There's never a dull moment when you're a surgeon. You might think that the hard part is over once you've graduated from medical school, but the truth is that it only gets more stressful from then on out. All sorts of crazy things happen at the hospital, and these stories from real surgeons prove just that:
1. A Lady And An Officer
I work in the psychiatry registrar, and a memorable night involves a 55-year-old manic patient. She was brought in with hypothermia after she jumped into the local river during winter. She claimed the CIA was after her because she was ex-Navy. During her evaluation, she would only give me her name and rank. She said she would only give further information to an "officer."
Before I finished the assessment, she leaped out of bed and ran through the busy ER naked. Our nurses tackled her while she continued screaming her name and rank over and over. We managed to sedate her and send her to the psych ward.
2. The Human Torch
Way, way back in the day, we used ethanol-based cleaners for pre-op. Now picture a naked and fully-sedated guy with a light sheen of cleaning fluid on him. Add a static electric spark into the mix and you get a man fully engulfed in flames. Everyone just stood there for a second until someone grabbed a sheet and put out the fire.
The surgery went well in the end. No complications—human torch aside. At least the guy got a nice suntan.
3. Puff-Puff-Pass-Out
I once had a middle-aged female patient, with no prior medical history, who was flown in from another state for escalation of care. She was transferred for intracranial hemorrhage. But one thing made her case stand out. According to her family, it had happened after she tried smoking the green stuff for the first time. She had taken a big, long toke and she coughed so hard that it ruptured a vessel in her brain.
She survived her surgery, but during her post-op recovery her heart stopped and she went into cardiac arrest. I attended the code blue with the team, and with rapid sequence intubation and CPR, we were able to bring her back. After she was stable I was outside the room reviewing my patient list when she went into cardiac arrest a second time!
The same team had to sprint across the hospital again to handle it. I've never seen the code blue team so out of breath. In one night she was flown in, had a ruptured aneurysm, hemorrhagic stroke, and two cardiac arrests back to back and lived. She was a fighter but I hope her family understands no means no next time!
4. A Thorn In The Side
This is my dad’s story. He was putting up a central line for a drip with an 18G needle (which is relatively big compared to most needles) in the patient's external jugular. All of a sudden, the needle went right into the jugular. My dad and his co-workers all started panicking because usually with a drip, the needle is meant to come out and only the plastic remains; but in his case, he had lost the needle inside this guy’s jugular.
Before they could even fish out the needle it was gone. My dad looked at his fellow surgeons and nurses in total shock. They knew how could bad the situation was. Before they could do anything, they rushed the patient right into surgery. After a few minutes, they fished the needle out near his subclavian vein—closer to his heart. They breathed a sigh of relief.
5. Don’t Skip The Important Stuff
When I was an anesthesia resident, a pregnant woman came into our medium-sized community hospital in the night with some abdominal pain and nausea. Her doctor determined she was not in labor so we just treated her with medication and kept her overnight. In the morning, a new obstetrician started daily rounds. When he saw her, he immediately raised the alarm.
The new obstetrician noted that the patient's blood pressure had dropped. They felt the patient's uterus and it was exquisitely tender. At this point, our patient is feeling very faint. Now the diagnosis is likely a uterine rupture, which is when a small hole has burst in the womb. In these cases, the solution is an emergency C section, and my team was called in to perform this delivery.
A uterine rupture is bad enough, but when we removed the tiny preterm baby, we discovered a horrific truth. It wasn't a rupture but a placenta percreta. That's when the placenta grows through the wall of the uterus and into the surrounding organs, in our patient’s case her bladder. The surgery became more complicated and we had to call for help.
In the OR we now had a urologist, and two other anesthesiologists and started a blood transfusion as she had lost a lot of blood. This condition is usually detected on a prenatal ultrasound, but the patient had skipped hers. If she hadn’t missed it, this surgery would have been performed in a big city due to its risky and delicate nature. Thankfully, mom and baby were OK.
6. Hello, Kitty
I wasn't present for this, but I got to deal with the fallout from it. A client brought a stray cat that he found on the street to the veterinarian’s office. He wanted to get the cat spayed. The vet, who is also my boss, prepped the cat for surgery and began cutting. It was business as usual... until it wasn't. For some reason, he couldn't find the uterus or ovaries. And then it hit him—the cat was a male! Poor kitty.
The owner was, understandably, furious.
7. Dignity Discourse
A young woman in her 20s comes in with an infected heart. Her infection and heart failure are pretty much past the point of recovery. Her only option was IV antibiotics, hope they work, and plan for hospice care. Her IV lowered the infection but the heart and valve damage were extensive. It was so extreme that the heart was producing micro-clots.
After the micro-clots, her fingertips went purple and clots migrated to her lungs. When she arrived in my ICU ward she was struggling to breathe. At this point, she decides to fill out a DNR or Do Not Resuscitate and move into hospice care. Unfortunately, our state has a loophole where if the patient becomes unresponsive their proxy can change the DNR. Sadly, the worst happened.
Her mom went to court and was granted healthcare proxy rights. This meant once the daughter was disoriented, her medical decisions belonged to her mother. The first thing her mom did was cancel the DNR, and our team was forced to put her on life support. This lasted for months and her arms and legs became purple, black, green, then necrotic.
Her organs were failing and the clots had traveled to her brain. She was unresponsive and we knew it shouldn’t be prolonged. We took the case to risk management, we held ethics meetings, and we went to court against the mother to revoke her healthcare proxy to fight for the patient's right to die with dignity. The court refused and mom stayed in control.
8. And the “Eyes” Have It
I was a junior doctor working in the neurosurgery department back in 2008. One of the senior registrars I worked with told me his most unfortunate moment in the operating room. In order to have a patient’s head stabilized for surgery, he used a frame that had a set of three spikes that held the head in place. Due to the angle he needed to approach from, this required the patient to be face down.
As he was placing the head of the anesthetized patient onto the frame, the unimaginable happened—the head slipped and his eye landed on to the spike, perforating the eyeball. Panicking and thinking that his career was now over, he then started poking at the eyeball, trying to work out what was what until the anesthetist told him to stop.
They then called the ophthalmologist who came to tidy up what was now a completely ruined eye. After the surgery, he went to explain to the patient what had happened. Understandably fearing the worst—anger, distress, and tears—he received the response of, "That's OK, I was blind in that eye anyway!" from the patient.
Luckiest guy ever.
9. In The Blink Of An Eye
This patient had a history of kidney cancer but was in remission. On his latest scan, there was surprising news. There's a focal mass on one kidney. Still, if it’s actually just a focal lesion we can chop off the tip of his kidney and cure him while retaining most of his kidney function. The lead surgeon requests better imaging, so we send him to radiology.
When radiology calls us back with the results and it was the worst possible outcome. The cancer is back and has spread into the renal veins. This takes our patient out of remission and into stage three. The radiologist also mentions he sees shadows in the liver and brain. After the dust settles, everyone agrees that this patient is more advanced and surgery is no longer an option.
The worst part was telling him. Remember, this patient came in thinking he was having a short surgery and leaving completely cured. Instead,the surgeon walks in and says, “I’m sorry, but your cancer has spread and you most likely have about six months to live.” His son was five years younger than me and standing next to his dad at the time.
10. Get Woke
I was the patient in this scenario. I woke up during the last part of my gallbladder removal. I felt a peculiar sensation of pressure as my surgeon was trying to close one of the wounds. I lifted my head and we locked eyes—he had this startled “Oh God, no!” look in his eyes. Then he snapped back to normal, said to his colleague, "The patient's up," and the anesthetist put me back under.
I woke up an hour later in recovery.
11. Up In Smoke
My patient was a teenage girl who was taking a nap at home. As she slept, a reckless driver crashed into her house, causing an electrical fire, igniting a ruptured gas line, and setting the entire house ablaze. Originally she got out with her sister, but went back in to try and rescue her dad and dogs. When firefighters pulled her out, her body was 95% burns.
When she arrived in ICU we registered smoke inhalation, lung damage, carbon monoxide, and cyanide poisoning plus toxic inhalation. She survives the initial presentation to the trauma unit and now she’s in our burn unit, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. The only intact skin on her body was a small area around her inner thigh.
Her hair, face, eyelids, and lips are gone. We do what we can with moist sterile dressings and debridement plus broad-spectrum antibiotics. At the end of the day, she looked like a mummy fully wrapped by the end. There is no chance of her having a normal life ever again. The chances of her surviving are in the single digits. After a few days, the infection begins to set in.
All that damaged tissue was a breeding ground and the first thing we noticed was the smell. The only thing you can really do to encourage healing at that point is IV/Topical antibiotics and debridement. Basically, large wounds heal better when they are scraped or shaved to expose the wound bed. This removes dead cells which hamper growth and encourages new skin formation.
It takes weeks of treatments, and we had to do this all over her body. This was scheduled multiple times per week. One day, I said out loud in the OR, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Several years in medicine later that statement remains true. She survived the next few days, and we started with the skin grafts. Trying to re-build her face, and cover her body.
Her average surgery time was about 10 hours per procedure. We have to keep the room at 98 degrees because burn patients go hypothermic quickly. This meant 10 hours in full scrub gear at nearly 100-degree heat.
12. An Upset Stomach
I was in charge of the ICU unit the other day and we had a pretty messy situation.
We had a patient who had some big abdominal trauma. He had gone to the OR and he was too sick for us to be able to close his abdomen, so we left it open. We had a sheet of plastic protecting his intestines and we placed a vacuumed sponge dressing on top of it called a “woundvac.”
The patient's nurse called me into the room to look at the abdomen because she thought she saw pieces of the bowel seeping out of the bag and getting sucked into the “woundvac.” I agreed and thought the bowel looked pretty dusky as well, so we called the doctor to come and look at it. He advised that we take the woundvac off, tuck the bowel back into the bag it had escaped from and put a new woundvac on.
It all just sounded like it was going to be a disaster, but whatever. So, we took off the “woundvac”—we could see that the patient’s bowels had become very swollen from the fluids, trauma, etc. Just as we were lifting it, the unexpected happened—the patient’s bowels all slipped out. The bag had dislodged significantly. When we tried tucking the bowels in one side, they would spill out the other.
The guy was in his bed just disemboweling and we simply could not get everything back in. Luckily, the anesthesia we had given the patient kept him very nicely sedated...But it was MESSY. We really had to step back and say, "Well, shoot. How do we get this guy’s guts back inside of him?”
We ended up having to call in six other people to help tuck things back in. We finally got him back to the OR for them to get everything back into its proper place.
13. Evil From Within
One time, we had a woman come in through the ER with excessive bleeding three weeks after childbirth. That's fairly unusual timing and I took her to surgery for a dilation and curettage, or D&C. I expected to find a little retained placenta and that the bleeding would improve as soon as I got it out. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
As soon as she was on the table, it only got worse. We eventually performed a uterine tamponade balloon. This is a big balloon you fill with saline inside the uterus to apply constant pressure. With medication, we finally got the bleeding stopped and she did ok after a blood transfusion. In total, she lost 1,000cc in the ER plus another 2,000cc in surgery.
Her lab results never showed any retained placenta, meaning her uterus just tried to murder her that night. It’s incredibly rare and I’ve never seen this since. She took the time to send me a thank you card a few weeks later with a handwritten note in it: "Thanks for saving my life, I guess." I kept it in my locker for a while and wish her a happy uterus future!
