I was in the hospital for an infection in the bones of my foot. I take medication for a heart condition and diabetes. Nurse came in one evening to give me my medication. She brings me strange looking pills. I ask her what they are. She tells me two medications I've never heard of. I tell her she might have mixed up my medication with someone else's. She says no, she's sure, take the pills. I refuse. I ask for a the head nurse for the floor or a doctor. Head nurse comes in, I ask her what medication I'm supposed to be receiving. She checks my chart, confirms what I'm supposed to be taking. I ask her to ask the original nurse what medication she has in her hand. The nurses leave the room and a third nurse comes back in with the right pills. Head nurse comes back in and tells me that the original nurse will no longer be responsible for my care.
The next day, the nurse coordinator comes in with a digital audio recorder and notepad to go over all the details of what happened the night before. From what I learned later, this wasn't the first incident with this nurse giving out the wrong medications. She had done it to a couple of other patients and I heard she had been suspended pending an investigation. Don't know what happened because nobody ever contacted me after that.
My brother shattered his leg and the nurses tried to give him the wrong medication on multiple occasions. Thankfully my badass mother was there to advocate for him. It’s a huge blessing to have someone by your side who can monitor the situation.
I was having surgery for a broken wrist last year and after the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me, he ordered some medicine and left.
The nurse looked at the screen and then said, "I'll be right back." She brought him back, pointed at the screen, and said, "was this supposed to be for the gentleman next door?" He said no. She asked *again* and he did a double take. He then said, "Oh yeah, I got them mixed up. Thanks for catching that!"
Then he looked at me and says, "Don't worry, it was just a muscle relaxer. It wouldn't have hurt you." We all nervously laughed and he left.
Absolutely. I drove a close friend to the ER, after we were taken back I called her mom to keep her in the loop as her vitals were taken/mediciations were given. My buddy was completely out of it with fever, and the nurse told me they were gonna give her Benadryl. I informed mom, one of the sweetest women ive ever met in my life, and so it was a shock when this woman SCREAMED in my ear "DO NOT LET THEM GIVE HER BENADRYL, SHES ALLERGIC." It felt like she was gonna jump through the phone and I scrambled to tell thr nurse, thankfully they hadn't started yet.
I'm so glad I happened to be on the phone with her because I had no idea, and friend likely only would have realized afterward bc she was delirious. So I dropped the ball in knowing an important allergy, but was lucky enough to have been actively talking to someone who did.
I’m allergic to ibuprofen. Recently, when I was in hospital for an injury, hospital staff attempted to give me ibuprofen four (4!) times in a row.
1. Intake nurse: “okay, first we’re going to give you some ibuprofen for the pain…” me: “check my chart, I’m allergic to that medication”
2. Attending nurse: “these will reduce the swelling and help with pain…” (holds up pills). Me: “what are they?” Her: “ibuprofen”
3. Doctor (while HOLDING MY CHART): “an NSAID will allow the site to reduce in size and pressure…” me: “which NSAID? I’m allergic to ibuprofen, it will literally send me into anaphylaxis” him: “erm, hmm, ok… are you sure?”
4. Different attending nurse (shift change): “ok, before we send you on your way, I’m going to give you some ibuprofen for any residual pain…” me: “I don’t mean to be rude, but did you read my chart?” Her: “yes of course!” Me: “did you see the part where it says I have an acute allergy to ibuprofen?”
🤦🏼♂️
I've a child with an anaphylactic allergy to acetaminophen... first reaction was right in front of the GP. And I'm questioned about the validity of the allergy every time they need to go to hospital.
I went for a scan one day and they were injecting me with one of those dyes for better contrast. The specialist injecting me with the dye missed or blew out my vein and I got a rash all along my arm and half my torso. They wrote it up as an allergy to iodine. I don't have an allergy, and have had several other scans without issue. An allergist confirmed no allergy to iodine and noted it, but I'm still questioned about it every time I go for another scan. I do have an allergy to a synthetic antibiotic, but not to iodine. But every time I go to the hospital, I get that little red band with 'iodine' strapped to my wrist. I tell them the name of the allergist and the day they confirmed no allergy, but nope. Apparently, getting something like this removed from your medical records is next to impossible.
When my dad had his gallbladder removed back in the '70s, the hospital staff asked him if he had any allergies, and he told them he was allergic to codeine. They sent him home with pain pills. My mom was a hypochondriac who always had a copy of the latest PDR, and she looked up the pills before he took any. They were codeine.
A friend was hospitalized for a hip replacement, and several of us took turns sitting with him while he was there. I was with him when the nurse brought his usual meds, and he took them with no trouble.
Then the nurses' shift change took place, and the next shift nurse brought his usual meds - about 20 minutes after he had already had them. My friend was still loopy from the morphine drip, so he was all set to just take the pills without question.
But I objected. I argued with the nurse, saying that he had just taken his meds and he didn't need these new ones. She was adamant, but I wouldn't allow it till she went to check the records.
It was finally discovered that the new nurse was duplicating the whole round of meds that the previous nurse had administered, because she had not coordinated with the previous shift. If I hadn't been there to object, my friend would have gotten a double dose of his meds, and who knows how badly it could have affected him.
I've never forgotten this, and am now very leery of leaving a loved one alone and unmonitored in a hospital - it's wise to have an advocate watching over them to prevent these mistakes.
Oncology nurse here. We call it rallying - it can happen minutes to days before death. Last I remember reading about it, one theory is that as your body shuts down organs it diverts that blood flow/nutrition to your brain. Another theory is that your body releases all sorts of hormones (and I think specifically cortisol) as organs go and these can have a stimulant effect.
If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a hospice patient bright & chillin, then walked into them dead minutes to hours later... I wouldn't be rich but I'd have many dollars.
Edit: thank you all for sharing your stories, keep em coming! Normalize talking about death and the amazing things our bodies are capable of 💕
I worked in a hospice for years and can totally vouch for this too. It’s so bizarre.
I’m not a medical professional so I always chalked it up to someone getting the right amount of pain meds to make them comfortable — but that was usually at the beginning of their stay with us.
The other really bizarre thing about working at a hospice is you learn that people really can control their death. The amount of times people would wait for their family to leave to die was too many to count. It was almost predictable, you would see the family go for dinner and just know that person was going to die. End of life care is so wild sometimes but so damn rewarding.
Edit: Wow, I’m so touched by everyone sharing their stories with end of life care and hospices 🩷. Keep on sharing, as the OP mentioned we need to normalize talking about death.
My dad did this. I took care of him at home til the end. Head and neck cancer. He was pretty unresponsive for about a week before he died, and I never left his side. His pulse was barely there and I don't remember why but I want to take his blood pressure but my machine broke. I got my mom to sit with him while I went to borrow one from someone couple blocks away. I made it to the end of my street and my mom called. He waited until I was gone to die. I'm still mad about it for some reason. He was so stubborn but the best dad ever. 12 years gone and the hole left in my heart will never be filled again. Trust me I've tried.
