandage on my arm from the IV and started crying. Being alone, in pain, and unable to voice it was the scariest thing for me.

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63. Dr. Google Is Cheaper

One time, I had slept on my arm wrong and it became paralyzed. You know when you fall asleep in a weird position and when you wake up your arm is like rubber, but then in a few minutes, you get that tingly, pinprick feeling as the feeling comes back? In my case, the feeling didn't come back. I learned from researching on my phone that this was likely “Saturday Night” syndrome.

It happens when you sleep on your arm wrong and pinch a nerve (also called radial palsy). This particular hospital wanted to check me in and run a whole lot of (completely unnecessary) expensive tests to make sure I didn't have a stroke. I was like, duh, I didn't have a stroke and this is unnecessary. But of course, they didn't listen.

So I got up, gathered my things, and walked out of there while all the medical staff was yelling at me to stay put. I got a small brace for my arm from my pharmacist and a few weeks later I was fine. I'm not interested in spending tens of thousands of dollars to conclude what I already knew.

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64. A Mother’s Intuition

It was during the birth of my second child. I’m a Type 1 diabetic and I had this sense at about 34 weeks that my baby would need to be born at 35 weeks. My OB/GYN told me he thought I could make it to 36. I had preeclampsia with both pregnancies, but there was a feeling I had, and I knew it was time. I spent the first three days in the ICU having steroids to speed up the baby’s lung development.

Having diabetes and steroids don’t mix, so I was on an insulin infusion to stabilize my condition. I was feeling okay, and I got a C-section operation time scheduled for 1:30 pm on a Friday. Initially, I pushed back. Even though it was a planned C-section, I was still classed as nil by mouth in the event I needed to go under, so I couldn’t eat anything. That was not ideal, as insulin requires food intake.

I was told that, unfortunately, there was no other time slot available. The morning of the surgery, I was to be given insulin and I mentioned my hesitance given that I was nil by mouth and was concerned I might crash and drop into a coma. By 11 am, my worst fears were realized—my blood sugar dropped dramatically and the nurses rushed around to get a dextrose infusion into my poor, tiny little vein on the back of my hand.

The dextrose glucose is so thick, my vein collapsed. It was excruciating. My body went into shock and it felt like someone was infusing napalm under my hand. It ballooned up into this massive lump and eventually, I was screaming so bad they relocated the IV into the crook of my arm. I was shaking all over, but as the pain started to subside I calmed down.

An hour or two passed and my husband and mother arrived. I was feeling good and ready to go into surgery to meet my daughter, despite the morning's drama. My friend who was studying to be a midwife was with me. She was the only person allowed to attend as I got prepared for the spinal block. My husband was waiting outside and would be let in once it was in effect.

The only trouble was that because I had so much fluid from the preeclampsia, they had trouble getting it into the spinal column. I had the blood pressure cuff on the left arm, which hurt every time it inflated thanks to the collapsed vein, and pain from the dextrose infusion. I started shaking from the pain, and simultaneously, they would be trying to insert a giant needle into my spinal cord.

The pain of that needle was something I only hope I never experience again. It felt like someone had live wired my body with electricity. Every time it hit the wrong spot, it would shoot through my body like lightning, all the way down through my pelvis and into my legs. The anesthetist kept demanding I stay still when I was not moving willingly! And it only got worse from there.

After an hour, my OB/GYN came over and said I couldn’t take much more, and suggested I go under. By that point, I was so broken and in agony, I cried and agreed. My daughter was born while I was asleep, with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck three times. She had to be manually resuscitated for five minutes before she was able to breathe on her own.

If I had waited even one more day, she may have suffocated in the womb. She spent a solid week in the NICU but is now healthy. I came to while in recovery and was pretty out of it for days. I had fluid in my lungs and was mostly in and out of consciousness for the first 24 hours. I’ll never forget that whole situation but I am so glad I listened to my gut.

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65. The Heart Wants What The Heart Wants

My nephew was in a medically-induced coma for over a month. When they were weaning him off the medication, he was a bit out of it. He tried to get out of bed a few times, so they put him in restraints. He escaped those so they put the escape-proof netting up. Well, his brain just decided it was going to figure out how to escape that and he managed to get out.

He ended up running around the hospital in his birthday suit for about 15 minutes until security could wrangle him back to his room. Luckily this was at about three in the morning so he wasn't terrorizing visitors.

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66.  Toothache Troubles

When I was younger, I had to go to the hospital to get a bad tooth removed. I don't remember anything from my stay except for one situation where I was in a room with a few nurses. They were talking about something completely unrelated and ignoring me in the process, as they held my arm down on the table and rammed a needle in my hand.  My mom was holding me from behind in a supporting manner while I was screaming and crying in her arms. I've avoided needles ever since.