14. We Need Gauze Here!
I had a friend with a swollen area on his lower back. It got to the point where he could barely sit. He went to his doctor and he was told it was a pilonidal cyst. The doctor assured him that they would go ahead and take care of it. He told my friend to take off his shirt and lay flat on his stomach. As he laid there the doctor cautioned him that he would feel a slight poke. That's when things took a turn for the worst.
Well, it turns out the "poke" the doctor was referring to was actually a full-on scalpel slice. He said it basically felt like someone took a hot poker and drove it into his back. He then heard the doctor exclaim, "Oh boy, We have a pumper!" just as he felt warm blood and pus pour all over his back. He said the nurse’s face went from a warm smile to what he termed as "pure and unadulterated fear."
The doctor started screaming for her to get gauze and towels and then climbed up and laid on his back to apply pressure. It took ten minutes for the bleeding to stop. So, yeah. I'm hoping I never get one of those.
15. Without A Leg To Stand On
I was a resident in the ICU and we had a patient recovering from Steven-Johnson Syndrome, which is a rare drug reaction where skin blisters uncontrollably. At the same time, he had a clotted femoral pseudo-aneurysm that was at risk of bursting and bleeding. Between the afternoon and evening rounds, this patient’s nurse asked me to assess his leg swelling.
His whole body was swollen because of all the blisters and he had fluids he'd been getting for his blood pressure. When I checked his right leg, it did look more swollen than a few hours ago and the skin was worse. However, the aneurysm was stable on the ultrasound earlier in the day so it didn't seem like there was much to do other than keep it well dressed and monitored.
A couple of hours later, my co-resident and I are doing our evening rounds as the general surgery team is assessing a few doors down. The leg looks even worse than earlier and is another few centimeters swollen. Even with the swelling, his vitals are stable and he’s receiving the right treatment. We were scratching our heads when his leg burst.
Where the swelling had occurred has now split open and is gushing. The nurse and my co-resident throw on gloves and apply pressure while I grab a surgical kit and try to find the source. Our team is running down the hall to grab the surgeons who are still evaluating patients. Within two minutes, there's a small team searching through this man’s leg, looking for the cause.
Another minute or two later and they've found they found the ruptured vein. They stopped the bleeding as best they can. I think on the repeat blood work that evening he'd lost maybe 10-20% of his blood in five minutes. Now we had to treat the infection. This patient was pretty frail and had already had a near-fatal reaction to one class of antibiotics.
I wish I could say it was a happy ending, but his wound became purulent and he developed bacteria in his blood. It was a bad day that got worse with all the other medical problems he was having. It was just too much and we transferred to palliative. I’ll never forget the experience and know my team kept him as comfortable as possible.
16. Don’t Have A Cow
Veterinarian here. This happened in my fourth year of vet school. A very valuable bull had an obstruction in his intestines that we had to remove. Generally speaking, the amount of money people spend on a food animal's surgery is equal to the amount of money that food animal is worth. That said, we did this on the cheap. Full anesthesia on an animal as big a bull is crazy expensive, so we did a "standing" surgery.
We numbed him up really well but other than that, we only gave him light sedation. He was totally awake and standing for surgery. The surgeons made a two-to-three-foot vertical incision in his right flank and started pulling out armfuls of intestines and handing them to me and the other vet student assistants. There was a sterile drape on the bull and we were all in full sterile gowns.
The obstruction was pretty bad, so they had to remove a couple of feet of damaged intestines and then sew the ends back together. There was a lot of blood. A lot. The bull was starting to get stressed, impatient, and weak from blood loss. It started kicking at the chute and trying to move. We gave it more sedatives and the surgeons tried to sew faster.
By this time, everyone was sweating and there was a lot of swearing going on. The puddle of blood at our feet just kept getting bigger. The bull did a side shuffle and the intestines that another student was holding became trapped between the bull’s ribs and the metal bars of the chute. This was bad—even a few seconds of that could have lead to permanent damage.
The bull was too heavy to just shove over, so they removed one of the side rails of the chute to free the intestines. The bull was starting to get really angry. It started trying to lunge from side to side and the surgeons ordered us to let go of the intestines we were holding to keep the bull from breaking our arms against the rails of the chute.
The bull was really freaking out and, at one point, disaster struck—the bull managed to get completely out of the chute and started running around the room while mooing, stomping, and ripping huge chunks of intestines out of itself. Blood and guts were everywhere. Gallons of blood were everywhere. Keep in mind, this room was in a barn, which was mostly covered in hay and dirt.
Some huge guys managed to subdue the bull and wrestle it to the ground. They gave it more sedatives and pain meds. My job was to sit on its shoulder while another bigger student sat on its head. Everything was a complete fiasco at this point and I just felt so terrible for the poor bull who was bellowing non-stop. They washed off his mangled intestines as best as they could, stitched the ends together, dumped a ton of penicillin in his abdomen, and closed him up.
The bull survived surgery and then got tons of IV, antibiotics, fluids, and care. Every day his temperature got higher until he finally passed away a week later from a massive infection in his abdomen. It was awful. I have absolutely no idea what they told the owner.
17. Just Bumming Around
Our patient had a pilonidal cyst that bothered them for years. This is the type of cyst that can be very large at the cleft of your backside, and is caused by hairs that burrow deep under the skin. It flared up while the patient was sitting for long periods, and became inflamed and infected. Normally we would recommend a surgeon for this procedure.
When we examined the cyst, we could see it had opened on its own and was beginning to drain. When I took a closer look, I could see the nest of hair in this opening and my curiosity and an absolute need to remove it took hold. But I had made a fatal error. I didn’t predict the nest acting like a plug, and the removal released the most foul-smelling pus.
Thankfully due to protocol, I was wearing a face shield but it did land on the bridge of my nose and eyebrow. I will never forget the sheer force, trajectory, or smell, but would do it all again if I had the chance. Chalk up my fascination to too many episodes of Dr. Pimple Popper. Even so, I still wasn’t prepared for the results.
18. Don’t Get Bent Out Of Shape Now
I worked in an OR for a couple of years as a biomedical engineer. Basically, my job was to sprint to the room when the equipment wasn't working right or when the surgeon or anesthesiologist didn't know how to use the equipment. With about 70 ORs, I was doing a lot of running and saw some surgeries that belonged in horror movies.
One time, a surgical table was malfunctioning going into full a Trendelenburg position, which is when the table tilts so that the patient’s head is below the level of their feet. They could slide off the table like an egg from a skillet. So, I went running into this room and the whole surgical team was there, holding on to the patient while his blood was pouring out everywhere.
The fix was pretty simple—I just slammed the controller against the floor a few times. Thankfully, the patient turned out ok.
19. I Hope This Isn’t Personal
I have Crohn's disease and spent the majority of 2012-2015 going in and out of hospitals due to malnutrition, anemia due to blood loss, an inflamed colon, infections, etc. No medications helped calm my disease down. As a bonus, I got something called Pyoderma Gangrenosum two months after I was diagnosed with Crohn's.
Pyoderma Gangrenosum gave me several open wounds on my legs that were painful and required wound cleaning twice a week with high doses of pain medication. Due to building a resistance, I went from 5mg to 20mg over the course of a year and a half. My daily prescription was valium 5mg and morphine 10mg five times daily to manage the pain.
Under one of my many hospitalizations, I was sent to a bigger hospital than my local one, since they had better resources, equipment, and a special ward for people with gestational issues like mine. A couple of weeks into my stay, I got into big trouble. My stomach was hurting a lot more than usual. I also stopped making bowel movements, which was a big red flag.
I was still going to the bathroom like 50 times a day to pass blood and minuscule amounts of waste, but then stopped overnight. I informed the nurses and spoke to the doctors when they had visitation, but I was getting brushed off by everyone. I asked to be checked out, showing my stomach, which by now looked like a six-month pregnancy.
Regardless, doctors did nothing more than feel my tender stomach daily. I started crying a lot, could hardly sleep, and stopped eating the first or second day because of the pain. Eventually, I was vomiting and overall deteriorating. After six days, I had enough, and finally, someone wheeled in an ultrasound machine to my room.
After a quick look in my stomach, I got a meek, "Oh, your intestines are twisted around on themselves, you need surgery." The next morning I was on the operating table and ended up having my whole large intestine removed because of the extent of damage from the twisting and inflammation. I now have a permanent stoma to function.
The reason they did nothing for a week despite my daily complaints was the doctors thought I was addicted to my pain relief medications. They thought I was complaining for more medication...even though I never asked. The doctor responsible had never interacted with me face-to-face and made the decision based on my medical history alone.
20. You Can See Right Into My Brain
The microscope video feed for a brain surgery operation crashed. The surgery team called me in as a biomedical engineer to look at the issue. I tried different video connections to get the overhead monitors back up, but every time I tried, I accidentally hit the scope with my hand. It was causing vibrations that, under magnification, were overly noticeable in the brain. So, the surgeon told me to never mind and get out.
This was my first day on the job.
21. The Circle Of Life
My brother is a paramedic, and he said every time, practically without fail, dispatch would downplay the calls. So one call he had was for a girl "with minor bleeding." He arrived and found her 14-year-old brother frantic. His 12-year-old sister was bleeding everywhere and wouldn't stop. My brother braced for a major cut and expected a blood bath.
Instead, the girl was terrified she was a goner....because of all this blood coming from between her legs. So yeah, that became quite clear quite quickly. She was in the bathtub and he calmed her down and asked them both where their mother was. They called the mom at work and she got on the phone to explain to her daughter what was happening.
When she was passed back to my brother, she asked if ambulances had sanitary pads, but they don’t carry them. He did however use gauze to make a temporary pad and explained to the girl what to do. The mom ran into the house 20 minutes later, thanked my brother profusely, and hugged her daughter for a long time. He never expected to teach someone about the menstrual cycle.
22. Right Down To The Bone
I’m not quite a surgeon but I received some medical training. I was bisecting someone's leg and I hadn’t realized that the person had a metal rod through their femur. I’m not a construction worker, so I don’t know why I did what I did...but surgeons must press on. So, I did something that no one in the OR could have predicted. They all just stared at me with their jaws to the floor. I proceeded to cut through the bone with a metal saw. Sparks were flying everywhere and before long, my blade broke.
Luckily, I was standing off to the side instead of directly behind the blade as it flew backward and hit the wall. The clothes the person had been wearing were lying underneath the body and caught a spark. My “Oh, God, what have I done?” moment only lasted a second. I was able to douse the person with the water hose before a large fire could start.
Fortunately, the person I was operating on was deceased…or I would have been in big trouble.
23. The Digit Details
We had a patient call our clinic and say they cut their hand. They wanted to know if we were busy or had time for a couple of stitches. They failed to mention that they were working with a table saw, and had nearly cut off three fingers. Their tendons were exposed and severed, and I sent him immediately to the hospital. He received a hand specialist and kept his digits.
24. The Zen Master
I’m a thoracic surgeon. I was still a young intern when this happened. I was young enough that the senior surgeon wouldn't let me perform the whole surgery (under his supervision, of course), but old enough that he allowed me to do parts of the procedure. He might have overestimated my abilities at the time, honestly.