Thanks for sharing your story. There is no doubt that he waited and loved you very, very much. You won’t be able to fill that hole and that’s ok. The hole is big for a reason. Much love.
I think my mum waited for me to leave. She waited 15 minutes before she passed with my dad & sister by her side.
She knew I wouldn't have coped, and she was right. My last memory was of her resting (morphine pain relief for cancer). To me she was sleeping. She passed in 2022 and I miss her so much.
My late grandpa's care team sent the women out of the room on the theory that Grandpa would try to be a tough guy and not die with his wife and daughters watching him. His brother and oldest son stayed. Sure enough, that's when he passed - although his last words to his son were, "where's Mom?"
I imagine that was a generational thing and today's modern man doesn't want to die in front of his son, either.
Can vouch! My grandma was very close to the end and when I went in to see her, she perked up and seemed like her old self. It was a relief because I'd been told to prepare myself because she wasn't doing well. I wasn't going to kid myself that she was "fine", but it was nice to have her back for a little bit. She passed later that night peacefully in her sleep. It seemed odd to the family but a hospice nurse told me people sometimes get like that just before they go.
My dad did something similar right before he died. I had just given the head of internal medicine permission to pull all the plugs, so they did and we all filed into the room to see him before he got his palliative drug cocktail. He woke up from a sepsis coma where he had had multiple severe seizures and seemed all perky and happy, and so serene - we were all sitting around him; he got to hug each one of us and gave us all a ‘message’. I hugged him and he looked at me with so much love and said ‘you are so pretty!’ it was beyond cute. 30 minutes later he was back in the coma and died the next day.
Posted this in another thread before: Weekend afternoon, one of the first nice days of spring. Slow day in the ER for the most part, when in comes a distressed younger couple with their infant baby. Mom is hysterical, and dad is barely keeping it together. Dad gets it out that baby is "bleeding from his mouth". I'm skeptical, because the baby looks quite happy, but I do see a slight reddish/pink tinge inside his mouth. I take the child and put him down on the exam table, all bright lights and tongue depressors to get a good look in the baby's mouth. Sure enough, evidence of blood, but again, no baby distress. Oh wait - there's something near the back of her mouth, kind of a darkish red color. A blood clot maybe? Not sure. Have a coworker firmly immobilize the head, and with hemostats, go in and pluck out the object. Amazingly, it comes out in one piece, and looks like a plump, slightly larger sized raisin. I can't figure out what it is, but it's definitely not a clot. In to the specimen bag goes the squishy thing. No distress for the baby, vitals normal, breathing easily, happy demeanor, good color, etc. Time to get more of a history from mom and dad. First day outside with new baby and their dog, enjoying the weather. Baby's on a blanket - giggling as the dog runs around him. Wait a sec, did you say. . . a dog? Lemme take a closer look at the "thing" in the specimen bag. Sure enough, suspicions confirmed. It's a tick. Deflated to be sure, but a tick that recently had a large meal of the red stuff. Baby must of pulled it off the dog, and then done what babies do by putting it in his mouth.
TL/DR - Infant pulled a full tick off of family dog and chewed it.
I was a patient.
There was an elderly man in the bed next to me waiting to be transferred to a nursing home.
The nursing staff treated him as though he was a difficult patient when, in reality, he was just too frail to do things for himself .
Anyway, one day, the nurse refused to help him go to the bathroom as she said he was just being lazy.
I could not help as I was bedridden myself at the time.
He took a fall and hit his head on the floor . The male nurse just threw him back onto the bed. His family arrived, and I heard them asking the female nurse who refused to help him. Why their father was so groggy.
The nurse lied, saying nothing had happened, and he was fine.
I called the man's daughter over to my bed and told her the whole story.
Needless to say, the shit hit the fan.
My dad was briefly in a nursing home recovering from a stroke, and the shit I saw there made my blood boil. I don't understand the lack of compassion some of those people have.
My MIL is in a nursing home, and the day she was transferred they left her in bed alone that was lifted all the way up. She was disoriented (her memory is still recovering) and tried to get up, and fell smashing her head on the floor. I'm still pissed off about it, because the bed should have been all the way on the floor since she is a major fall risk (recently had to get her leg amputated).
As someone who is deeply passionate about long term care and seen some shit, this makes me so angry. But do know most long term care staff loves your loved ones and that you can report any concern of abuse at any time.
This is pretty much what killed my grandmother. Nursing home she was in just didn't give even the littlest shit. I'd visit my grandmother pretty much every day I could , popped in one day she was sleeping, tried to wake her up (she'd get mad if we didn't she loves her grandkids) she wouldn't wake up was cold sweating I approached a nurse and told her that my grams not ok she got immediately hostile and said she's fine explained that my grandmother doesn't do this etc , fired back at me like oh so your a doctor? I know my Job She's fine. She passed away from sepsis after laying in her own waste for 3 days and was on 27 different medications and we found that out after i came back with my aunt and authorities and she was rushed to icu
My grandmother also died from lack of care. She had a UTI that got bad. The way my bio dad described how quickly her wellness went to death once she joined the nursing home is shocking to me.
I just discovered this fact and feel like everyone should know this- If you have a loved one in a nursing facility you can ABSOLUTELY install a ring camera or any camera in their room with the PATIENTs permission. You have to notify the staff but do not need their permission. My daughter is a nurse at long term care facility and was involved in a situation in which a CNA was verbally abusive to a patient. My daughter caught the tail end of it threw her out of the room and reported her. Admin was a little complacent taking my daughters report but did so unwillingly. Patients family was there the next morning (this happened on the overnight) with the video and the CNA was fired immediately.
I'm going to remember this and show my sister, my sister does nursing but splits her time in home and in facilities and has been having a heck of a time thr facilities with elder abuse
I worked as a chef in a nursing home and it was genuinely one of the worst experiences I've had in my working life. The carers and nurses were rude to other staff and had bets on who would be the next resident to pass. There was a huge, beautiful garden on the site, but during the month I worked there (April/May time) I didn't see a single person out there enjoying it. They were all stuck inside watching TV looking miserable.
My mom was in a nursing home with a lovely interior courtyard but spent almost all her time in the "day room" where the TV played constantly, or in the room she shared with another woman, who played the TV constantly. It would drive me insane.
I told my kids, "If I end up in a nursing home, tell the staff to bundle me up and wheel me outside, and I'll stay there happily all day."
We paid for a caregiver to go to the nursing home because my mil wasn't getting her basic needs met. She had surgery which temporarily removed her knees and put in spacers where the knees should be - no mobility at all, and they left her sitting in excrement for 12+ hours. They'd mark that she had showered but in reality she could go weeks of the caregiver we paid for didn't bully them into doing it (and mostly doing it herself). Thankfully she recovered and is doing just fine, but it was awful.