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67. The Feral Child

I had to get stitches in my lip and nose as a kid. When we got to the hospital, they wanted to do a local anesthetic on me with a needle and I was having none of it. I started fighting the nurses and the doctor. Then I tried to bite the doctor's face. But, since I was a small child, I was subdued quickly. They wrapped me in a blanket and held me down.

I kept shaking my head and tried to bite the doctor again, so he sprayed the anesthesia in my face. I don’t remember much after that. I just know I had trouble breathing and the nurses looked mortified. I did eventually get stitched up though.

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68. Constant Miss

I was scheduled for surgery on my hand. When the nurse came to put in my IV to knock me out, she missed my vein several times. She called someone else over to try and the second person also missed my vein several times. With every missed jab, I was getting more and more frantic. My dad was holding my hand and he said I was squeezing hard enough to break it.

But the final straw was when my face started changing colors. I was crying nonstop, flailing around, and my heart rate was through the roof. My dad angrily yelled at the nurse to get someone competent to put the IV in. I think it was the anesthesiologist that came over and thankfully he got it on his first try. I was knocked out and wheeled into surgery a few minutes later.

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69. Who Needs A Radio?

This one dude came in to the hospital after being hit by a car. His CT shows he has a pretty significant head bleed. He's been drinking so this guy's just having a great time. We get him undressed and start trying to clean up when he bursts into song. He keeps going on with the same song for half an hour. But he didn’t stop there.

It got ten times better when a female nurse came in to help and he immediately stops singing and goes, "Hang on...I forgot the second verse." He sits for a few minutes and then goes right back at the same part he's been singing. That's probably the hardest I've tried to not laugh in my life.

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70. Narrowly Avoiding Disaster

As an EMT, I have seen a lot of stuff in the ER that people shouldn't have to see, but my scariest encounter was when I was the patient. The lady in the room next to me coded. My ER nurse jumped on her and began giving her CPR. Her heart started back up pretty quickly, just as he hit the code blue button. Several of the nurses and a doctor rushed to her room, but the one with the crash cart showed up in my room.

She looked around confused, wondering where everybody was. I pointed to my right towards the room with the code and she quickly left. She coded a couple of more times that night and they moved her up to ICU to watch more closely. I'm glad I wasn't asleep at the time of laying there with my eyes closed. Who knows what she would have done to me.

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71. Maybe Next Time

I sat awake through an entire operation to remove a blood clot, I was not really sure if I was supposed to be awake or not. The pain was pretty uncomfortable, but not unbearable. Lots of sharp pains that made me wince. I listened to the anesthesiologist and nurse talk about their weekend the whole time… still unsure if I was supposed to be conscious.

When it was all said and done, I asked the anesthesiologist if I could be put under for the next procedure, because that kind of sucked. She gave told me that I was definitely put under for the last one and must just be confused. I knew exactly what to say. I explained to her what she did that weekend to a look of shock. I explained my father and I always seem to have high tolerances to this sort of thing.

She apologized profusely and ensured I would be completely out next time. I guess I should have said something during the procedure.

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72. I Was Left In Stitches

When I was about six or seven years old, my mom took me over to her friend's house. Her friend had a daughter who was the same age as me. The daughter loved to chase me. They had this metal screen door with a long broken handle—I remember it was very jagged and sharp. The girl was chasing me in the backyard and I decided to run inside as fast as my little legs could carry me to escape.

I barely opened the metal door and slipped inside like the little ninja I was. The next thing I knew, everything became dark. I woke up to a massive puddle of blood and then proceeded to pass out again. The broken handle had caught me behind my left ear and almost completely removed it. It was barely attached by a single thread of skin from what my mom told me.

My mom lost her mind and rushed me to the hospital. I bled everywhere and destroyed the inside of the car. I was still knocked out when we got to the hospital and I was rushed into surgery to reattach my ear. As they put the first stitch in, I woke up as soon as the needle went through my skin. Three doctors proceeded to HOLD me down fully awake and sew my ear back on.

I remember every stitch to this day. Every last one. I remember the doctor holding my legs down telling me to, "Calm down little buddy we are almost done," as I screamed. Apparently, they waited too long after administering the anesthesia. I have no clue why they didn't put me back under. I will never forget the pain and that stupid doctor.

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73. At Least He Doesn’t Forget

I sustained a TBI some years ago in a car wreck and was airlifted to the hospital. I don't remember the flight at all, but apparently, I was just punching at everyone on my way in and shouting obscene nonsense. For the next day or two, I'm told that I kept repeating the last thing I could remember being told, over and over again.