In my mind, I was doing a pretty decent job of dissecting a branch of the right pulmonary artery, freeing it from the cancerous nodes around it. Then, suddenly, dark blood started pulsing out of it. It was like the tide coming in, only way quicker—and way redder. My brain froze and I could only think, "Oh shoot,” but in far less family-friendly language. I then realized the grave error I had just made.
I had perforated the pulmonary artery—a very fragile organ that carries two and a half liters of blood every minute. Thank goodness my senior surgeon was the Zen Master he always is. He put his finger on the breach which stopped the bleeding immediately, then looked at me and just winked as if to say, “Well, you're in trouble now, aren't you?”
He stitched the pulmonary artery up himself and finished the procedure as if nothing had happened.
25. Ride-Along-Astray
As an EMT trainee, in my first ride-along we responded to a call where a guy fell at a skate park. When we got there he was conscious, walking, and talking coherently. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet when he fell and a bruise was forming above his eye. With no scrapes and his pupils dilating, we assumed it was a concussion and black eye.
We talked him into coming with us to the ER just to double-check. We get him in the ambulance, lay him down, and his blood pressure had gone down significantly since our first check. Then it took a very dark turn. It escalated quickly to him getting drowsy and throwing up blood. We turned on the sirens and started fluids, but his blood pressure kept dropping.
He was unconscious by the time we got to the ER. Skipping the bruise meant we hadn’t felt the soft skin filling with blood and the crushed bone around his eye and cheek. He ended up having emergency brain surgery. Coincidentally, they also found and removed a tumor while operating. He recovered to skate another day, and hopefully will remember his helmet.
26. It’s Just Like Popping A Zit
I was the patient in a surgery that went horribly wrong...and I was awake for the whole thing. I was supposed to have a bump on my back removed and it was supposed to be standard procedure. For insurance reasons, they did it as an ambulatory in the OR of a hospital instead of at the surgeon's actual office. That should have been the first red flag.
I was wide awake, face down in the OR. I had picked this guy as my surgeon because his main practice was plastic surgery. At the time, I lifted weights a lot and spent a lot of time working on my back. I wanted the smallest possible scar because I was so vain. But then the surgeon began with his first incision…then a second, larger incision…then an even deeper third.
That’s when the surgeon realized that the "bump" on my back was actually the extruding tip of a cyst. It had cut through my back straight to the back of my lungs. This surgeon wasn't accustomed to operating on alert patients. As soon as he realized what was going on, he just said, “Oh God!” That was the beginning of a four-hour surgery. I was awake the whole time.
What they cut out of me was the size of an adult fist. In closing the wound, they drew in so much flesh that my right arm essentially became inflexible. I couldn't lift weights for years. All that precious work shot down the drain.
27. No Laughing Matter
One night I had a young guy; a walk-in who thought it was hilarious he had a stab wound. He arrived at 3:00 am and had been waiting hours before deciding to get help. He also brought in his family and friends who also didn’t think it was a serious injury. During his evaluation, it registered as a level one and his blood pressure was low.
His heart rate was soaring as his body tried to compensate for the loss of blood. As soon as we brought him into a room, he coded and never woke up. We tried to revive him with a manual cardiac massage, which meant cracking his chest and manually pumping the heart. The knife had nicked his abdominal aorta, which ruptured. But that wasn't the most chilling part.
When we went back to the waiting room, his friends and family were having a pizza party, not recognizing the fatal status of their loved one.
28. “Oh, my Gauze!”
I'm currently in med school. This happened a few years ago when I was attending surgery classes. Thank goodness I hadn’t been the surgeon in this case because I might have dropped out from the embarrassment. One patient was up for a laparotomy and an investigation of an abdominal mass. We all thought that it was probably cancer.
Imaging tests were really not specific as the mass was presenting atypical features. Even the specialists couldn't figure it out. To everyone's surprise, the patient's "cancer" turned out to be something totally different. The moment of realization came as the surgeon just stopped and said, "Gauze!" The nurse promptly gave him a roll of gauze and the surgeon said, "No. There was gauze inside of him!"
Turns out, the atypical presentation was just some forgotten gauze from some previous surgery.
29. Fancy Seeing You Here
My patient came in with a badly infected foot abscess. Like, the entire foot was showing signs of cellulitis and we had to put her on antibiotics for a few days of inpatient care. She was paying out of pocket and kept trying to leave, but we insisted she finish the treatment. When the infection was mostly cleared she was discharged.
She had strict instructions to change the bandages, monitor the wound, keep it clean, and also had a list of prescriptions. We also scheduled appointments at a wound clinic to monitor the abscess. She did none of those things. She never even picked up the antibiotics from the pharmacy. She skipped her wound clinic appointments and was unreachable.
We later found out this was because she went on vacation. Several days after getting home, she decided to go on a two-week-long camping and river rafting trip with some friends. Her camping trip was cut short after the first week because she developed septicemia and her friends drove her to a local hospital to get airlifted back to our hospital.
30. Your Biceps Look Huge
My dad had a torn bicep and had surgery to reattach it. It didn't heal right and it remained swollen long after it should have healed. He kept having unexplained fevers and went in for IV antibiotic therapy for weeks. Finally, some other doctor got the idea that my father’s problems had something to do with his surgery...though, he probably didn’t need a medical degree to figure that out.
Anyway, they reopened my dad’s arm, and lo and behold, they found the problem. It was absolutely shocking. There was a medical "sponge" left inside his arm from the first surgery. It had been in there for so long that it had lots of necrotic tissue surrounding it. The original surgeons were idiots.
31. The Girl On The Grill
The year I was a medical intern I had a 34-year-old woman for a patient. She was manning a grill for two days during a weekend festival for her church. During the festival, her eyes got irritated from the smoke off the grill so she asked a friend for eye drops. After using them for two days, she developed a rash. The rash rapidly progressed to cover her whole body.
It then developed into Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis Syndrome, which essentially means the most superficial layer of the skin separates from the deeper layers. This leaves a wound that is similar to the raw spot underneath a big blister. In her case, it involved three-quarters of her body. Her body was also fighting off infection in her mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestines.
We had silver-impregnated dressings that we had to wrap her in like a mummy and change every day. Despite everything we could do at the main burn unit in a huge metro hospital, her body couldn’t continue to fight. Her friend was racked with guilt. All over some eye drops.
32. Knocked My Lights Out
When I was a medical student, I had the opportunity to scrub in on a big vascular surgery procedure. One of the lights was a bit tricky to adjust. The surgeon inadvertently gave it a yank, but he was maybe a bit too enthusiastic about it. The light hit the scrub nurse on the head, knocking her unconscious and into the huge table of open instruments.
33. Till Burns Tear Us Apart
I had a husband and wife brought in at the same time, both with major flame burns. He was about half his body surface area, and she was 75% or more. The woman was intubated at the original emergency room they went to. She was waking up a bit when she got to our unit and kept trying to mouth something around her breathing tube.
In hindsight, I'm pretty sure it was "my baby," as she miscarried about 36 hours after she was admitted. She developed an arrhythmia while we were starting a new IV and we couldn't control it. Then we found out what really happened. We found out the husband lit her on fire when he discovered he wasn’t the baby’s father. He survived and after medical treatment moved to a penitentiary.
34. It’s Getting A Little Hard To Breathe
I’m a nurse. In this medical nightmare, the doctor was an anesthetist. The patient had her surgery (I can't remember for what) and it all went well. She was awake and in recovery, but we still needed to give her medication through her IV line. As is standard practice, we flushed the line with ten milliliters of saline. Just as soon as we did that, the patient had a reaction that made our hearts stop beating. Almost immediately, she stopped breathing and we had no idea why.
We called the code and the anesthetist came running. He actually said, “Oh God!” when he realized what had happened. During the surgery, the anesthetist had given the patient rocuronium through that same IV line and he hadn't cleared the line afterward. So, when we flushed the line, the patient got a dose of rocuronium that had been sitting in the line.
In case you’re wondering, rocuronium is a muscle relaxant. It’s used to inhibit the respiratory muscles to allow for intubation and ventilation while under general anesthetic. In layman’s terms, it paralyzes the breathing muscles so you can't take a breath no matter how hard you try. But that's not even the scariest part. You'd think it puts you to sleep, but it does quite the opposite.
This patient was wide awake but totally unable to breathe throughout the whole ordeal. Luckily, the anesthetist worked out quickly what had happened and easily reversed it. The patient was physically fine but understandably traumatized.
35. Where’s The Horsehoe?
When I was a medical student on my surgery rotation, I was working a shift with the trauma team. I'm observing a simple repair surgery when my trauma pager goes off. I run into the trauma bay and a young gentleman is brought in on a stretcher with the lower half of his body covered in blood, but he's awake and coherent.
He's screaming and had been shot 15 times, all below the belt, and one shot had gone straight through his scrotum. We're doing an evaluation when a code is called in the next pod over. Turns out it’s the patient who was brought in with our current patient. Several of us run from patient one and into the next pod to see a woman lying on a stretcher receiving CPR.
We roll the patient on her side to get her clothes off and notice she's bleeding out of her back. There is a tiny exit wound and we piece together it’s a ricochet from our previous patient. We take her to the trauma bay to perform the primary surgery. She's not breathing and has no pulse. We intubate and find the entry point in the center of her chest.
Ultrasound confirms a hemothorax and we get a chest tube in place. Instantly there are two liters of blood gushing onto the floor. The resident I'm with immediately takes a scalpel and makes an incision, then they clip the sternum in half. This woman’s chest is now completely open and we can see the heart, and the clean entry and exit wound.
All of the blood and fluids we were pushing was just draining right out of her heart and into her chest. We’re running her to an OR, when I notice she’s bleeding from every single opening in her body. Her body had used all its clotting agents. The blood still flows but she can’t go for surgery under this duress. We transfer her to intensive care and monitor her for three weeks.
She can't talk or move, and the family is having conversations about life support. I find out she was discharged as a quadriplegic and the future is bleak. The real twist happens six months later. I was working a shift in intensive care and bring up this patient to my attending. They remember the night and working on the body and proceed to tell me that a month ago at a follow-up visit, this patient walked in. After the traumatic experience, all she has is a scar from her thoracotomy.
36. When Nature Calls
This happened to me when I was in training to be a cardiologist. This disaster occurred during just my second or third heart procedure. Everything was going well until, all of a sudden, my senior doctor ran out of the room. He just ripped off his surgical gown and yelled "Oh, no!" and left. This surgeon had just abandoned me, a student, to complete his surgery. Little did I know I was in for the worst panic of my life.
I had just positioned these catheters with wires into the sleeping patient's heart. They were just hanging out, pulsating to his heartbeat. I had never made it to this point in the procedure before and I started wondering where to take it from there. I hadn’t even learned how to take the catheters out safely. I was looking at the vitals and monitors like, “Oh no, what do I do now?”
They paged my senior cardiology fellow in training but he was taking a nap and not returning any of my pages or calls. There were no other doctors around. Finally, thank God, my tech assistant who had done these procedures before gave me a nudge to flush the catheters out in order to prevent blood clots.
After a few minutes, I had properly removed the catheters and wires. Apparently, the doctor had gotten food poisoning and had to make a run for the bathroom.
37. Going Great Lengths To Stay Hip
Our elderly patient went into cardiac arrest but was revived. We did all the possible tests but couldn’t find the reason. Just as she was getting better, her heart attack came back for a sequel. We did CPR and were able to get her pulse back, and closely monitored her that night. Things were not looking good so we called her husband.