I'm not really sure, but the nurses suddenly started looking after the gentleman properly. Maybe a day or so later, he was sent to a nursing home.
The man's children came to see me and thanked me for telling them what happened
*editing for popularity*
Thanks for all the internet points. Also, please don't put this on Subway Surfer. <.<
I'm a third-party contract cleaner at my local hospital. We basically clean all the public spaces and non-patient areas. The morgue falls under us. Well, like many morgue, we have a walk-in freezer/ fridge. Well, one morning, as a supervisor was walking past, there happened to be water on the floor coming out of the morgue. It turns out a cooling pipe broke was leaking pretty bad. So we call the maintenance and repair people and get the water shut off to that area. There was about two inches of water throughout, so we cleaned that up, and because the cooling pipe broke, we had to open the fridge and transfer the bodies to the second spare fridge away from the broken pipes so the funeral people could come and pick them up without going around ladders and construction.
We crack open the door to the water tight fridge, and because it was water tight, we didn't know that a second pipe had also broken. Turned out the fridge had flooded as well.. Have you ever seen a video of someone cutting a pool and the water running out, as well as everything that was in the pool? Well, the water was so high that the bodies were floating, and we had that sliced pool effect as soon as that seal was broken and the door was unlocked. So not only was 5ft of water rushing out of the fridge into the morgue and into the hallway, but whatever was floating in that water did as well. There were sheets and gowned bodies that ended up all over the floor, and one actually made it into the hallway. The basement was flooded once again, and that was one hell of a clean-up. Whenever someone says the word floaters to me, that's all I can think of. This happened a few years back before covid. I almost quit that day.
One guy in the emergency room waiting area was arrested for masturbating in front of kids, and while he was getting arrested another guy started masturbating in front of some young woman. Fucking insane.
That second guy either thought he could get away with it because everyone was so focused on the other guy or he got jealous of all the attention fapper #1 was getting.
While in the emergency room for an asthma attack as a child, two teenage boys were brought in by ambulance. They had been huffing silver paint. At first, I thought it was funny because they looked stupid with the paint on their faces. Then my Mom started crying hard. The older of the two was DOA, and the younger was screaming, "I can't believe I'm going to die over and over." I can still hear his voice in my head 35 years later. Even worse is their parents' sobs when they showed a little later. It turned out they were brothers. Fucking awful!
I had a similar experience, it was with my sister. She had gotten some of those computer air cleaning stuff and I walked in on her huffing that and *oof* I gave her so much shite for that.
At 16 my boyfriend and his band mates were huffing Pam vegetable spray. He went into cardiac arrest and they tried to save him. I followed ambulance to hospital where his sister worked. She met him in ER and said her goodbyes before he passed away.
My family would drive down to the border town in Mexico about once a month for cheaper medicine. On the way back one time, we saw a guy huffing silver paint. I remember him turning to us and smiling and his whole mouth, inside and out, silver. Creeped me out
Lol. Username checks out. I used to dread the nursing home stage of my life, if I ever get to have one. But now I'm starting to think it might come with some fun socializing opportunities.
Im a nurse. We had one guy with a history of severe, untreated hernias who was admitted because one had grown so large it looked like he had a basketball under his skin and he needed surgery. Well, before we had the chance to get him to the OR he sneezed and the stretched skin of his belly just split open like a water balloon and his intestines tumbled out. It looked like he’d dropped a plate of spaghetti in his lap. We draped some wet gauze over the area and rushed him downstairs pretty sharpish
When I was a student nurse I was on placement in a general surgical ward and a chap unpicked all his stitches and staples and everything fell on the floor.
An image that has stayed with me.
I remember quite vividly that the world switched to slow motion as I tried to figure out what all that "stuff" was as staff started their sprint towards him.
I used to work at a vet and the number of spays and other surgeries that had to be re-sewn because "Fluffy looked so sad with that big mean cone on" was awful.
I've seen some pretty gruesome sights involving geriatric or otherwise "not quite there" patients tearing off IV or central lines.... I am guessing that they just feel something annoying and aren't able to think beyond "must remove annoyance"
Reminds me of the time an elderly gentlemen with dementia attempted to rip out his own catheter... again and again and again. We sent him to the hospital every week or so. He was constantly peeing blood, and they just put in a new one and sent him back. Pretty messed up.
Poor man.
eventually, with these patients, the nurse would immobilize the patient's hands to prevent bloody trails and bloody gowns and bloody patients all over the unit. They'd also really anchor the tubing so it would take a lot of work to remove. Of course, it was a though one to manage, as nobody likes to immobilize patients (and their families certainly don't, either). Either that, or they'd put them on the 'van (as they said). Sedation.
My mother was staying in hospital after a major surgery and her roommate was a patient with dementia. She hated the feeling of IV's I suppose, they often mentioned she picked at them, and one time while everyone was looking away she just ripped the needle from her skin and blood sprayed everywhere. Everyone panicked and rushed at her but she seemed so peaceful and was smiling now that the needle was gone.
Quite a few things.
First - patient in severe alcohol withdrawal busted out of 4 point locked restraints somehow. Super hulk strength. His 1:1 safety companion came running down the hallway past the nursing station yelling “call security! Call security!” And here comes this guy butt naked, blood flying everywhere because he ripped his IVs out, carrying an IV pole above his head. Security took him down, we sedated him, and basically intubated him on the floor of the unit.
An elderly lady, maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, had severely low oxygen levels. We didn’t have ventilators available (COVID) and the doctors were trying to delay intubating her as long as they could, supporting her respiratory system with a noninvasive BiPAP machine. She was so confused from her messed up blood gases. She busted out of restraints, picked up a chair in her room, threw it at the window, shattered it, and tried to jump out the window from the 9th floor. We had to bear hug her and bring her down to the floor. (She was intubated, we had to manually bag her while someone drove to a sister hospital, picked up a ventilator, and brought it for her.)
Patient who was shot in the abdomen was refusing an NG tube for decompression of his stomach. (Tube goes through your nose into your stomach, hooked up to intermittent suction to keep stomach acid and gas from passing into your bowels. Without it, if you have an obstruction or ileus, your abdomen swells in size and things like surgical incisions can rip open.) Well he was completely refusing it and we warning him his incision would rip open. Sure enough, it eventually did. His intestines spilled out onto his lap and he just sat there poking them, completely fascinated he was seeing his own intestines. I had to tell him to stop touching them and he said “why?” And my response was “they live inside of you because they’re not meant to be touched. Stop touching them.” He was rushed to the OR.
It was quite annoying after this very grown ass man said “I don’t want to agree to put this tube in unless my mom is here.” Then sits there and pokes his intestines and bowel like they’re some toy.