As in, someone would tell me not to get up, and I'd just tell my friends who came to see me that I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to get up. One of them told me that somebody else was coming to visit, and I apparently kept telling everyone that they were coming to visit, even after they'd visited.

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74. A Mother’s Haunting Screams

I spent a good portion of my life in the hospital, but the one moment I'll never forget is when I was in the emergency room getting an IV and a mother came in, running and screaming with her small child in her arms. All the doctors and nurses immediately ran to help her and attend to the child. The mother was screaming for help in such agony that I felt even more nauseous than I already was.

I don't think I can ever forget her screams and seeing this tiny little child wrapped in a towel looking blue. I think the baby made it because the mother had stopped screaming and calmed down and went to the waiting room. I can't even begin to imagine the horror of holding your breathless baby.

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75. Just Trying To Help

I was getting my wisdom teeth removed and everything before the surgery went fine. But halfway through, I woke up. The wild thing is, I specifically woke up because the nurses were discussing the new Star Wars movie at the time and were confused at where it landed in the timeline. So I tried to explain to them as I woke up.

They thought I was just awake for a second and told me to go back to sleep, but I didn’t. Instead, I soon realized all the medication had worn off and I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell them. So, I felt them pull the last two teeth they needed to pull and white-knuckled my chair to deal with the pain. It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced.

When my parents were expecting me to act weird afterward, they were sorely disappointed when I exclaimed, “I am fully awake right now, put your camera away.”

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76. A Dystopian Encounter

I had gone to visit a relative. When coming to a crossroads in the hallway, there came a moving box about the size of a mini-fridge—a hospital robot. There was nobody around it. It was beeping and playing a recording. It wasn't moving fast, but I realized it was headed straight for me. I backed around the corner to find a different way out, then quickly picked up my pace when it rounded the same corner and followed me. It creeped me out.

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77. There Are Problems And There Are Solutions

During my last day of training, I responded to a life alert call. This could have been anything, firefighters had gotten there first but didn’t give us any updates. So we take everything from the truck just in case. We get into the apartment and there are firefighters frantically running around the kitchen that was surrounded by a baby gate.

We see the patient and she looked fine just sitting in a wheelchair, talking to the firefighters. We ask what was going on. A firefighter says to us that the patient is not allowed in the kitchen because she almost burned the house down, so that’s why there’s a baby gate to block her out. She lives with her son and he’s working today.

She wanted a piece of cake but couldn’t get to the kitchen, so she thought the most logical way of getting it was to press her life-alert button so that the firefighters could get it for her. So I’m standing there watching as the firefighters ask if she wanted ice cream with her cake and slicing it for her. I ask my field training officer what I write in the report. He says to me, “Just say we were canceled by fire.”

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78. The Pain Just Wouldn't Stop

I grew up a completely healthy kid but I was oblivious to my family’s health history. Out of nowhere, I began having stomach pain that was diagnosed as ulcers. After two days of being on medication, I began having attacks that would begin with pain at the bottom of my ribs, followed by shortness of breath and this horrific pain in my upper abdomen.

These occurrences would happen randomly and last about 30 minutes to an hour. I couldn’t do anything for the pain. No medication helped, no position, eating didn’t help, nothing. After 30 minutes to an hour, the pain would just disappear and I would be fine. I went to the hospital when the first one happened. When they did an ultrasound, the doctors gasped—they discovered numerous gallstones...an overwhelming amount.

I was a 19-year-old female in good shape, so they were very confused as to why I had so many. My gallbladder wasn’t inflamed and they didn’t see anything blocking any ducts, so they said that they wanted to treat the ulcer to see if that was what was causing the pain. Ulcer pain and gallbladder pain are incredibly different, so this was frustrating initially.

For me, the ulcer felt more like a gnawing, constantly hungry pain. The other pain I was having was the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. For a week after, I had these attacks on and off, but then they seemed to stop. I was hopeful and thought that if I could make it to the end of the medication cycle, then I would be fine. At the two-week mark, I had another attack.

From there, they only seemed to get worse. I called my hospital’s nurse line, and they told me that to get evaluated I needed to be in pain for longer than two to three hours. The day I had a doctor's appointment, I woke up at around 3:45 am in severe pain. Things got progressively worse until I was laying on my bathroom floor, throwing up nothing but bile, unable to move or barely breathe.

I had never felt complete fear until then, and that was the only time in my life that I have ever had to call for emergency services. I was taken by ambulance to the same hospital I had been going to. I was given meds and the pain subsided somewhat. Once in the hospital though, the true test of my faith began. The surgeons came and talked to me and made it clear that surgery was the best option.