We asked him to come in as we were worried she would not survive the day. Her husband told us he would be there within the hour. Well, three hours passed and he didn’t show up. We tried calling and couldn’t reach him. Eventually, a nurse found out that he was downstairs in our ER! Apparently, when he left his house in a hurry, he fell and broke his hip.
38. Better Call A Lawyer
This one is funny and no one was hurt—at least, not physically. One of my junior residents was helping me with a case when I was a chief resident in general surgery. We got a phone call from him in the operating room in the middle of a procedure. The nurse said, "Dr. Jones, it's your wife. She asked me to ask you what today's date is." He replied, "Um, the 5th. What the heck?" The nurse spoke in a hushed tone on the phone for a minute and then came back with, "She wants to know what yesterday’s date was." The, “Oh no!” look on his face was priceless.
His wife was a real pain. She hadn’t bothered to remind him or even yell at him for forgetting her birthday on the day itself. She had waited until the next day when she could be absolutely sure he had missed it. In case you were wondering; she was a lawyer.
39. A Medical Mystery
A patient mystery I never understood was a healthy 23-year-old male. He came into the ER with chest pain that started after eating something spicy. We check his vitals, do an X-ray, and are about to discharge him when he collapses lifeless. We start CPR and get a pulse. He was stable for a CT scan but doesn’t survive the procedure.
The team was baffled. During the autopsy, it was revealed his major blood vessels basically just imploded. This sometimes, though rarely, happens to men in their 70s with a long smoking history and high blood pressure, but this patient had zero risk factors and was a non-smoker. This was a few years ago but the case still bothers me.
40. You’ve Got Some Marbles on You
I’m a nurse. Thankfully, I was able to prevent this one surgery from going horribly wrong. I was assisting with a simple vasectomy and I noticed that the doctor was having a little trouble. It looked like he couldn’t differentiate between the vas deferens and the testicular artery. He started going in for the artery but I stopped him just before he cut it. If he had cut that, the testicle would have been a write-off and there would have been a very bloody mess.
But hey, testicular artery, seminal tube, vas the deferens?
41. Fix One Problem, Find Another
My sister was having stomach surgery and the surgeon mentioned that her uterus looked strange. The surgeon thought there might be an ovarian cyst and recommended getting checked. After she recovers from the stomach surgery, she checks out the uterus, and she finds out she has uterine leiomyosarcoma. In other words, her entire uterus was just one big tumor.
The tumor also impacted her ovaries and her fallopian tubes. She had another surgery where they got it all out and then she went through chemo for five months. After six months of clean scans, she goes to get a mammogram and finds breast cancer. She chose to have a mastectomy last week and she starts radiation soon. It’s the worst treasure hunt ever.
42. Arm, Meet Hammer
I broke my wrist once. I had to undergo surgery to have the broken bone adjusted so it would grow to be a nice and functioning bone again. It appeared to be an easy and uncomplicated procedure, but then two hours later, I woke up with a cast around my arm, which they never told me I would need after the surgery. The doctor assured me everything went fine, but a couple of weeks later, I returned to him to have the cast removed...
As soon as he took it off, my blood ran cold. The surgeon had a confused look on his face and I could see him with that “Oh God” look. He told me perhaps the surgery didn't go exactly as planned. He hadn’t placed the two parts of the bone in a straight-line during surgery, so after a couple of weeks in a cast, my arm had healed in a funny and crooked way.
In the end, he had to rebreak my arm and put it in a bit more of a straight position. A few weeks and a wicked-looking scar later, everything was okay again!
43. A Clot Unlike Any Other
My father went to the hospital with chest pains, and they decided to do an angiogram. The process injects dye into his valves to look for clots. During his procedure, the surgeon asks if he suffers from blackouts, and a few more doctors get called in to have a look. My dad is the strong silent type but admits to minimal daily pain.
They take him to another type of X-ray machine and again are looking in bemusement without explaining anything. Turns out there was a blood clot the size of a golf ball floating free in his heart. It normally should have killed someone quickly and the doctors were all intrigued. He had a triple bypass 30 years ago and is still the strong and silent type.
44. Can We Rain Check This One, Please?
My husband broke his back at work. Because we had to go through the insurance company, they made him go through everything but surgery first. Six grueling months later, and they finally approved him for surgery. He was in severe pain for months leading up to this, so we were really looking forward to this procedure.
On the day of the surgery, they wheeled him in and I sat in the waiting area with about a bunch of strangers also waiting for their loved ones. I knew it would be about five hours, so I was just settling in when I got the fright of my life. Approximately forty minutes into the surgery, a nurse and the surgeon poked their heads into the waiting room.
The surgeon looked directly at me and says, "Um, we have a problem. Can you step out here please?" My knees buckled. I felt the air leave the room as all the others gasped. I somehow found my feet and floated out to the hallway. The surgeon said, "Your hubby is fine, but right before I made my incision, I double-checked the cage (the equipment they put in to stabilize the spine) and it's the wrong size. We have to wake him up and reschedule.” Biggest sigh of relief ever.
The surgery ended up happening two days later but my poor guy suffered a lot. Looking back, I'm really glad that the surgeon double-checked before cutting into him. The hospital was extremely accommodating to us afterward—to a fault. They were very nervous about a lawsuit. We just forgave them and moved on. Mistakes happen.
45. A Mumbling Clue
When I was a fourth-year resident, my first rotation in the hospital was in radiology. I was waiting with a patient after an ultrasound and they told me they were thirsty. They take a sip of water but then start mumbling. It was incoherent to us but his daughter said he had spoken like that before. She said something felt off. She was all too right.
One second he was fine, and moments later he’s just quietly staring off into space and I start to wonder what’s going on. We check him and one of my seniors calls our resident and immediately starts CPR. He was wheeled down to the ER but we lost him later that day. Since then I’ve had many patients but this memory still makes me feel weird.
46. Let’s Take The Tube
Some years ago, my wife went in for surgery and we asked to have her tubes tied at the same time. After the surgery, the doctor came out to talk with me. He told me that the surgery went very well and that my wife would be coming out of the anesthesia soon. When I asked about the tubes, his eyes got really wide. Something was definitely wrong. He said, "I'll be back in a few minutes," and practically ran back to the OR.
They had to put her back under and re-open the sutures. I'm glad I asked about that, or we might have had a much bigger surprise than that.
47. A Tickle In The Throat
In my first year as a nurse working in oncology, we had this cute old man who had esophageal cancer. He had a golf ball-sized mass in his throat, and he had gone through radiation treatment but his doctor decided he needed a tracheotomy. Just in case you don't know, this procedure cuts a hole near your Adam's apple to form an airway.
His procedure never healed properly and the patient was constantly in pain at the surgical site with excessive ooze and liquid, I’m talking cups every hour or two. This wasn’t normal but it wasn’t impacting his airway, which was the most important thing. We continued to monitor the patient carefully through his radiation treatment.
We would suction out the liquid every night but one night, the suction started pumping out blood. I’m trying to stay calm and thought he’d gotten scraped when they changed the inner cannula of the trach recently, but then it got worse and worse. All of a sudden, he coughs, and his bleeding trach turns into a literal faucet of blood.
My suctioning can’t keep up with the blood flow and it starts to flow into his throat, and is choking him. I’m yelling for help as blood is pouring down his chest and all over my arms. Eventually, with CPR he was unresponsive and we couldn’t get a pulse. In the end, we presume the trach had been irritating the wall of his throat, and the radiation was making it worse.
48. That’s Nuts
I was a student assisting in the operating room when we came across a shocking discovery. A 65-year-old guy with kidney problems (possibly cancerous) needed to have a chunk of his kidney removed. It sounded like no big deal. We gave him his meds, knocked him out, then prepared to operate. But when we removed his gown, everyone in the room froze.
One of the surgeons actually exclaimed, “Balls!" That was relatively accurate. Apparently, our guy had some muscular disease that caused a massive abdominal hernia, and his intestines were herniating into his scrotum. It was honestly about the size of a deflated basketball.
49. Twice The Fun
My mom is 4’11”, so when she was pregnant with twins, she was almost wider than she was tall. They had her on bed rest in the hospital because they knew we’d be early. She had gestational diabetes and hadn’t had sugar in months. My loving, caring father was by her side the whole time and had also cut out sugar to support her.
On this specific day, however, he was sneaking a chocolate shake, and my poor mom became really emotional and asked for one sip. Immediately as she took the sip, her water broke. Of course, it was unrelated to the chocolate shake, but my mom was beside herself, thinking she messed up and caused early labor by drinking a chocolate shake. Oh, and there was one more thing.
After a successful delivery, my mom had intense pain. She couldn’t even blink her eyelids, her body was on fire. They rushed her to surgery and had to remove her whole gallbladder, which according to her was worse than childbirth. The constant optimist, my mom was just happy to stay in the hospital longer while we were in natal intensive.
50. Ready, Aim, Fire!
There was this time we had to amputate a lady's leg. The whole thing was gangrenous—it was disgusting. I was with the nurses cleaning the patient for surgery when the surgeon came in to check on us. One of the nurses pressed too hard on a dressing and popped a blister, shooting pss across the room. The gross pus hit two people. Everyone screamed, then dry heaved at the smell. It was horrendous.
51. Balance Out The Breath
I’m a patient, and I'm just remembering a wild diagnosis. I was 19 years old and started experiencing shortness of breath. It would happen if I exerted myself, like running to the bus or climbing stairs. I decided I was out of shape and made plans to start going to the gym more. That night, however, I got dizzy walking to the kitchen, and I knew it was time for help.
My parents were out of town so I asked my neighbor to drive me. I figured it would be a quick visit and felt a little embarrassed going in the first place. Turns out I had two clots in my lungs, a side effect of my birth control. Full treatment was four days in the hospital, heavy blood thinners, and a wheelchair for a few weeks. Thank God I checked.
52. You’ve Gone Too Far This Time
I snapped my wrist once. It turned it into this mangled, nightmarish thing with a hump that was an inch or two high. It was horrific...I had to go to the ER. This was still when I was a teen, so it was my first experience with painkillers. I loved it. Anyway, they had to set the bone first, which involved putting one of my fingers in some kind of finger noose so that my arm would hang down straight.
With both of my parents there, I watched as the guy put his hands on either side of my wrist—which, to my utmost surprise, didn't hurt at all—and then push. It made this awful sort of internal grinding crunch that I only sort of dimly remember. I definitely remember what happened next, though. The guy said, "Whoops, too far," and then just shoved it again in the other direction.
I was entirely unperturbed thanks to the morphine but I later found out that my mom had to run out and vomit. Good times.
53. All In Your Head
In 2014, my sister got rear-ended and suffered from whiplash. She began to get awful headaches, and she'd go to the doctor but they couldn’t find the cause or solution. Over the next year, the headaches got worse, and she started to have problems with her body functions. Sadly, everyone she talked to said it was just in her head and was dismissive.
At the time, she worked for UPS and got hit in the head with a box that was dropped from above, which only made things worse. She then developed problems swallowing, breathing, and began having seizures. In September of 2015, she came to my house after school one day and laid down on my couch, and then didn't get up for months except for the toilet.