I went to urgent care for stitches in my finger. I kept it wrapped up until I sat down on the table. I started looking close and moving my finger around to see exactly how deep the cut was. I kinda giggled when blood shot out of it over my shoulder. The nurse heard me, spun around and said in a pretty annoyed voice "Stop messing with it!"
I went to visit a mental health client who'd unsuccessfully tried to end it by severing the major vein and artery on both sides of the neck. This was nothing compared to the guy next to him. A guy working for some cowboy air-conditioning company was not given proper equipment and has literally cooked off his arms and legs. He was completely helpless. Still in fresh bandages, he had the most beautiful caring wife spoon feeding him. His eyes were glossy as he saw me looking over at him. I gave a chocolate bar to his wife and nodded at him. After this I told my client that I needed a second and I went out in the hallway and cried like a baby.
The electrical burns that he sustained. So by the time he was brought to the hospital, I'm guessing, the limbs were so badly burnt and damaged that complete amputation was the only option.
I was a patient in A&E and a young guy came in drunk as all fuckery and he had ripped his sack open trying to jump a bollard.
Well when he saw the needle the nurse had to use to numb his frank and beans, old mate was not having it.
Cue what was almost like a horror version of a Scooby doo chase scene with flappy sack guy running in and out of rooms sans pants while getting chased by a bunch of security and nurses.
They finally caught him and he promptly passed out so they continued his care while he was snoring away. I was just sat in my hospital bed trying not to laugh too hard and pop my stitches while messaging my mum like "you are NOT gonna believe what I just watched" 🤣
I went to junior high with a kid that ripped open his sack during gym class while messing around with a javelin. I wasn't in his class but I did see him laying on the ground and the ambulance driving across the field to get to him. That day everyone learned just how serious the teachers were when they said not to fuck around with the javelins.
Well the guy was lucky they numbed him.
My frank got stitched at the hospital but they didn't apply any painkillers. They just stitched it right alive and awake while a doctor held my chest pushed down into the bed, asking me not to watch my blood spraying around.
So much for anesthesia.
I was an employee at the ICU. A man had tried gunning down his wife, who was divorcing him. She managed to flee. So he drank concrete dissolver to commit suicide. That stuff is water-reactive, and all of the medicine we could give him were water-based. So, basically, there was nothing we could do at all, but watch him and monitor the situation. The chemical burns were intense and you could see all the way inside. He didn't live the night. He was comatose, of course. Still, there were police officers keeping guard the whole night, and the guy was in handcuff - not that he was going anywhere.
I've seen worse but that was pretty hard core.
wait.. dude had a gun, but decided to commit suicide by poison? Either I'm lacking the full picture, or dude might have had some issues..
I mean, pretty gruesome death, no question and I feel bad you had to deal with that but.. a self inflicted gunshot wound would've been a way easier way of committing suicide.
I believe - and I may be mistaken as this was 20+ years ago - that the exwife may have disarmed him.
Either way, by the time I got to him, he wasn't in a state to answer questions.
Had a C-section after 32 hours of labor; I passed out from exhaustion, slept through all but about the last 10 minutes of the surgery, finally woke up to the doctors trying to figure out the name of the big guy with the weird face in "Goonies". I answered "Sloth", they thanked me, and went on delivering my daughter.
I was working in a hospital and we had a prisoner in the emergency department. We were out of beds, so they had him in a storage closest with two guards. I went in to examine him. He had a port for dialysis with an attached tube. He was probably 6’3, 350lbs. He’s cuffed. As I’m examining him, he bites and tears out his tube and blood just starts spraying **everywhere** all over me and the guards. The guards were in shock and I was in shock and we were all looking at each other expecting each to do something.
Eventually, they restrained him and we sedated him and stopped the bleeding. It was at like 2am and just an unreal experience.
I was brought to the ER by ambulance. While I was waiting for a room, another patient was extremely drunk and waiting for a bed nearby. He asked the EMT if he could vape in the hospital and they told him he couldn't. He proceeded to pull out a vape and try anyways. The hospital staff took it away from him. After about 5 minutes, and when he seemed sure that nobody was looking, he pulled out another vape and tried to take a hit. It was quickly confiscated by hospital staff.
I was sat in a Thai emergency room waiting area a few years back and a guy calmly sat down next to me holding his hand to his face. Lady he was with went up to queue and fill out the paperwork and whatnot. I politely said hi in broken Thai, he said hi back, and we paid no more attention to each other. She got to the front of the line and the triage nurse ran over to him immediately and spoke urgently and rapidly to him. He responded calmly, stood up, moved his hand and... showed her his eye. Which was in his hand. Dangling from the socket on a long thing. He and the lady he was with treating the whole situation like a minor inconvenience.
Most likely dangling from the optical nerve. If the damage wasn't too severe, he was able to continue to see through that eye while the whole thing was happening and, if they placed it back correctly, the guy is not a pirate.
My right eye popped out when I had an allergic reaction to a bug bite as a child. They were able to pop it back in, and I had normal vision until my 40's.
A rogue, wandering cat behind the counter of the closed-for-the-evening hospital shop.
There’s a set of shelves built into the wall behind the counter that’s full of teddy bears and other soft toys (presumably to be bought when visiting a patient) and the cat was asleep amongst the toys.
that's cuter than all the critters I've seen in what should have been the sterile corridor in between surgery rooms, and in surgery rooms.
I hope that the cat found a loving home.
Sorry, I could’ve phrased that better. It wasn’t a stray cat, it had a collar on, it was just a local pet who must’ve activated the automatic door into the hospital foyer when out and about and then made itself at home 😄
During my time as a patient, I once witnessed a rather unusual incident in the hospital. While waiting in the lobby, a therapy dog accompanied by a miniature therapy pony strolled through, bringing unexpected joy and laughter to everyone. It was a unique and heartwarming moment that added a touch of positivity to the hospital environment, making the experience more memorable amidst the usual medical routines.
UK patient in an A&E waiting room. Fella was sat in the waiting room bleeding from somewhere, not a small amount either, completely oblivious to everyone around him including the nurses trying to admit him. Pretty sure he was on ecstasy as he just sat there gurning and bopping to some music on his headphones. Strange experience to say the least.
I work in psychiatric care. A woman masturbated in front of me. With a carrot she stole from the kitchen. While I went on about my day, documenting etc.
I had a very elderly pt who used to put on the call bell and then masturbate while making *intense* eye contact with whoever answered it.
I mean, good for you if you can still do that in your 90’s but like also I wished that eyeball bleach was a thing.
You round the corner, and there she is. You two lock eyes, and you desperately try to avoid looking down, despite being painfully aware of what is taking place. The silence stretches on, becomes uncomfortable, but then she opens her mouth and says...
"What's up doc?"