My gallbladder had to come out. Then more doctors kept coming in, and courses of action kept changing, and it felt like they were just trying to get me out of there. On top of that, the pain continued to come back. One doctor came in and said that he didn’t think my gallbladder was the problem. When I asked him what else it could be, he replied with, “Oh you know, GERD, acid reflux, heartburn.”

I was terrified that I was going to be sent home to continue dealing with this pain that was hovering over me every day because this man didn’t believe me. He said that he wanted to try a GI cocktail and a PPI inhibitor (to see if the issue lay with my esophagus or stomach) and wait to see if that helped the pain. So I took it, and when it didn’t help, he finally agreed that surgery was the best option.

They scheduled me to have a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, after being in the hospital for eleven hours in disgusting amounts of pain. I don’t remember too much after that, as I was taking more and more medication, but I remember them taking me up to pre-op and the pain getting worse again. Finally, I was put under. The second most terrifying thing was waking up alone after surgery.

I can still remember the pain I was in, even after the nurse gave me another round of meds, and how I could barely get any food down. After the painful walk to the bathroom and changing, I had to stop because I was going to throw up. For this, the nurse went and got a dose of anti-nausea through my IV and handed me some smelling salts.

I did not feel well enough to go home, but it felt as if they wanted me gone, and my days after surgery were miserable. As I read through my paperwork afterward, I found that my gallbladder had been nicked during surgery. They also listed in their notes that “pain was managed well, was able to keep food down, and wished to go home,” none of which was true. My recovery was painful and troubling. The experience scarred me enough to not want to get any medical treatment.

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79. Maybe It’s Karma

This is so embarrassing, I still can’t forget it. As a teenager I had my wisdom teeth removed at an outpatient surgical facility. After being checked in, I was told to strip down and put on the hospital pants and shirt they gave me, basically a set of hospital scrubs. I don’t remember this first part, but apparently, after the surgery, as I was coming out of the anesthesia, I became combative with the nurses and doctors.

I was calling them awful names and trying to fight my way free which was totally out of character for me. So they pulled down my pants and jabbed me in the thigh with another sedative to put me back under. A while later, I came to, totally calm this time. I was in a community recovery room with about fifteen other occupied beds.

A nurse came over and had me drink some water and told me that they couldn’t release me until I peed to get some of the sedatives out of my system. She helped me out of bed and began walking me to the bathroom when my pants fell to my ankles in front of the other patients. They never re-tied the waist string after the second shot.

The other patients got a huge chuckle out of this and all began laughing. There I was, a 14-year-old kid going through puberty and my first experience being undressed in front of someone else is a roomful of people laughing at my bits and pieces being on display.

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80. Never Steal Someone Else’s Seat

I was in the children's ward of a hospital getting treated for pneumonia, at six years old. I escaped my room and ran down to the waiting room of the ward. It was way more fun than my room, it had toys and sweet widescreen TV. I got there and promptly started beating up a little boy who had the audacity to sit in my favorite chair by the TV.

Eventually, someone noticed I was gone and my Dad and a nurse dragged me back. I escaped a few times but only got violent once. Something they gave me in the hospital made me act like a little psychopath. If you're out there little boy, just know that I'm very sorry I beat you up.

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81. An Unsettling Recovery

When I went to the hospital a few years back to have surgery, I was placed in one of the recovery wards for three days. Five other children were sharing the ward with me and we had curtains to separate us. There was a girl my age across from me who I could see when the bed was tilted up. She had survived a car crash and she was recovering from a spinal injury, so she couldn't move. Her eyes locked with mine. We stared at each other for nearly two days. Something about the pain and sadness in her eyes was unsettling.

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82. That’s Pretty Fast

Upon waking up from general anesthesia, I apparently felt it was important to convince everyone in the recovery room that the dog went 1,000 mph. I guess at first I was saying it in a conversational tone but quickly progressed to screaming at the top of my lungs. I made a nurse’s aide cry. Eventually, they had to sedate me again.

It’s something they try to avoid at all costs in patients waking up from general anesthesia but necessary in my case to avoid me injuring myself. I woke up again 30 minutes later and did not remember any of it. Unfortunately, it all took place before everyone had a video camera in their pocket.

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83. Is This The End?

While I was giving birth, I lost a lot of blood. I was lying in bed and feeling very weak and cold when someone from the staff came to check on me. I asked them if this was what it feels like to stop living. She didn't seem to take it seriously until she had checked some stuff on me, at which point she got others there. The last thing I remembered was them putting some mask on me, thinking I was going to pass away.

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84. Patience Is A Virtue

I once accidentally peed on my doctor. I had an epidural while giving birth, and the doctor was being impatient and pushed aside the nurse who was getting ready to place my urinary catheter. She went to check me and asked me to push, and I did as she said. One epidural plus no catheter equals pee fountain right over her shoulder and all down her front.