One day, she managed to finally convince someone to give her a cervical MRI. At that point, the doctor called me in a panic to come in, but I wasn't able to go with her. She called me in tears later because they had finally found the cause. It turns out the whiplash had made a previously unknown Chiari Malformation symptomatic, and her brain stem had fallen out.
Yes, really. It was compressed against her spinal cord and shoved into her first cervical vertebra. The back of her brain was just hanging out of her skull. She had decompression surgery but suffered irreversible damage due to the length of time she was untreated. Turns out, it wasn't all in her head and her primary care doctor had never even heard of Chiari Malformation.
54. Don’t Lose Your Head
I’m a med school student. I knew another student who was two years older than me. He had a very unfortunate moment during his first-ever surgery. In the middle of the operation, he dropped a brain tumor on the floor. The lead surgeon laughed at him…and then told him to leave his operation room. The poor guy was devastated and never saw that surgeon again.
Thankfully, he still got a good evaluation for that rotation. I mean, he hadn’t dropped the patient’s actual brain after all.
55. A Puddle Problem
I was working in the ICU one night, and it was fairly quiet. I had this older gentleman, in his 60s, admitted with hepatitis. He started complaining of pain in his stomach and chest so I gave him some morphine as he was prescribed. A short time later, I asked him how the pain was. He looked visibly uncomfortable and stated it wasn't any better.
He started moaning and pleading for help. I called the resident and got a further order for morphine. A short while later, he's calling me over and is now pale and restless, stating the pain was worse and begging me for help. I'll never forget his moaning and pleading. My nursing intuition knew something wasn't right. I turned around and walked to the phone.
I called the resident again when suddenly I become aware of a dark shadow growing and spreading under the patient’s bed. There was no mistaking this dark red puddle growing rapidly. I Interrupted the resident and said "you need to get here right now" and hung up. I ran back over to the bed and confirmed that the puddle was his blood.
Before I had the chance to say or do anything, the patient suddenly threw his head back and passed out. He went very pale and then blood spurted out of his mouth. In fact, it seemed like blood was coming out of every orifice. It was spurting, like a waterfall. I'd never seen so much blood. By the time the resident came running in the door, the patient was gone.
56. A Generous Blood Donation
I was working in the ER one night when this huge dude, maybe 300 to 350 pounds, came in from a car accident with the paramedics giving him CPR. We quickly decided that he would have to go to the OR as he eventually flatlined. I was new and my knowledge was pretty limited at the time, but I knew they were going to have to massage the guy's heart.
I was pretty relieved since we had all been taking turns pumping this big man's blood for him. Shortly after he left, I was talking to some of the medics and doctors and they said that it would be a great experience for me to watch the procedure in the OR. So, I scrubbed up really quick and went in to watch in the back.
When I got to the OR, they were just about to start cutting the guy open. I watched in excitement as they began cutting through everything. Then, suddenly, everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Blood started bursting out of this guy like a pot boiling over. There was more blood than I had ever seen (and hopefully will ever see again). I don't remember anyone saying, "Oh my God," but I remember everyone getting really quiet.
The operating team stepped back as the blood flowed out of him, onto the table, and then falling on the floor. The pool of blood crept across the floor until it got a couple of feet away from me. Most of the operating team were standing in a lake of blood by the time it stopped. The surgeons said that it looked like at least three liters of blood.
It was like something out of a horror scene and I think I was in shock because I felt so weird and out of place afterward.
Later on, I found out that upon a closer inspection of the X-rays, the poor (and very large) man's sternum had given way. The going theories were either that his sternum had broken when his chest hit the steering wheel during his accident or from the CPR performed by the paramedics. People don’t realize how dangerous CPR can be.
The bone had splintered and punctured into his major blood vessels so we had just been pumping blood into his pericardium (heart sac). That’s what exploded when the OR team cut him open. There was little we could do to save this man's life. After that episode, the sight of blood never bothered me anymore.
57. An Ax To Grind
My stepmother was a general practitioner but got to spend some time in the ER and EMT services during her studies. One night in the ER, a woman walks in...with an ax stuck in the middle of her head. Apparently, the ax had done no damage and the blade was simply embedded in her head. As it happened, her husband had taken a swing at her during an argument.
She never told me what the argument was about but she survived and made her way to the hospital. She had to drive herself with the ax's handle dangling in front of her face. It was impressive, to say the least. The good news: she divorced her husband!
58. No Room For Mistakes
My mother is a doctor. During her training, she was assisting as an anesthetist alongside a senior surgeon and a few other junior doctors. The senior surgeon was known for having a very short temper and the rest of the faculty tiptoed around him to avoid any unnecessary outbursts. Towards the end of the surgery, one of the junior doctors ended up making a minor mistake.
The junior doctor’s mistake was no big deal, but the senior doctor wasn’t having it. In one of his infamous rages, he attacked the junior doctor with a scalpel. The poor rookie had to keep on working on the surgery. Afterward, my mom had to patch the guy up.
59. A Rollercoaster Of Emotions
On my last day at my previous hospital, we had a patient with chest pain and low blood pressure. He'd had no symptoms prior to passing out at home. We get him hooked up on the monitor, get an electrocardiogram and an IV, and noticed his results looked funky, like he might have a heart condition. Nonetheless, his history is clear of it.
We go to the doctor, who says to run the test again in 10 minutes. The second test had different results so we run a third, which also produces different results. The cardiologist is now convinced that we had mixed up his chart with someone else's. He's sitting there with 6/10 chest pain and results that looked like they were all from different people.
Suddenly he passes out and we can’t find a pulse. We start CPR and revive him. When he wakes up he’s yelling and angry at everyone around. We're getting him prepped for a CT scan but his blood pressure is unstable. On the monitor, we see an abnormal heart rhythm, but he’s laying back and talking to us. Then we can't find a pulse.
The monitor now shows he’s in cardiac arrest but he’s still awake and answering questions coherently, even though we still couldn’t find a pulse. When he loses consciousness, we do CPR and shock him back. We decide to move ahead with the CT scan. He passes out in the machine and we are again giving him CPR. Each time we repeat this and shock him back.
We go through this a total of 19 times. I’ve still never seen someone get shocked that much since. We couldn't tell when we needed to start CPR if he wasn't talking to us, so I had to stay bedside. We eventually found out his aorta was riddled with clots. He got up to ICU and was a total nightmare of a patient. Hostile and grumpy the entire time, but somehow managed to survive and get discharged.
Everyone involved with that guy celebrated after work the day he left. The whole experience was tough and a rollercoaster for everyone that met him, since we never knew what to expect.
60. Return To Sender
My mom had to have surgery. Because the hospital didn't have what they needed to do the procedure, they had to have an essential fluid for the surgery shipped to them. On the day of, my mom was ready to go. The operating team prepped the room and the surgeon took the day off from his practice to perform the surgery. Everything looked great, so they proceeded to put my mom under.
But when the fluid arrived, a nurse said, "We never ordered that." She then sent the guy away with the fluid. This all happened after my mom was under anesthesia. She said that when she started to wake up, she could see the surgeon losing his mind on those nurses. They were all crying from how bad he flipped out on them.
61. Resident Roulette
When I was in residency, we had a patient that came in for a quick visit to test their leg circulation. We run the test and there’s trouble getting a reading in his left ankle. We try again, and still no reading. We’re all checking the equipment, and one resident takes off his sock. We were shocked at what we saw. The sole of his foot was totally black.
One of the other residents squeezes his foot and their thumb sinks into the flesh. When they pull their thumb out, a cup full of grey liquid flesh starts leaking out. I think I’m going to be sick and one resident almost passes out. Thankfully, a nurse rushes over and tells us to get him to vascular. The simple test discovered necrotizing fasciitis and turned into a below-the-knee amputation that night.
62. Don’t Screw It Up
I was performing foot surgery once. It was just me and the attending nurse. Everything was as expected until we started trying to put a screw in the bone. We kept twisting the screw over and over again as hard as we could, but it wasn’t biting. Eventually, we tried a smaller screw—still no success. Then we tried a longer screw—still nothing. Then…crunch! We had just made a horrible mistake.
A few bone chips and K-wires later, and we had it fixed. But oh man, let me tell you, I was sweating for that small period of time.
63. May The Floss Be With You
I’m a dentist, and had a young patient who came in for an evaluation with complaints of tooth pain on an upper molar. We take an X-ray, and the molar has a large cavity that has reached the pulp tissue of the tooth. This is where the nerve sits, and the infection has created an abscess. The patient’s options were a root canal or pulling out the tooth.
The patient didn't show too much interest in either option and left the office with an antibiotic prescription. Flash forward to six months later, and I see the front desk has an emergency patient in my schedule. The description says the patient is in severe pain and can’t talk at all. I figure it’s another dental abscess patient with a rotten tooth.
I come into the room and realize it’s the same patient that I saw six months ago, but this time he is with his partner. The patient clearly can’t communicate, so his partner is telling me about the severe pain, plus trouble talking, eating, and breathing for the last three days. We can’t take an X-ray because he can’t open his mouth, but we try a panoramic X-ray.
Well, the same tooth from six months ago with the infection has escalated. I take a look inside and see that the floor of his mouth is raised significantly, and it's also as hard as a rock. I turn to his partner and say they need to go to the hospital ASAP. I phone an oral surgeon colleague and explain to him what I see.
The patient goes to the oral surgeon’s office before the hospital, and the surgeon calls me after the examination. It was worse than he anticipated and the patient was on the way to the hospital pronto. The patient needed to be in the hospital for five days before the successful surgery. Don’t underestimate a simple toothache.
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64. Oh, Baby, Baby
I went in for a scheduled C-section at 37 weeks to deliver my first child. It also happened to be my first surgery ever (unless you count wisdom teeth). They decided to do the C-section because my kid had an in-utero growth spurt and at 37 weeks, he was already eleven pounds. They feared that if I went to 40 weeks my kid would be 15 pounds or more.
We checked in and everything went well. They got me prepped and wheeled me into the surgery bay. Then the anesthesiologist came in to give me the spinal block so that they could actually cut me open. They injected the stuff into my spine while I was sitting up, then laid me down in the bed. It all seemed to go okay, until the moment I was horizontal. That's when I felt something was really, really off.
Turns out, my blood pressure completely tanked. I started vomiting uncontrollably (thank God I hadn't eaten anything so it was just bile). My OBGYN had to start the surgery immediately while my anesthesiologist tried to clean up the bile. I vaguely remember they whisked my kid off to the NICU with my mom while the other support person stayed with me.
I honestly don’t remember most of what happened because I kept losing consciousness from my blood pressure being so low. My mom told me after the fact that they had brought a crash cart into my recovery room because the doctors were super worried that my heart was going to stop. After about four hours, my blood pressure finally stabilized and I was OK.
I ended up spending four or five days in the hospital to recover from the C-section. That just goes to show that sometimes even a routine surgery can take a harrowing turn.
65. With Friends Like These...
I’m a paramedic and a few years back, I worked for an ambulance service that included an area home to a summer nudist colony. We would be called every few days for minor falls or people with colds or flu. This call came in at 9:00 pm and said the patient at the nudist colony was fainting. We head over and are introduced to the patient.
He’s in his 80s and was visiting from Poland. He's sitting at a campfire, enjoying a few drinks with his equally naked friends. His wife said she called because he kept passing out after complaining of heartburn. He said he's fine and was just tired from the days’ festivities. All in all, pretty lighthearted scene, but he didn't want to go to the hospital.