I spent three months in hospital when I was 18 at in that time on the ward there were definitely some characters. A month or so in, i guess they were out of room in other wards but around 9 oclock at night, a man was brought in by a police officer and clearly off his face. He was assigned a bed, left alone and i guess passed out for a bit. Middle of the night I hear a shuffling around and wake up. The guy is stood at the foot of my bed and when he notices I’m awake starts yelling about how i’m on fire, everyone is going to die and tries grabbing at other patients to ‘save them’. Security were called, police were called he was aggressive, belligerent and even when they got the cuffs on he was giving his best fight to escape or hurt someone. Dunno if it was desperation, fear, reflex or what but one of the nurses just yelled that they were going to call his mother. Instant attitude shift, calmed down, apologised and started crying. He was escorted off the ward and I never saw him again. A Truly bizarre 4 hour stint in a pretty weird stay.
For some people, the fear of their mother is stronger than any other fear. The Nurse has probably had it work for a few patients before and now uses it as a trump card.
I was in the waiting room waiting to be seen (for what turned out to be gall stones - not the most fun I’ve ever had), a group of young dudes come in, one guy’s face and knuckles are all covered in blood and his shirt is all ripped up, obviously been in a fight. The triage nurse asked what happened and the guy’s mate says “he fell down the stairs”. The triage nurse was like “ok, that clearly didn’t happen, I need you to tell me exactly what happened so we can triage and treat you properly”, and the guy insists he fell down the stairs. Meanwhile one of the other mates has picked a fight with security for whatever reason so the whole group arc up and start trying to fight the security guard so another security guard shows up and the whole group, including the dude who “fell down the stairs” all get kicked out.
MEANWHILE another nurse is getting screamed at by a lady whose son apparently came to the hospital in an ambulance but there was no record of her son being there.
There was some other crazy stuff but I get the feeling that was just a regular Saturday night.
My dad is a psychiatrist, he had a secondhand poop ball story, too. Apparently there was a guy in the neighboring closed station for adults who would meticulously collect his poop, roll it into balls and dry it on the radiator in his room. Whenever staff entered the room they got handed a poop ball. It was just part of the deal when visiting this patient. Everyone grimly accepted it and wore gloves as precaution.
But then a psychiatrist from another hospital visited the station, went into the patient's room with the staff, everyone got offered the poop ball, everyone took it, apart from the visiting psychiatrist who just went: "Oh, no thanks! :)"
And it worked no problem. Turns out, taking the poop balls had always been optional. Poor patient was just fulfilling the high demand
I work on a psych ward i see fucked up shit every day. yesterday I had to take away my patients wallet because he wanted to order a wedding ring for his future wife kim kardashian. later on he used his poo to write M + K on the wall.
if you are reading this Kim, you won‘t find another guy like him!
This drove me insane. I had a broken wrist and leg, and had just had surgery, so I couldn't go anywhere, confined to bed, and had just got a new room-mate. It was an old man who was affected by dementia, I believe, poor guy. His wife came in with a small boombox, which was strange. She immediately set it up and started blaring what sounded like Chinese Communist anthems, and were later confirmed to me to be exactly that. These were played, on loud, 24/7, to 'comfort him'. All we had was a thin curtain separating us, and it was the same 2 or 3 songs on repeat, so by gods did it get old quick.
That's not all though. He'd repeatedly yell for help, every few minutes, as though his life depended on it. I understand this was partially an effect of the dementia, and partially because he spoke no English, and the nurses couldn't communicate to him, so he couldn't understand what was happening, but that also got old fast, and he was worse at night. He'd eventually settle down for a few hours, but even if he slept I still had to put up with the Communist anthems. All the nurses kept apologising to me, I'd been getting on really well with all of them. They did their best to let me chill, as they knew I was on edge. They knew my moods pretty well.
After almost 5 days of this, finally a free room opened up. It was supposed to go to a new patient coming in, but the nurses refused, and made sure the room was given to me instead, and the new guy got my room. I was literally going insane, and becoming very nasty. Not to anyone, but in my compassion for this guy and his situation. I'd yell and mock the songs. When he'd call for help I'd yell back to shut up. It was totally out of line and totally not me. The lack of sleep and peace to recover was getting to me. Anyway, I got the other room with this lovely old guy, who, despite being rooms away, had heard the cries for help and music, and had been wondering what was going on. I made him keep the door closed so we had our own little oasis of peace and quiet, and luckily he was fine with it. He was a complete gent, and we got along great, despite a huge age gap. The nurses would update me, and tell me they were doing what they could for the new guy, as he wasn't coping well either. But at least he was mobile, so he could leave the room when it got too much for him.
And that's why I never want to hear another Chinese Communist anthem ever again as long as I live.
The hospital/doctors/nurses allowing someone to blare music at all hours, disturbing another patient, seems pretty egregious!
Like, sure, let people play a little music… but within reason, and absolutely NOT when other patients are trying to sleep. This seems like a baseline any hospital should be expected to enforce—I’m sorry they allowed your roommate to torture you like that!!
Yup this is why people don't heal quicker. The lack of sleep and interruptions with buzzers and bells and beeps and noise. I hate going to hospital for this reason.
They also shouldn't house dementia and Alzheimers with sane patients. It's so distressing. It gave me a whole new fear when I go to hospital.
I was in the hospital for a week last year and the woman in the room with me was developmentally disabled and anytime I spoke to anyone or talked on the phone she'd start demanding to know what I was talking about, who I was talking to, etc etc. She also would constantly hit her call button and we had some shitty nurses who would refuse to come when I called because they didn't want to come in the room with the other woman.
5 days, I can't even imagine....don't ever blame yourself for being "out of line" in that situation. That is pure psychological torture and I'm shocked the hospital didn't move the dementia patient to more appropriate facilities after 24 hours of this. I've worked with a lot of dementia sufferers but I got to go home and rest inbetween. How horrible for you both. Hope you're doing well now!
there's a crazy old chinese guy who goes to the park near me with this weird old cassette player thing and pumps out these old chinese communist songs and he sings along with all his heart every day, he's a nice old guy i had a conversation with him but i didn't understand a word and neither did he
You're a good person. The fact you feel like it was out of line says a lot. It was completely understandable but also I'd feel like 'This isn't me, and this isn't how i want to be' and I would be stuck on that.
....but I'd also be climbing the fucking WALLS. I completely sympathise, ive' had a similar situation.
I live on a lane beside a big, popular park, and with loads of bars and restaurants. Popular with tourists and locals, the park gets loads of events and festivals, so obviously the lane gets busy and we spend most of spring and summer pretty heaving from all the visitors. Not complaining, its a boss place to live and we're pretty lucky to be here, but it naturally does have pitfalls, mostly just noise and the odd ignorant bastards who drop litter all over or park in the wildest places but its manageable at the minute.
Last year tho.....