I missed her face by inches. She was already not happy to be there and I think that was why she was so impatient. I kind of laughed at her because it was totally her fault since she knew I had an epidural and couldn't manage to wait for the nurse to finish with the catheter.

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85. An Unexpected Diagnosis

I had been vomiting uncontrollably, so I went to the ER. There was an ice storm about to hit and I didn't want to wait in case the dehydration forced me to go in. I wasn't really worried because this had happened to me before, so I figured it would be business as usual—I assumed they would run some tests and give me medication, and I would be on my way.

A doctor or nurse, I don't remember which, came in shortly after my blood test, and told me that my white blood cell count was extremely high—like three times what was normal. They said they needed to take blood cultures and that they were admitting me to the hospital. No one explicitly told me what was wrong; just that I had an infection in my blood. I had no frame of reference for what that meant.

I asked every single day for three days when I could go home. Meanwhile, I was being pumped full of antibiotics. On my third day there, I was chilling in my hospital bed when I took a deep breath. That's when I made a startling realization—I hadn’t been breathing well before. Still, I thought that it was from puffing, and since I wasn't doing that in the hospital, my lungs had cleared up.

Then, the doctors told me I would be having a PICC line put in and would be set up with a home nurse to do IV antibiotics at home for two weeks. When I was finally discharged, I was reading through my discharge papers. I read that my official diagnosis was bacterial septicemia, also known as sepsis. I knew what THAT meant and that it was very, very, bad.

I realized that the breathing issues I was having were because my organs were all slowly shutting down. They also weren't sure how I ended up with the bacteria that caused the infection. I insisted it was probably from a nasty case of food poisoning I had about two months prior but they weren't sure. I got set up with an infectious disease specialist.

He checked me from head to toe for any wounds that may have gotten infected, but I had none, so he agreed I was probably right. But here's the wild part—I didn't feel that bad leading up to the ER visit that saved my life. As I said, I puffed and it was winter, so I assumed that I was getting winded from that and feeling rundown because of seasonal depression on top of regular depression. But I survived. A little traumatized, but I'm still kickin'.

Coma wake upUnsplash

86. A Hospital Is Not The Place For That

While working my shift at the hospital, a man came in saying he had lodged some beads, or some sort of similar artifact inside of his body…from behind, if you catch my drift. So, routinely, they decided to get some x-rays to check on its progress the wrong way up through his digestive system. They took the patient through, got him scanned…but found nothing.

When confronted, the patient’s answer blew everyone away. He said that this had happened before and that the reason it wasn't showing up was that it was some sort of plastic and silicone hybrid that was difficult to see on the x-ray. So, the next step was to grab some gloves and manually search for it. The patient dropped his pants and they were underway.

After a couple of minutes of not finding anything, the doctor made a disturbing realization. He looked at the patient and saw that he was sweating and smiling. There was nothing in there.

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87. Double Lung Disaster

When I was staying in the hospital for my double lung transplant, I got pretty sick. I got lung failure in my sleep, which led to heart failure. It also made my arms and legs retain a lot of water; so much so that I was barely able to lift my arms and I was unable to walk. I had to get ECMO and be intubated with a trachea, some chest tubes, IVs, and other lines.

They had to be careful that I didn’t aspirate things so I couldn’t eat (I had a feeding tube for years) and I hadn’t gotten the piece that let me talk. Every morning, a nurse would clean me and change my dressings, but she apparently didn’t know that I had had a feeding tube for years prior, so she kept trying to dress it.

I kept panicking because they change the dressings every 24 hours and I didn’t want my feeding tube to be covered up for that long because if it is not turned every once in a while, I was told it could make me pretty sick. When I tried to explain this to her on my whiteboard she kept denying that it was true and continued to try and dress it.

I told her to wake up my dad who was in the room, sleeping. She looked at him, seemed anxious, and said no. I was 17 at the time, and she probably just wrote me off as being scared. I was making any frantic noise I could at my dad to wake him up since the nurse was ignoring me.  Finally, my dad woke up and I wrote down what I’d been trying to tell her. She finally accepted it and didn’t dress it. I told everyone there to never let me get that nurse again.

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88. It Cost How Much?!

Back when I was a teenager, there was a day in which I was in extreme pain which seemed to be originating in my stomach area. My folks were starting to worry about me so they took me to the ER. They ran some tests and the whole lot. They ended up giving me some muscle relaxers since I was very tense. Then something happened that was completely out of my control.

I released a large amount of gas and afterward…I felt perfect. Everyone got a big laugh about it. My parents now refer to the incident as the $500 toot.