I convince him to let us do an EKG before we leave and it shows that he’s having a heart attack. I run the test once more and then sit down next to him to deliver the news. The mood changes and the group is now begging him to go to the hospital. He concedes, hugs his friends, and gets in the ambulance. En route, we do our routine cardiac care.
A week later, we get called out to the nudist colony again and arrive to find we're treating the previous patient’s wife. She was now having heart problems which was luckily just a case of angina and wasn't very critical. Our patient from before is there, and said the doctor told him “the ticker is good, I just need to be careful getting excited around all of my friends."
66. Spine Tingling
My uncle tore a muscle in his lower back and had to go to the hospital. He had no idea that going to the hospital was going to make his situation so much worse. The doctor gave him an injection in the back to ease the pain while he waited for his surgery. Unfortunately, he can’t walk anymore—not because of the surgery, but because the needle hit his spinal cord.
67. First Day Jitters
This was my first day of surgery rotation while I was still in medical school. Our patient was a middle-aged woman. She was unconscious, pale, and possibly bleeding internally due to self-inflicted wounds in her abdomen. There were multiple cuts and we found out she did them after finding out about her husband’s infidelity.
We immediately went into surgery to locate the source of internal bleeding. After a few moments, we were able to stabilize her and checked every segment of her intestines for bleeding. There was one that missed a major artery by millimeters. As we were preparing to close up, my chief resident decided to take one more look. It all ended in horror.
While doing this, he accidentally caused a big artery to bleed. We had to call the chief surgeon, even though he was on vacation. He answered and was calm while telling us what to do via the phone. We were able to control the bleeding by a combination of aggressive cautery and some pressure plus suturing. The patient spoke to me a few days later as she recovered in the ICU bed.
68. Did You Feel That?
I had keyhole surgery done to drain a fluid build-up caused by a Grade-4 spleen laceration that had collapsed my left lung. My lung was collapsed for about a week, and when it expanded after that, it really hurt. They warned me about this but reassured me they would give me a hit of morphine beforehand and all would be sweet.
So, in came an intern who was supposed to perform the drainage as per her training. I was pretty cooked from my stay week in the hospital, so I didn’t notice that she forgot the morphine. None of the doctors noticed either. Anyway, the intern started to drain the fluid and it was happening really fast because of the super sucker machine. I took a big breath of air as the fluid drained out.
Lemme tell you, my spleen tearing in half hurt already hurt a lot. But my lung getting a little stretched? That was some excruciating, mind-warping pain. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, ever. Stupid intern.
69. Not The Face We Were Expecting
I worked in a rural area of our county and treated a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Unfortunately, this happens a lot, and we have to show up to “pronounce” them deceased for law enforcement. As a paramedic, we’ll also play mini therapist for anyone who was there because that’s something that’ll mess with you no matter who you are.
Prior to showing up, though, we always park a ways away, waiting for law enforcement to enter the scene. As we’re waiting we get an update that a female witness has passed out and become a second patient. Dispatch gets a second ambulance en route and luckily they weren’t far away. Finally, dispatch calls us and says we’re cleared to enter the scene.
Our dispatch team also says law enforcement is requesting lights and sirens, which is an odd request. Normally they just ask us to proceed, but we also have to manage public perception. We assume they know something we don’t and comply with the request. The second ambulance comes from a different direction and beats us by 30 seconds.
We park right behind them and hop out. My partner checks if the second ambulance needs anything while I go assess the second patient. I see a distraught younger female sitting in the grass and she’s screaming and crying uncontrollably. I then hear my radio go off “patient one in critical condition.” I glance at the front door and see them walking and sitting on the stretcher.
I get in the back of the second ambulance and set up the equipment they’re going to need. I set up an IV line, grab a bag with intubation equipment and a medication box that has pain and sedation stocked. We load the stretchers in backward and the first patient is sitting up moving around. I thought this was a good sign—how wrong I was.
The first patient had chosen the wrong angle and they basically had no face to speak of, but they were still breathing. What I remember most was just every time someone walked by our ambulance, they just stopped functioning and stared. It didn’t make any sense that he was alive. We performed a surgical cut for him to breathe, and he was flown to a trauma center.
70. Sue-sue-surgery
This happened after my chest surgery. I explained to the anesthetist that anesthetics make me vomit uncontrollably. He just ignored me and went ahead with the infusion. I was sick at least 30 times in the 12 hours after my surgery. The nurses drew the curtains and just left me to it.
The hospital discharged me even though my stats weren’t great. The doctors had previously stated that they wanted me to remain under observation, but I was already on my way out. I was not given any antibiotics despite having a nine-inch incision. I even asked the nurse if I was meant to have them and they told me I wasn’t. The nurse accused me of being difficult for asking.
She then told me I had to wait in the car park for my lift home, so I stood outside for 30 minutes. She wanted me to carry my overnight bag despite telling me not to lift anything heavy for at least three weeks. Within the week, I was readmitted to the hospital. Another nurse told me that the previous nurse should’ve given me antibiotics. I had to be on IV drips for a week and have the full incision reopened to clean out the wound, which had at least half a pint of infection in it.
A doctor came to ask me not to sue the hospital.
71. One Foot Forward
When I was a paramedic, we responded to a call from a man in his late 40s who lived with his invalid mother in the middle of the country. He wanted us to check his high blood sugar levels. When we ran the numbers, they were the highest my partner or I had ever seen. We advised him to go to the hospital immediately; he was morbidly obese and wasn't taking care of his type II diabetes.
He refused our attempts to admit him and drive him to the hospital. We can’t force him into the ambulance and had no choice but to leave him. As soon as we could, we advised our medical control of the incident. The second phone call came two weeks later. With this gap in treatment, his feet now have gangrene and we can see the exposed bones of his toes.
I mean all 10 of his toes have had the soft tissue eaten away and are down to the bone. This time he wasn't the least bit hesitant, but I still can't believe he waited for it to get as bad as it did.
72. Did I Knick An Artery?
I wasn't the surgeon involved in this case, but anyway—a patient came in with a bump on his leg. After imaging it, it looked like it was an abscess collection that needed drainage. We admitted the patient to the OR for what should have been a routine procedure. The operating surgeon dissected the subcutaneous tissue, but then everything went haywire.
All of a sudden, blood was squirting everywhere. Turns out, the abscess was really a femoral artery aneurysm. Overhead Stat had to call for the vascular surgeon to bail him out.
73. Savior Sibling
When I was a resident, we cared for a toddler admitted to the ward with a newly diagnosed tumor. Her mom had just delivered her baby sister at the adult hospital across the street three days ago. Due to nursing, baby sister is allowed to stay in big sister’s hospital room. The nurses call in the middle of the night because baby sister “doesn’t look right.”
When we arrive she is blue, poorly responsive, and breathing hard. We take the newborn to the emergency room downstairs where she is promptly intubated, resuscitated, and diagnosed with a cyanotic heart lesion. Within an hour she’s undergoing successful open-heart surgery. She owes her sister for the save since they were already in the children’s hospital when she deteriorated.
74. It Was…Shocking
This story comes from my vet. He was in a super run-down barn with a pregnant mare in trouble. She'd been getting up, lying down, and getting up again, but nothing was happening. Apparently, horse births are difficult because the foal doesn't turn until minutes before the actual birth is supposed to happen. If they're in the wrong position, things could get deadly for the horse as there's nothing in there but rigid legs and sharp little hooves.
So, there he was at night, up to his elbow in this frightened mare. She wasn’t really into what was going on and didn’t want to stand for it. The vet wasn’t terribly fleet of foot in that position, so it was up to the owner to keep the horse calm. Now, keep in mind this barn was in horrible shape. Really, it was just a dilapidated health hazard.
Well, the mare decided she'd had enough and tried to walk through the owner. That's when everything took a turn for the worst. I'm guessing there was a stud chain involved (a metal chain that loops around the nose, jaw, over the gums, or however you want to attach it so that you have more "persuasive" power over the horse). The horse shoved the owner off-balance and, before they fell back, they managed to grab a live, uncovered wire.
Why there was a live wire in this old barn, I will never understand. But the result was that current flowed through the owner to the horse and into my vet. So now, the poor vet was elbow-deep in a terrified mare while all of them were getting electrocuted. He didn't explain to me how he got out of that, but the mare was okay and she delivered a live foal.
They named the filly Electra.
75. Rival Redemption
I was an intern in the trauma surgery rotation. In my first week, we have a known gang member brought in by private car. No one stayed with him and he crawled into the ambulance bay for help. There were multiple gunshot wounds to his chest and abdomen. He was bleeding from everywhere, and he needed immediate surgery.
We needed to locate entry wounds, deal with a collapsed lung, and keep him from bleeding out. In the midst of this controlled chaos, pandemonium breaks loose. We find out an armed man has entered the hospital. We go into lockdown and believe it’s a rival gang there to finish the job. They were asking about our patient aggressively.
We start erasing the trauma whiteboards that say the patient’s name and injuries and lock down the trauma bay. We cover his face with a drape and can’t go for scans because we are stuck. We are working blind to keep him stable and also unsure of what could come through the doors at any moment. My attending was so calm and set the tone like a champ. In the end, the patient lived, but left as soon as he could stand.
76. Super Soaker
Right as I was about to graduate from medical school, I had one of the most formative experiences that led to my surgical career. I was on-call late one night with a chief resident who was really a pleasure to work with. He let me take the lead on minor procedures and helped me work on the things that were actually interesting among the drudge work.
Well, this was not one of those enlightened moments, but it fits the question. This wonder chief—we’ll call him Wiggles—called me to the ED to assess a patient for possible surgery. “Amazing!” I thought, “He trusts me enough to let me work up this patient!” So, off I trotted in a fervor of anticipation to the room where my patient was.
Wiggles was standing there with this pie-eating grin on his face. He just said, “The orders are in, but you need to do the pre-op note and you'll be doing the procedure. Enjoy!” Then he just walked off laughing. “Interesting,” I thought to myself. But I wasn’t about to let Wiggles rain on my parade. I decided that I was going to have this moment to shine and all would be well.
But when I walked in, I quickly realized why Wiggles was laughing. What I saw haunts me to this day—It was a bum-pu
s case. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, a bum-pus case is when you have an abscess filled with the vilest, malodorous, repugnant filth to ever grace the medical profession. You have to open up the glory of this pocket of putrescence so that the cavity in which it dwells can fill in with nice, healthy, non-bum-pus. They most often occur in people who already have trouble fighting infections or have a lot of tissue where they can hide a pocket-o-poo.
My guy was a stinky, sugary, smoke-stack of a whale. He also had what was a massive amount of pus hanging out just under the skin of his VW-Beetle-sized butt. Thankfully, it was an easy workup and he was actually a nice guy with a great sense of humor. Wiggles had told him that a stupid med student would be doing the honor of treating him. As I was getting him ready for the procedure, he said, "I just want to warn you. I'm a squirter.” That stopped me in my tracks.
“Haha, don't worry buddy. You'll figure it out," he said. Writing this story now, it's obvious what he meant, but I was naive and still psyched about doing my own procedure that I just forgot about it and went to the OR to get everything ready. As we got the guy positioned on the table, it occurred to me how truly large this guy was.