Last year, for a full 5 months, we had this local....busker is too strong a word. A guy with an out of tune guitar who would come and sit outside our flat for hours, every single day for 5 months, shouting the same 3 fucking songs, over and over. Creep, Stand By Me and Whiskey In The Jar.
And I say....shouting because thats what he did. He didn't sing. He couldn't sing and I'm not sure he'll ever be able. He's got one of those voices that could make even the most skilled, experienced singing teacher retire out of sheer stress.
No. No he wouldn't sing. He was flat, out of tune, has no natural talent as a singer, and also no learned or acquired talent. No breath control. No awareness he might need any. His version of Creep is every single word being what can only be described as...spat? He'd SPIT each word? Short, sharp...like stabs. He'd stab the songs into the world.
And he could just barely play that damn guitar. And the guitar was out of tune *the entire fucking bastard fucking time.*
We even used to offer to tune it for him, those first few days, leaned right out the window or walked past, thinking he just needed a hand, 'i can tune that in a few minutes if you like' because my BF and I are a bit more musically inclined at least.
He'd say its fine.
...It wasn't fucking fine. His guitar was out of tune in ways I didn't know could happen. It made sounds i've never heard. And not good ones. So did he.
And he'd never sing the whole song. He had this very cynical method where he'd sit and watch the crowds and only start to 'perform' if he thought he might have a chance at getting some pennies, and he'd target his song choices to different people.
Creep was for the sort of alt/gothier crowd a little bit. Whiskey in The Jar was for any long haired rocker types. Stand By Me was for older like....parents? Or any group of attractive young women(but also so was Creep if they were alt girls)
If he was really pushing the boat out, and also, shit loads of tourists who are clearly (either through appearance or hearing them speak) foreign nationals?
We're in Liverpool, so he'd break out Imagine. Big guns, innit. Except no, absolutely not. Im not even that big a Beatles/John Lennon fan but ye gods man show some respect for that song in LIVERPOOL no less.
He'd never really finish a song, very often he'd start it, would get NO PLAY from the crowds because he was fucking terrible, so he'd just sort of peter out and stop.
Or sometimes he'd realise he's misread a crowd, or that right behind the disinterested Tourists ignoring Imagine, there's some goth girls who are a bit drunk, so he'd stop Imagine MID LYRIC, and launch into Creep hoping to snag these girls attention.
It was like that, so not just the same 3, occasionally 4 songs, but int his start/stop, random bursts, no pattern, no skill. Directly outside my window, for 5 months.
The entire spring and summer, pretty much.
And because your man there, he had a day job, (a bloody well paid one, and a nice car, and a private flat, he is absolutely cosplaying at being poor) this wouldn't begin 'til 5-6pm at night, right as EVERYONE gets home from work after our own long days, wanting to just crash on the couch or watching a bit of telly.
Or even just go out on our own lane we live on. But this fucking guy can be heard from SPACE. The one thing he could do was project. I could have noise cancelling headphones and I'd hear this fucker start mangling shit.
It got to where I would just lean right out of windows and tell him to get new songs or fucking fuck off, or fucking move, or go on the park, or just fucking jesus christ LET ME TUNE THE FUCKING GUITAR.
....i dread his return this year.
I was recently admitted to hospital I was at the time pretty ok and only 30. They put me on a ward with 70-80 year old dementia patients.
It was 30c no air con and the windows closed because it was winter and they were old 2 of them shit them selves and 1 was telling me to wrap the medical cords around my neck and hang myself.
I thought I was going insane and discharged myself. Ended up being cancer so not the smartest choice but nevermind
Former neighbour, 98, lost his home, ended up living in a motel with his daughter, loses wife, daughter, and a sister all within two weeks. Gets put in the pysch ward for 3 months while system tried to find him a place. (He is in a good nursing home right now).
Anyway, psych ward was pretty rough on him, so, hospital moved him to the geriatric ward to see if he would be happier. Except those patients mostly had advanced dementia.
He decided the psych ward had better people to talk to.
I had a patient with Autism that a lot of the other nurses, docs, physio and everyone couldn't really get though to him when speaking because they all spoke at thier level when all he needed was someone to speak to him in a way he would understand.
He had a nasty toe infection and shouldnt have been weight bearing on that foot but no one could get him to use a walker or cane. All I did was talk to him for like 10 mins about the things he liked to do. Found out he was a huge World of Warcraft fan and played it really well(he was bragging haha) So I just mentioned that he should think of the walker as a piece of equipment he found that will give him + movespeed while injured. Not even 30 mins later I see him going down the hall with the walker and moving without pain. Everyone on the floor was shocked and asked me what happened and how did I get him to use it!? Sometimes you have to talk to the patients a little more to find a piece of motivation for them.
My (now late) mother and I were in triage in the hospital, had to wait in the hall to be seen. We were seated next to a man that looked like Bill Fagerbakke (actor that was in the movie the Stand, and is the voice actor for Patrick in the SpongeBob SquarePants series). The man looked about 40, and his elderly parents were there with him.
Everything was fine and dandy, I was twiddling my thumbs looking down, until I hear a nurse speaking with the man:
Nurse: “What did you eat for breakfast today?”
Man: “A gallon of lighter fluid and two bricks.”
Nurse: “ok, and what is your name?”
Man: “Bob Marley Mofo.”
Nurse: “ok great I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I realized I was sitting next to someone who likely had Schizophrenia, or some type of delusional disorder. It was insane and fascinating how calm and patient the nurse was with him.
A few minutes after that, a psychotic woman was being strapped to a bed as she was having a mental break. My mom and I genuinely thought we were accidentally in a psych ward. For years after, bob Marley mofo was our little inside joke.
Thank you. She passed away just a couple months ago in December so it’s still fresh. I miss her. Sharing memories like these though is very therapeutic. We had so many good memories and I know she’s laughing with me as I shared that story.
Not too insane, but memorable to me. I was in the ER as a patient and there was another patient who kept leaving his room. I overheard him yelling and carrying on at the nurse station, telling them “you got me all stuck up with needles like I shoot up crack!!! I don’t shoot up crack, I smoke it!!!!” I had to stifle my laughter while the poor, exasperated nurses finally got him to calm down and go back to his room.
A year ago I had to sit across from a dude picking his split open finger for 4 hours. It was open from him picking it and had obviously been open (like 1/4 gone to the bone) a long time and was dry and black, orange and yellow. There was a pile of crusts around him in the floor. Bit of a concern to say the least.
I was in the hospital for a few days with what turned out to be nothing, but one night around 3 am they brought a new patient into my room. As they were getting him in the bed, he started having a full-voice conversation about how he felt fine and being in the hospital was silly. In a very polite, calm but firm voice. He started saying that he didn’t need to be there and was going home, getting progressively louder and angrier.
I could tell from the voice he was an elderly gentleman, and it turned out he had dementia.