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89. Study Abroad Surgery Nightmare

My first invasive, major surgery happened while I was on a study abroad trip in Ukraine. Ukraine has always had a bad reputation but I didn’t find that to be true until I had to go to the hospital. There were private hospitals that came at a premium for tourists and oligarchs, and then there are the state hospitals. As an American student, I was labeled a premium patient, but the luxury private hospital that I was sent to didn't have the proper facilities for major surgery.

Hence, I was shuttled off to the state hospital. My student group was situated in Kiev, which is as modern as any other European city. Within ten miles, there was nothing but forests. When we finally arrived at the hospital, it was a 20-story concrete block with windows punched out in the middle of this forest. I couldn’t see a single building or business nearby.

But the scariest part? There was no one else in sight.  There were no nurses running around outside, or even ambulances going in and out. There also wasn’t a ramp leading to the hospital entrance for the gurney, so the EMTs had to lift me and carry me. I was lying straight on my back, face-up, on the gurney for around ten stairs. They had to stop and take a break, and then proceed to wheel me to the entrance.

Even inside the hospital, there was no one around. There were rooms lit up but I could only see the shadows of doctors, nurses, and patients behind the curtains. As we passed by further in the hallway, I saw some busted, fluorescent lights, dangling from the ceiling. Again, I still didn't see any doctors or nurses rushing over; just the EMTs wheeling me around.

We headed towards the elevator, and there was a caution tape fluttering over the open elevator shaft. The EMTs were like, "Oh, well," as if this wasn't the first time, and headed up another flight of stairs to get to an elevator that was working on the opposite side of the hospital. At that point, I prepared myself to accept a horrible but absolutely possible reality—that this was an organ harvesting black market hospital. I just wanted to get the anesthesia to end it.

They carted me over to the pre-op room, which looked like a room in a typical hostel.  After 10 or 15 minutes, my American guide, who was in charge of the study abroad program, finally arrived. I was relieved and he told me that I was going straight to the operating room. I woke up eight hours later with tubes coming out of my nose and stomach cavity.

There were doctors, along with my American guide, at the foot of my bed, and the one surgeon, who could speak English, said, "It was bad. Very bad." I just looked down at my stomach, and my face went white. There was a running trail, from my belly button to the top of my abdominal cavity, of thick black stitches. It turned out what the doctors thought was appendicitis, was a ruptured ulcer.

My stomach acid was leaking into my abdominal cavity, essentially burning the outside layer of my major organs, which explained the unimaginable pain I had. When they went in for the appendix, and just saw pus, and they realized it was a lot more severe. This explained the need for all the post-op tubes—they had to drain the remaining pus out of my stomach cavity.

The first few nights were unsettling. I was in my own room with a single partition that was half wall and glass. I could see into the other room next to me, but couldn't lift myself to see above the wall. I was just flat on my bed. Every night the man in the next room just groaned all night. The sounds he made were that of a large wounded animal or someone who just fell down a flight of stairs.

I kept asking the nurses if the man was okay since he groaned all night. They just always said, "He's fine. Just bad dreams." One day, I woke up and saw the nurses cleaning up the room, laying out and flattening out the sheets on the bed. I was absolutely shaken to my core. I asked them, "Did he pass?" They just responded, "He left." I could see that he was gone, but I was wondering if he had passed away while I was sleeping.

The nurses laughed it off, and kept saying, in Ukrainian, "He's gone." I can’t believe I was in the next room to a dying man and sleeping through his final throes. I had to stay in the hospital for a month and a half. Aside from the isolation, the nurses were nice, yet professional. There was no small talk, except from one nurse who had a brother in the United States and was sincerely curious about American pop culture.  In the end, I was able to leave, with a 7-inch scar running down my stomach, and was able to finish studying abroad.

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90. Always Look On The Bright Side

My four-year-old son had to stay at the hospital overnight for reasons I've forgotten. Somehow, it didn't make it to his chart that he has ADHD and was taking Ritalin at the time. I leave and they don't medicate him. He was mobile, wired, and unsupervised. When I came back, what they told me put me in an instant panic. They had LOST him.

He'd made it up several floors, flushed his pajama top down the toilet for…reasons. He then managed to find a very senile old man and climbed into bed with him. When they finally found him he was watching the guy's TV and was eating his ice cream. They called me to come and get him early. The staff looked like they really needed a nap. My son, however, had had a glorious time.

He never did tell me why he flushed his pajamas, though.

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91. He Was Itching For Some Help

I was in the hospital following a motorcycle accident. My hospital roommate, who was beside me, had been in an 18-wheeler accident. He was complaining that his back itched and someone finally came in and rolled him on his side. When they turned him over, their faces dropped—his back had pieces of glass stuck all over it. I still don't know how that was overlooked.