He had to be around 450 pounds and he had rolls of fat dripping down his legs. We had to put his legs in stirrups so that we could get to his bum crack and do the procedure. I positioned myself front and center, staring deeply into this guy’s brown eye while the chief resident and attending physician held—with both hands—rolls of fat aside so that I could get to the area in need of debridement.
I numbed his skin, called for the knife, and then stopped. In that second, I realized what he had meant about being a squirter. There was no other reasonable explanation and I can't imagine why I hadn’t realized it sooner. But being the only one scrubbed and prepped for the procedure, I had no choice but to proceed. The attending, perhaps sensing my hesitation, looked down at me with a smile that was visible through his surgical mask. “Son,” he said, “We've all been there. Well probably not there, but it doesn't matter. You're going to do this."
I leaned forward and placed the blade into the pus pocket. The big beluga of a patient gave a great heaving snore and then a cough. He shifted what must have been half an inch down right as I pierced the skin. The increased intra-abdominal pressure combined with this guy’s massive thighs acted like a finger over the end of a hose. Then, the worst thing to ever happen in my career happened. A straight shower of feculent horror blasted forth, covering my surgical gown, cap, shoes, and glasses.
I was speechless. My brain couldn’t simultaneously process the horror, hilarity, and smell of what just happened. The other attendants in the room, however, had no trouble as they'd been expecting that from the start. I handed back the scalpel to the scrub nurse, the only one to keep her composure, while the attending, chief resident, circulating nurse, nurse assistant, and the three other med students who had been watching from the door all completely lost it. I must have looked like a medical Jackson Pollock.
I truly wish that I had had a witty response prepared. Or that I’d been cool enough to just keep going as if nothing had happened. I couldn't see through my pus-caked goggles and I must have smelled worse than a pigsty. I let out a meager, “Uh, can I go change?” The attending, laughing way too hard to make any sense, simply nodded and pointed out of the OR.
I took off the gown and all the pus-covered materials and went to take the longest, hottest shower possible. I put the scrubs in the laundry and promptly told the maintenance crew that they should burn those clothes…immediately. The guys laughed until they saw the damage, then the laughter turned to faces of horror. It was their problem now.
As I understand it, the rest of the procedure was uneventful. When I went back into the call room, the rest of the med students gave me a standing ovation. By that time, the hilarity of what had happened had surpassed any embarrassment that I had felt. The patient had had the procedure before and had, apparently, oozed quite a bit.
It was my worst moment in surgery. Though it was gross, I wasn't really that disturbed on a deep level. After that, I feel like there is very little that would shake me at the core in terms of bodily fluids. After all, I was baptized in the absolute worst of it.
77. Investigative First Response
I’m a paramedic, and we were responding to a road accident. The police had detained the driver, and we were checking the passenger in the back of their sedan. We couldn’t see visible damage to the car; it was a fender bender at most. Our passenger, however, was disoriented and resistant to everything. All we could see was a tiny cut on the back of his head.
We struggled to get him out of the car, to check his vitals, and to use a stretcher. Every time he just closed his eyes and pushed us away. We tried asking him what happened to his head and he refused to answer. His behaviors didn’t make sense with the minimal car damage, but we knew we had to get him to the hospital. Later in my shift, I checked in with the team and got shocking news.
Turns out our patient actually had a basilar skull fracture and bilateral subdural hematomas, and we had absolutely no idea how it happened. It taught me to assume there’s a medical or traumatic cause to any of my patient’s conditions, and not to overlook anything. In our roles, we can often miss the big picture, and that can cost lives.
78. Did I Set My Alarm?
This isn’t as gruesome as some of the others but I definitely gave the surgeons a real fright. I had several herniated discs, a pinched nerve, and spinal spondylosis. I went in for a major epidural. Most people get one or two, but I was getting six—it was a bad situation. Basically, what was supposed to happen was that they were going to put me under, fit a needle in-between my discs, and give me a shot.
Well, I woke up on the table. It might have been due to the fact that I had already been taking some heavy doses of narcotics or maybe the anesthetist just gave me the wrong dose. I was kind of hazy, but I was definitely aware. I could feel a slight burning and fuzzy feeling in my back. It felt kind of like butterflies.
I could see a screen that kind of looked like an X-ray reading—was I looking at my own spine? I found out later that the surgeon watches the screen to guide the needle so that they don’t run into anything important. I started coming to my senses and just as I was about to raise my head, I heard one of the nurses shouting something.
One of the nurses kept shouting, "He's awake! He’s awake!" It didn’t sound like she panicking, but she definitely sounded alarmed. I wanted to tell her to relax—maybe take some anesthesia because I felt great—but by then, someone else had stuck me with another IV and I fell back to sleep. All in all, it was a win. When I woke up, I threw a fit about it and they gave me the rock star treatment.
79. A Smell That Lingers
Our patient had severe abdominal pain and we performed an exploratory laparotomy since she couldn’t sit still for a CT scan. Based on an X-ray and the rock-hard feeling of her body, we knew there was fluid building but felt blind to what was going on. When we opened the abdomen of this woman, the entire room instantly smelled like hot garbage.
The smell enveloped the room instantly, and I ran to grab the peppermint oil to rub on our masks. We saw that she was going into multiple organ failure with a ton of tissue simply turning rotten. Our lead surgeon announced this surgery was a mistake, and the patient didn't make it.
80. You Should Be Feeling Very Sleepy
This happened during a procedure that I was working on. I was placing an IVC filter (a small metal filter that sits in the inferior vena cava to prevent blood clots from traveling from the legs to the lungs) when I got the fright of my life. It was meant to be a simple procedure. Basically, we were supposed to tunnel into the femoral vein and travel up into the vena cava where we would leave the filter in place.
In order to confirm our location in the body, we had to use a radiolucent contrast and an X-ray to light up the vena cava since we were basically looking from outside of the body. The scrub tech handed us 100cc of contrast and we injected it straight into the vena cava. Then we waited for the X-ray to light up... only, nothing happened.
Not able to figure out why we couldn't see it, we asked the scrub tech for another 100cc of contrast and again injected it into the vena cava. Again, no luck. At a loss, we thought maybe that the contrast was bad, so we drew up some more and looked at the syringe under the X-ray before injecting it this time. That's when we realized our huge mistake.
Of course, the syringe did not light up under the X-ray. While we were trying to get some new contrast into the OR, the patient—who we had sedated and intubated—began to seize. We finally looked over at the scrub tech’s table and realized what she had done. Turns out, she had been drawing up 100cc (twice mind you) of lidocaine, a quick-acting anesthetic that you are not supposed to inject directly into the central circulation of the body.
I was working with a very senior vascular surgeon at the time and I've never seen her look the slightest bit phased by anything. But when she realized what we had given the patient (and how much, i.e., 200cc of lidocaine) she looked like she was about to faint. Luckily, the patient suffered no permanent harm due to this medical error.
81. Exhale For An X-ray
I am an ER nurse, and we had a patient come in with what he thought was bronchitis. He was trying to calm his family down and believed he would be fine in a couple of days. His chest X-ray showed pneumonia, but he refused to believe it was anything besides bronchitis. He left the ER and went home. When he left he said he wouldn’t tell his family because we had no proof. Unfortunately, he died a couple of weeks later.
82. Too Little, Too Late
I asked my grandfather, a surgeon of 30 years, what his worst experience was. He told me a story about opening a patient up to fix something serious with his aorta (it's been ten years since I heard the story so the details are a bit hazy). Anyway, he and the other surgeon opened the guy up for this dicey operation. What they found shocked them.
When they opened the patient up, they found several significant tumors. Like, "Well darn, this guy is toast," tumors. He said he'd never seen so much cancer. They went out to break the bad news to the family, but little did they know that this guy made it to the pearly gates earlier than they had expected. And it wasn’t even cancer that did him in.
When they went back into the operating room trying to figure out what to do about the tumors, the patient’s aorta dissected. He began hemorrhaging with my grandfather and this other surgeon shouting and scrambling to clamp it up and stop the bleeding. But they were too late. The guy bled out. My grandfather said it was over in seconds.
He felt bad, but the guy was facing a pretty painful future anyway with all of those tumors. He figured that there was less suffering that way, but secretly I think he was upset that they couldn't save him.
83. Packed Up North
I’m a nurse. One night, I received a woman after her midwife let her go through eight hours of very difficult labor. In Canada, midwives practice separately from doctors and nurses. They have an agreement with hospitals to use the beds when labor becomes high risk. At this point, our doctors take over and plan an emergency c-section.
We realize the arteries in the sides of the uterus are ruptured due to extensive pushing. We delivered the baby fine, but the mom became a separate patient. Finally, the team finishes surgery but her blood pressure immediately plummets. They realize another artery is bleeding and that they needed to clamp her aorta.
This meant her lower body wasn’t receiving blood flow for several minutes. They replaced her blood volume a minimum of three times throughout. Finally, the team stabilized her but was afraid of anything else unexpected. The safest option was to pack her but leave the would open and send her to intensive care for further surveillance.
84. In Your Face!
This wasn’t a big mistake, but it was definitely awkward at the time (and hilarious now when I look back on it). I was gluing up a lac on a 14-year-old girl’s forehead. Anyone who has used Dermabond before knows that that stuff can be runny but it bonds very quickly. Well, I ended up gluing my glove to her face. Her mom was in the room and I had to turn to her and say, "I’m sorry, I've just glued my glove to your daughter’s face."
85. Defying The Lung Odds
Our patient came into the hospital with cystic fibrosis and end-stage lung function. He had an infection and was transferred to critical care after coughing blood, but began to code. There was panic everywhere. A major artery in his lung had eroded and he was bleeding out into his airway quickly. He had no chance of living without a transplant.
It was a long shot, and they performed the transplant after 10 days of him being kept alive. After a couple of weeks, he started to respond and was taken off assisted breathing equipment. He walked out of the hospital two months later and showed no complications a year later.
86. I Spy With My X-Ray Eye
I was working in the ER when my jaw nearly hit the floor. A patient showed up to the ER covered in blood after attending a rap concert. We were all so focused on a bullet wound with an arterial bleed that we missed the obvious. The nurse placed a blood pressure cuff over another wound on the patient’s arm. We all missed it.
Even during the secondary assessment, I still missed this other injury. We didn't find it until we did a chest X-ray. Then, my heart sank. There was another bullet resting in the posterior portion of the thoracic wall. Fortunately, it had come to rest without significant trauma to major organs. The patient lived, but I nearly swallowed my stomach.
87. A Hole In The Plan
I’m a surgeon, and one patient had a traumatic wound. When he got to the hospital we started CPR and blood transfusions, but we had to get a steady pulse to operate. We manage to get him on the table but lose the pulse again. I’m doing CPR while another surgeon locates an injury near his groin. At this point, I’m thinking we’re going to save this kid.
I didn’t realize as I continued CPR that the blood was just leaving through his groin wound. By now he’s been down about 20 minutes, and it’s just pouring out of the artery. That was the moment I knew this had gone downhill. We pause CPR to see if we have a pulse and there’s nothing. We had to call it. I’ll never forget how quiet the room was.
88. Keep Calm & Surgeon On
This one’s funny because the “Oh my God!” moment only led to more panic. My mom was an OBGYN and she told me about this incident that occurred early on in her career. She didn’t really make a medical mistake, but she still almost ruined the operation. She was performing a C-section when she dropped her scalpel on the floor.