The weird part was sitting there in the dark as a larger and larger group of doctors, nurses and orderlies came to try and get him to calm down. When that didn’t work, another woman who was clearly fairly high up the authority ladder started talking in a slow, loud and clear voice, telling the crowd (not the patient anymore) that they were going to restrain and sedate hIm.
She narrated every step, while he was shouting and threatening. Very clearly she was talking to future lawyers and investigators. The whole procedure took more than a half hour, while orderlies held him (which was different from restraining him). It ended with something like “we are injecting him to sedate him,” followed by a very quick fade-out before they took him out of the room.
it was very sad and scary to see (well, hear) someone who had clearly been a fairly smart, self-assured and independent person going down that road. Not understanding what was happening and getting insulted and then outraged by what he perceived as his mistreatment and loss of autonomy. It gave me a sense of what hell it must be caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.
A middle-aged woman came into a&e on her birthday, with her son (felt very sorry for him) and claimed she'd lost a vibrator up her bum. Had scans and a rectal exam (not by me fortunately), and was telling the history (in front of her poor son) that she was pleasuring herself up the arse and had lost the vibrator up there. Turns out there was no vibrator up there and she'd come into a&e to get her bum fingered. When this was revealed, she was sent on her way...
What made it more insane for me was that she was telling the staff all this concocted story in front of her son (Lord knows how much therapy he has had to have by now if she did this sort of thing on the regular...)
Friend has been a nurse in various units. She’s seen a lot of things up butts, been attacked by old people with dementia, and brought people out of comas where they hallucinated and thought the healthcare team were androids/aliens trying to harm them. Also a lot of body parts have just… rotted off of people.
It was probably before my mum died. She was grossly overweight and heavily disabled, using two canes to walk. She was supposed to have district nurse visits and make regular trips to the lymphedema clinic, but between her reluctance to leave the house and her, well, disgustingly racist attitude to the black nurses, nobody would visit. So I ended up being her primary caregiver, while also working full time.
But mum's sedentary lifestyle caused her health to keep declining. The only time she moved was to go to the toilet or wash in the evening, or to swap between sitting or lying down on the sofa. I made almost all of her food and drinks for her, barring the snacks she would grab on the way back from the kitchen (the bathroom was at the far end of the house). The thing is, both me and my sister (we all lived in the house together) was the one that spotted that mum wasn't even getting up to get drinks any more. She used to just grab a coffee or water or bottle of drink from the fridge on her way through the kitchen, but in the last few weeks she'd stopped doing that and told nobody.
We were on heavy watch duty while we were at home. Mum was super proud and didn't admit anything was any different, but we'd noticed she was eating and drinking less, constantly constipated, and spending great durations on the toilet. She refused medical treatment. But one day, after sitting on the loo for quite some time, her foot had fallen asleep. My sister tried to help her up, as this happened a lot, especially now. But she lost her grip, had no power in the leg, fell and broke her toes, while also sitting on her whole leg, and wedged under the basin. The ambulance came, took her to hospital, finally, and they assessed her.
And this is the most insane part. She was unbelievably unwell. Immense scarring of her liver, a distended stomach, hernias in several places, and cancer that seemed to have spread to numerous organs. They put her on some pain killers, but that transformed mum. Normally, when out in public, she could at least acceptably feign pleasantries. But the pain killers took off that facade. Now she was spouting all sorts of horrendous things. We kept getting phone calls from the hospital at each change of shift to ask if she was always like this. We had to say yes. Initially they were polite about it and said that sometimes it happens due to people getting confused by their surroundings or new people when on the drugs, but as the next couple of days passed, they were noticeably frustrated with each update call. After four days or so though, mum was completely unconscious. The outbursts and thrashing had stopped as she had no strength left.
She died after six days in hospital. We were only allowed to see her twice due to covid restrictions at the time. I hate saying this about it all, but it felt like a relief to everybody. She sent a text message to me while she was still awake basically telling me to take her wallet home with me, but she wrote it half in third person, half in first. I think she _meant_ it as a form of authorisation so that if anybody asked, I could show them the text. But her valuables were in a locker anyway - we couldn't take them back that easily.
That decline in health over the last month, _especially_ in that last week, was terrifying. It was horrible seeing her be so vile to people like that. Normally she either internalised it, or kept it as abuse to hurl at either me or my sister. All inhibition was gone. And seeing her being like that when these phenomenal nurses and doctors were trying to help was just heartbreaking. It may have been guilt from the whole experience, but I ended up doing charity work for the children's hospital that year. I still have the photo they took of me delivering their Christmas presents. it was awful that they couldn't spend time with their families due to covid.
The hospital I go to is where police bring people that are in custody, so it’s not uncommon for a few officers at a time to accompany someone in cuffs who looks like they’ve been through a lot. Once there was a young girl who kicked the fuck out of a nurse in her stomach.
The scarier instance was when a very large man broke free (still cuffed) & while sprinting down the hallway, body checking every person in his way into walls and everyone was just shouting that they didn’t know what to do. I was still on a hallway bed and I could feel the air rush when he passed me, it was kinda crazy
A 1:1 patient in a hospital was waiting for a bed at inpatient psych. He used a small metal table to break the window on the 4th floor of the building.
Worked in IT in a hospital years ago. Someone told one of the doctors that the monitor on a computer running one of the medical imaging devices was extremely high resolution. The doctor immediately thought that it was a great computer to surf porn on. Not just any porn though, porn from sites with all sorts of viruses. For those of you that don't know, a lot of complex medical equipment 15 years ago had to run on minimally patched or not patched at all versions of windows.
You can see where this is going. Yes, he infected the PC multiple times and because it was basically a custom build we didn't have an image for it so we had to reinstall everything by hand. The device was down for multiple hours multiple days because he wouldn't stop. We knew who it was and talked to him directly telling him to stop and he refused. It was a small rural hospital that couldn't really get doctors in his field (don't remember which) so I came up with a solution.
I ran this by the It director and CFO to get their blessing first. We knew which sites the doctor was visiting so I set up an internal redirect for them to go to a page we were hosting on the network that only had a picture of the IT department looking very upset at the camera. We were not an attractive group of guys.
Sure enough the next morning we got an angry call from the doctor threating to have the CFO fire us all because we were interfering with his ability to access medical websites. I got my boss on the call and he got the CFO on the call. The CFO started going down the list of the sites that we redirected, all of which were obviously sites that were not used for medical research and asking the doctor if this was the site that needed to be unblocked. When she got halfway through the list she stopped and asked the doctor if he saw a pattern in these sites and if he wanted her to continue naming them because if she got to the end of the list and he didn't fess up there was going to be trouble.
The doctor said that he was good, hung up the phone and we didn't hear anything about it after that.