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92. Maybe They Hated The Playing

I was 14 in the hospital for streptococcal pneumonia, up on the ninth floor of our local hospital. After about two weeks, I asked my mom to bring my Casio keyboard. So one day, I open the window and sat up in the window nook to play. The window would not open wide, but I let a leg hang out to feel the sunlight and wind for the first time in a while.

I played on the keyboard for a while and I looked across and there were all these people making horizontal motions with their arms and yelling something. I stopped playing and stuck my head out to listen. At that moment, they got substantially more excited. It took a second, but then I realized they were saying, "Don't jump!"

In an instant, a group of nurses was in my room, telling me it's not worth it and that I was going to get better. I pulled my head and leg in from outside and told them that I did not plan on jumping. I shared that I was just up there to play music and feel the outside. They asked me to come down out of the window nook.

I complied with their request. Once out of the window, I got leather straps put on my feet and hands until my mother could get off work and get there. To this day, I think that I am the reason that the hospital windows will not open beyond a slither. Sorry folks. I just needed to feel the outside again.

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93. The Endless Wait

I came in with a kidney stone stuck and causing me horrible pain. I was left screaming and vomiting, writhing in pain in the waiting room for six hours before I finally got taken back to a room and given ibuprofen. Then they ordered a CT scan, found out about the kidney stone and the sepsis, then finally gave me heavy pain meds.

I sat in that ER room with no update for 26 hours while they were trying to get me a room. I begged the nurses to get the doctor to come to see me and give me an update on what they were going to do to treat my condition since they had done nothing at all. After six hours of waiting for a doctor, a nurse came in to say she was going to give me a bag of fluid. That, to me, was a red flag.

I refused it knowing the doctor would come in because I was being non-compliant. He was in the room within 10 minutes. They couldn't give me an actual description of my treatment plan, they just kept saying, "We'll see what happens." After two more days on another floor with nothing but fluids—no meds, no extra testing, no anything, I finally was discharged with Flomax and that was it.

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94. Diverse New Friends

I was in the hospital for what I thought was a heart attack or complications from triple bypass surgery, which I had had the month before. I went to the hospital closest to me and kindly asked to be transferred back to the hospital that did my heart surgery. They obliged and I was transferred. They got me a room and I was all set up to sleep.

But then this random dude came into my room and asked me what my favorite type of music was. He was a younger guy wearing scrubs who I thought was just another nurse doing his rounds. Turns out, he and I had the same tastes in music and his favorite band was also my favorite band. He had a wrist tattoo with a symbol from the band’s 4th album that I thought was pretty cool.

We chatted for about a half-hour or so and then he said he had to be going. He made a note on the whiteboard at the end of my bed, listing my favorite band, and then said his goodbyes. On his way out he told me, “Everything looks good so far and you’ll be fine after this.” For some reason, that brought me some comfort since I hadn’t seen the doctor yet and I was having high anxiety, being less than a full month after my open-heart surgery.

They let me leave the next day. I asked my morning nurse what that guy’s name was so I could do some detective work on social media and thank him for telling me exactly what I needed to hear at the time. Her answer made my blood run cold. She told me that the only people I saw were the doctor, my night nurse, and her. No one else had been in my room. So, I asked her who wrote my favorite band’s name on the board and she had no answer for that.

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95. Shaken Up

As a young adult, I was hospitalized due to sepsis. I was in the hospital for a few months. The first day I was transferred to a new hospital, I heard this loud, terrifying noise outside my door. It was late at night and the ground started to rumble. I was in Florida, so an earthquake was practically impossible, but I had no idea what else it could be.

I sat there, paralyzed in my bed. I was too scared to move. I didn’t know what was happening, and my heart was pounding out of my chest. When I finally worked up the courage to press the call button, I just shut my eyes and braced for the worst. The nurse came...and you can imagine the chuckle she had when she told me that it was just the floors being cleaned. I had been truly panicked!

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96. Obsessed

I was staying in a low-security mental ward. I had let my insomnia get the better of my life and mental health. I was admitted in order to get my medication and sleep schedule back to a productive place. While I was there, I became friends with a guy who was a little bit younger than me. I didn't think anything of it—but that was a big mistake.

This guy started to become a little obsessive and began to only focus on me. It got to the point where he was waiting for me outside my room all the time, eating what I was eating, stuff like that. It turned out he had paranoid schizophrenia, and he thought I could cure him. It came to a head one day where I was trapped in the rec room with him until our doctor could come.