Before she could even think, she blurted out, "Oh darn," as a reaction. The mother—who was in labor and already stressed out—freaked out, thinking something must have gone horribly wrong with the baby. She started panicking and it took the whole team of nurses, the husband, and the mother of the patient to calm her down.
In the operating room, it’s always best to stay calm.
89. Gone And Almost Forgotten
It was the beginning of clinical postings, and we were supposed to go interview patients for their clinical history. After that, our teacher would come and ask us to present our findings. My patient was diabetic and had ulcers in his left leg. As a rule, we are supposed to examine both limbs for comparison. Right before I asked to check, I remembered his right leg was amputated. Thank God I didn't say anything.
90. It’s Kind Of Like The LSATs
This “Oh my God!” moment was actually a sigh of relief for everyone. I once accidentally ran a creatinine test on a patient when the doctor had actually ordered a comp metabolic test. It turns out that the guy was in renal failure…and no one knew it. He was about to go in for surgery (I believe it was a bypass, but I could be wrong) when I got the test results.
I was able to stop them from putting him under just in time—like, needle prepped and measured, going into the arm, just in time. It could have been a tragic ending.
91. Learning On The Job
I was a fresh graduate and registered as Senior House Officer. My placement was in a community hospital 45 minutes outside of town. One night, my nurse comes and calmly tells me a new patient has arrived who had fallen out of a tree about three stories high. Both the senior doctors had already left for the day and there are multiple limb deformities.
The patient was here because it was the closest hospital, but we weren’t the best equipped. We were out of morphine and no one on the team knew trauma protocol. I had a nurse try to call senior doctors but no one was answering. Our nearest X-ray machine was 45 minutes away. I had to make a call, so I went into take-charge mode.
I began shouting orders left and right while assessing at least an arm and leg fracture with cervical tenderness. I asked to call an ambulance for an emergency transfer but we didn’t have anything for limb braces. That's when the senior doctor runs in and made braces and collars from cardboard boxes. We got him stable and into the ambulance and out the door.
92. How Good Are Your Reflexes?
My mom gave her surgery team a real fright. She had to go in for foot surgery. What the surgeons didn’t know was that my mom had really bad fibromyalgia—even under anesthesia. So, when the surgeons started poking around her foot, it jumped up. They nearly botched her surgery because of it, but all ended up OK. They must have thought that it was something like out of a zombie movie!
93. Hidden Gems
We had a homeless man brought in for a foot wound. We saw his foot poking out from the blanket as he's rolling by and it's a little roughed up, but doesn't seem too bad. We go in to get the details and he says he hurt his foot a few days ago and that it hurts to walk. We ask if we can take a peek, and he whips off the blanket to show us his other foot.
Moving the blanket released a horrific stench cloud, and we knew we were in for a treat. He has his foot bandaged in a very dirty wrap, his toes are completely black, and there's a maggot butt wiggling near the edge. We tried to remove the wrap, but it was stuck together with blood and dirt, meaning we had to cut it off. I wish I could have unseen the next part.
As we cut, more maggots began to present themselves, and the smell just kept getting more and more intense. We finally cut through and go to pull away from the wrap and at least a hundred maggots fell out. The worst part was the entire bottom of the man's foot was stuck to the wrap....and also fell away from the underlying muscle and bone.
94. I Seem To Have Lost My Glasses
I’m a veterinarian, but this happened when I was a fourth-year student. I was observing an orthopedic procedure that could have been a skit on Mad TV. The resident surgeons leaned over to see a structure that the operating surgeon was pointing out. She must have learned over too far because her glasses fell right off…and into the wound bed.
The surgeon threw up their arms, said, "Forget this!" dropped the leg, and stormed out of the OR. The resident was blind without her glasses and started bawling her eyes out. I just wanted to disappear into the scenery.
95. Sky High
I had a patient last week who had an arteriovenous (AV) fistula for dialysis. Essentially, we create a link between the artery and vein which gives better access to the dialysis catheter. The patient kept picking at the wound and their skin ended up creating a semi-aneurysm with the wall of the fistula poking through their skin. Yeah, gross.
It looked like a little tiny blood blister, and we were trying to figure out the next steps...when suddenly it pops. The patient was sitting in bed and starts spraying so high over our heads it hit the ceiling. We barely had time to move out from under it as it fell. We begin to put pressure on the wound but had to get him in for emergency surgery.
96. Keep Your Mouth Shut
I was the patient in this “Oh my God,” moment. My crazy surgeon would never tell the story himself, so I’ll tell it for him. When I was 18, I had to get my impacted wisdom tooth removed. I went to a surgeon who informed me that the tooth in question was pretty much fully formed. For the surgery, he would have to put me under a general anesthetic so he could break up the tooth to remove it. It sounded pretty routine.
On the day of surgery, I went in thinking it would all be great. I arranged for my mother to pick me up after a couple of hours because I couldn’t drive home by myself with anesthesia in my system. She arrived and the staff informed her that I was still in surgery. After nearly another two hours of waiting, she felt like something wasn't right and immediately called my father.
My father came in and the staff told him the same thing; I was still in surgery. At some point, my parents finally said they wanted to see me and threatened to call the cops. That's when the staff revealed the shocking truth—the surgeon had inadvertently broken my jaw. Apparently, instead of breaking up my wisdom teeth, the surgeon had tried to take them out in one piece.
On the very first tooth, he snapped my mandible. It popped up into the muscles in the back part of my cheek, coming up against two nerves, the trigeminal and facial nerves. In a total panic, this failure of a surgeon wired my jaw shut. He hadn’t asked my next of kin what they wanted him to do, nor did he take an X-ray. As it turns out, the reason you take an X-ray is that you need to make sure the bone is set. My bone was not set.
Over the course of the next two weeks, the bone didn't heal because it wasn't set correctly. It slowly sawed through my trigeminal nerve, destroying sensation in the lower right half of my face. I looked like a stroke victim because I had very little control over it. It's since gotten better and moves more or less with the rest of my face, but I don't have as much control there as I should.
This was probably the most pain I'd ever experienced in my entire life. I took liquid Vicodin (remember, the idiot surgeon had wired my jaw shut) every two hours. I could barely sleep and needed help with tasks like walking upstairs and going to the bathroom because of the pain and the medication. It was insufferable.
We eventually found a doctor to fix my jaw. He had to re-set the bone. This was about a six-hour surgery and it required a two-night hospital stay. The bone was so badly out of whack that it needed a plate and seven screws installed just to stabilize it. This new doctor had to keep my jaw wired shut for another ten weeks while it healed, but that's not even the worst part—later on, I was told the nerve damage was permanent.
The original doctor who broke my jaw refused to admit responsibility or pay any of the damages. Presumably, his counsel advised him never to admit to making a mistake. So, I sued for that. In the deposition, he said he broke up the tooth, which of course he hadn't. I had the tooth to prove he was lying, after which we settled for the amount of damage.
About 75% of the settlement ended up going to things like lawyers’ fees so I still came out behind on all that. But I have a wicked scar on my neck from the surgery and my other three wisdom teeth, so I have that going for me.
97. Quit Playing Games With My Heart
I worked as a mountain medic at a ski resort. Most of the time, I was treating people who fell on the mountain, and I had the rare occasions of an exciting broken femur. This was exciting because it meant their pants got cut off. On an even rarer occasion, you would have other medical events, but most people on skis are fit and healthy.
Most of the non-accident stuff happened at the lodge, and since the fire station was literally across the parking lot, they would just call them first. Their jump bags were better equipped for medical rather than trauma. One day, however, a call came about a heart attack and the firefighters weren't in the station due to hospital transportation.
A woman in her 40s had slipped and fallen on some ice. She appeared fine, but the lodge needed to medically clear her, so they called us down from our clinic at the upper lodge. We drove down on the snowmobile and start asking questions, palpating for broken bones or dislocated joints. She seems fine, but there is a slight weakness in her left arm.
I asked her history and any other symptoms and my partner flashed me her blood pressure. It was odd. Then she mentioned she was taking Tums. I asked why and she had woken up that morning with really bad heartburn. I then insisted she come with me to a private clinic room. She’s refusing, but I finally convince her that I'm not a doctor, and just being careful.
So we pop her shirt open and quickly get the monitor on, and confirm she's having a heart attack. I have no clue how she's standing, but women tend to have less of the big early symptoms and are tough as nails. We get her airlifted to the hospital and wait for news. The air medic told us after if she had waited any longer it could have been fatal.
98. 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.
99. A Telenovela Evening
One night while I was working in the Emergency room, a patient arrived with complaints of vaginal spotting. She told us she had been bleeding for two days and had a little pain. She thought it had started after her female partner had been “a little rough” during their last intimate experience. Her examination revealed something else entirely.
There was a complete tear through the posterior vaginal wall into the rectum, and these injuries were consistent with a difficult childbirth. The story wasn’t adding up given the amount of trauma, so I ordered more tests, including a urine pregnancy test. The pregnancy test came back positive, which opened a huge can of worms, given her relationship status.
Turns out, she had secretly delivered a baby two days ago but didn’t tell anyone. She had been hiding the baby from her family and girlfriend. Everyone from child protective services to pediatrics got involved in the case. They found the baby in her apartment under some towels and it was a doozy of a night for paperwork. Her parents adopted the infant and as far as I know, they are still the child’s guardians.
100. It’s Just A Scratch
I'm a nurse. I was working in the ER when I had a “What just happened" moment. A guy came in for a scratch on his neck and said he was "feeling drowsy." We started the usual workups, but then something completely unexpected happened—this dude's blood pressure just tanked. We scrambled to do everything we could but he was gone within ten minutes of walking through the door.
Turns out, the "scratch" he had been complaining about was actually the exit wound of a .22-caliber round. The guy didn't even know what had happened to him. When the coroner's report came back, we found that that the bullet had entered his leg and ricocheted through his torso, shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could've done.
101. A Tuesday In Radiology
I used to work for Radiology in a small hospital. We admitted a young couple in the middle of February who had been in a car accident. The girl gets a bed in the emergency room and she's overall fine. A few cuts and scrapes but still coherent and talking. A state trooper is in her room with her. Her partner is vocally complaining but stabilized on a spine board.
She asks if she can see him, but I tell her he can’t move and needs further tests. Well, she didn't like that one bit, and she begins to freak out as I take him to Radiology for a CT scan. The scan reveals an ugly result. The guy’s spine is severed. He’s in for serious surgery and rehab, and might never walk again. All of a sudden, though, the girlfriend runs into the room.
She’s tiny but squaring up to the cop, who ends up using his taser to get her under control. She gets cuffed to a bed for good measure. At the same time, they’ve just told her partner about his outcome and he is screaming her name. Later, we found out they were running product across the border and jeopardized more than just his spine that day.
102. More Than A Stain
I’m an eye doctor, and many people don’t realize that diabetics need to have their eyes checked regularly. After all, a diabetic complication can result in blindness. I had a patient 15 years ago that was experiencing severe diabetic vascular changes against the retina and required laser intervention. On the day of her surgery, she chooses to go to work instead.
She worked in the cleaning industry, and on that day she inhaled some of her cleaner fumes. They caused her to sneeze, which spiked her blood pressure, and she blew the fragile blood vessels in both of her eyes wide open. Immediately, she’s blinded in both eyes in a matter of seconds.
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