The last time I saw him, he was being escorted to the high-security ward, mumbling my name over and over again. He wouldn’t break eye contact, had a cold, unnerving stare, and held an outstretched hand towards me as the double security doors closed. I think about that stare when I don't prioritize my mental health and get the shivers every single time.

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97. What A Well-Mannered Fellow

I once woke up during surgery. Long story short, I am VERY tolerant to almost all anesthetics and they pumped a ton into me during the ER visit. But with all the problems I was in the emergency room for, I forgot to warn the surgery staff. I not only woke up, but I SAT up on the table and had a full-on conversation with the surgical team.

I have never seen six adults jump that high in my life. It freaked them out that I was that awake. Totally calm, I apologized for not warning them, thanked them since the pain was now gone, and asked if I could go home now. Problem was, they were not done. Luckily, they were mostly done and could finish with local anesthesia.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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101. Like Flipping a Switch

I can't remember all the details though so bare with me. I'm at a big tertiary hospital, and had an elderly veteran brought to us one day after being found unconscious in a park. He had alcohol in his system and a quick look at his records showed that this was an ongoing problem with him. He was a sweet old man who was very grateful for our help, up until day 3 of his hospitalization. That's when things took a dark turn.

He developed pneumonia-like symptoms and became somnolent for a few days. Then, out of nowhere, he became very inappropriate—he begins grabbing the nurses and repositioning them, touching himself, and constantly licking his lips in a disgusting manner when anyone even looked at him. He went from a sweet old man to a deviant almost overnight. We even had to wrap his hands up in bandages to stop him from touching himself and others. Oddly though, he hit on anyone and everyone (women and men) except for me. I guess I wasn't his type.

We ended up diagnosing him with Kluver-Bucy syndrome, caused by HSV encephalitis (herpes). Symptoms include hypersexuality and hyperorality. It's pretty rare and I haven't seen it since, but as you might imagine, it left a lasting impression on me. He improved with treatment though, and was incredibly embarrassed after finding out what he had done.

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102. The Milk Is For The Baby

I saw a patient who was concerned because she was still lactating, despite the fact that she stopped breastfeeding her twins two years ago. She said: "Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my husband sucking on the breasts. He says he's trying to drain the milk for me." I had to explain to her that breastfeeding her husband will lead to continued lactation.

 Adult Patients Believed This factsMadamsabi

103. Out to Lunch

I once had a pizza delivery guy walk in on me while I was getting a pelvic exam at the OB/GYN. My feet were up in the stirrups and my doctor's hand was in my you-know-where. Yeah, the whole bit. Apparently, the nurses had ordered a pizza and directed the guy to bring it to the break room, but he accidentally opened the wrong door.

You'd think that if you know you’re at an OB/GYN’s office, you would have the common sense to at least knock before entering any closed rooms, right? Yeah, no. It happened so fast though that he couldn't have really seen anything. I'm also pretty sure that he was more embarrassed than I was. Still, I must admit, this whole thing sounds an awful lot like the plot to a cheesy adult film.

Awkward Crush factsWikimedia Commons

104. Odd Anatomy

I’m a biomedical scientist, and my officemate was a medical doctor working on his PhD. He once did an appendectomy and cut into this person’s abdomen—only to find no appendix. He started freaking out. The support nurses in the room, however, started snickering at him because they knew right away what the problem really was.

Occasionally, they see someone with a rare genetic disorder where all their left-right asymmetries are reversed. This patient’s appendix was on the other side.

Doctor oh God noUnsplash

105. And This Is Why We Wash Our Hands

Sometimes, surgeons are the ones in for an unpleasant surprise. My father is a physician and, although he's not a surgeon, he did some surgery while in medical school. He told me a story about a patient he had once who had necrotizing fasciitis—a.k.a. a really nasty flesh-eating disease. I almost wish that he hadn’t told me this story. It’s like something out of The Walking Dead.

The patient had gotten a cut while gardening and never cleaned the wound properly. My dad told us that he had to peel back layers just to get at it. First, he peeled off the bandages that the patient had self-applied. Then there was a layer of holy book pages that he also had to peel off. Layer upon layer, bandage upon bandage.

Finally, beneath all that, was the wound itself. No amount of med school training could have prepared my father for what he saw. The wound was covered in maggots. Apparently, they were eating the dead-tissue generated by the disease. He said that once they removed the maggots, they were able to begin the surgery to remove the infected areas.

Oddly enough, this patient had the maggots to thank for keeping his appendages intact. Because the maggots had eaten away the dead and infected flesh, my dad and his team didn't have to amputate the patient’s limb. After this operation, though, my dad decided to not pursue surgery and focus on becoming a specialist.

Hospital HorrorsShutterstock

Sources: Reddit, , , ,


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