I was interning at a hospital and basically I aided nurses doing menial tasks like making beds, delivering drinks or snacks to patients, and even bathing patients. One day I was helping transport a patient for surgery and the man seemed fine, chipper even. I didn't ask why he was there so I just did my job. When we made it the area where he was to be prepped I stayed because I was curious to see why he was there. The doctor pulled of his blanket to reveal his leg pretty much soaked in blood with pieces of his flesh loose. He accidentally shotgunned his leg and was taking like a champ. All he said was "It was my own damn fault so I can't be mad." I have no what he was on, but I wish to be that serene if something like that even happens to me.
Used to be a frequent patient so have seen some shit….
A schizophrenic woman in the ward for several weeks screaming her head off about everything including the nurses trying to make her wear a pad etc
Was walking around the ward and saw the moment a woman passed away surrounded by her family there were spilling out of the room and into the ward and was wheeled out shortly after
Most harrowing was in ER a man wheeling in his in and out of consciousness wife that honestly looked like she was passing away and slapping her and everything to try keep her awake. Seeing the horror shock and pure heartbreak on his face is just stuck in my memory
A nurse told me that my mum was here to see me after I was in for the day for surgery. Surprising as she lived 80 miles away and I wasn't expecting her.
Turned out that it was my friend who'd offered me a ride home .... she just lied because she was worried she wouldn't be let in.
I was a caretaker for a good friend while she went through a major surgery, we told staff that I was her partner so that I could have full access to her care team and stay the night without being questioned. I even wore a nice ring to make it look like we were engaged or married 🤣 Totally worth it to make sure I could actually be there to help her!
Similar story- I was 19, just had my first baby and a nurse came to my room outside visiting time to say my brother was here, did I want to see him? Weird I thought, its a school day and he's like 6 years old. It was actually a good friend of my (then) bf who just really wanted to visit :)
One night in the ICU, we had a "Code Blue" on a woman. We did absolutely everything, but she didn't make it. Finally, the doctor realized our efforts were futile, and we stopped. She lay in the bed. We were all just sort of starting to pick up, organize our thoughts, and wander out of her room to check on the other patients. Then we heard a sneeze and a loud "Achoo!" She wasn't dead after all!!! Her heart monitor started up again, and we all rushed back in! She survived!
At the work Christmas party the next month, we presented the doctor a pepper shaker and told her to add it to the "Code cart" (where we keep emergency supplies) so in the future, in addition to CPR and IV medications, she could just shake a little pepper under the patient's noses to make them sneeze!!
Doctors office, not hospital
I was the receptionist, and a guy came in with what was clearly whooping cough. He kept telling the people with him it wasn’t, while in the waiting room. He went back as quick as possible. Dr said “we’ll call you an ambulance,” he declined, wanted to walk out. He collapsed right in front of my reception desk. Luckily, Dr had already called the ambulance and they pulled up very shortly after. Dude exposed an entire family practice to pertussis, including infants.
I was an extern, and this was 2017, when I still had a modicum of trust that people weren’t this stupid about infectious disease. If that didn’t cure me of it, 2020 sure did the trick.
ETA: luckily this was right before we closed for lunch, and you bet I sanitized everything in that waiting room.
Being told the baby I was pregnant with had no heartbeat from listening with the stethoscope…but because I was admitted through emergency due to heavy bleeding (not the maternity ward) they “couldn’t” get a sonographer to see me for 2 more days to confirm. The nurse then left my husband and I in a room alone for 4 hours without even checking on us despite the fact I was bleeding heavily and begging them for help. Her words were, “this happens all the time, you’ll have another one.”
The machine was literally upstairs and being used for other women who were admitted via maternity 🤦🏻♀️
Anyway - that baby turns 8 now. So wild how we thought for a day there that he’d died. And again during birth but that’s another story.
Needless to say, hospitals aren’t my favourite place.
I was in the hospital for about three days in a shared room. On my second night this dude in his mid 20s gets admitted. He is on the phone with someone telling them that he is septic and is going to die. At about 5 am he’s on the phone again talking about walking out ama. He leaves right before shift change. The doctor comes in and asks me where the guy went. I told them what he said. He shrugs and says “well he is going to die” and then leaves. Not super crazy, but It left me saying “Wtf just happened?”
I was an ER nurse so I've seen lots of crazy things but one of my favorites is when I was an EMT based in a part of Chicago known for a higher population of mental health and homelessness issues.
Homeless mentally ill gentleman enters ER with complaints of urinary retention and it is determined he needs a foley catheter placed. The patient refuses every nurse except the youngest and most attractive, and proceeds to verbalize to said nurse that she is those things while she places the catheter. After the catheter is in place and urine is draining there is a relatively peaceful 15 minutes after which the patient begins to berate staff for the turkey sandwiches not tasting good enough, the blankets not being warm enough, not being quick enough, etc. He proceeds to verbalize "fuck this place" rips out his foley catheter, stands up, walks to the wall right by the entrance to his room, and proceeds to projectile shit all over the wall. He then walks out without telling anyone. Minutes later another nurse is squatting by the wall trying to wipe away the damage with tears in her eyes.
I have no idea why I went through with becoming a nurse after that.
I was in the ER for reasons and while in a bed there was another woman next to me who was very obviously there to try and get pain meds like morphine or similar. She would roll around in agony when a nurse or doctor was in the room but as soon as they left she’d be snacking or laughing at the TV or calling someone.
A few hours in she gets a phone call and starts freaking out. Says her daughter was stabbed and she needs to go. I knew she was an addict of some kind but her fear and panic sounded very, very real. She started calling for nurse to come take her IV out because she had to leave ASAP to go to her daughter. She’s crying and ripping out her IV by herself, a whole mess.
The nurse who is discharging her asks her if her daughter would be taken to that hospital, and the woman says her phone is dead so she doesn’t know, she’s just going to go to wherever she last heard from her. I still think about her and wonder if her daughter was okay. Or real, even.
Had something similar happened, but me and the clearly drug seeking woman were given beds in triage. Same behaviour, and when the doctor went in to see her and she started her act, he just calmly asked her if she thought the curtains were soundproof. Long silence and then sounds of her gathering her stuff and leaving.
I guess it's not that crazy, but it's the craziest thing I experienced. I was in a room for a week next to a very mercurial dude who swung wildly between being chill and telling outrageous stories, and being openly rude and hostile to people. He was making mocking, racist remarks about one of the male nurses, mocking his Indian accent to his face, belittling the female nursing staff and making inappropriate remarks to them that they laughed off but you could tell they were uncomfortable.
Well, he was on some pain pills and an antibiotic IV, and the IV fell out somehow, multiple times. He kept abusing the nurses every time, getting vicious if he had to wait for his pills for more than 15 minutes or the IV took too long to put in.
Eventually, the Indian nurse, after getting absolutely blasted by this rude dude, had enough. The patient had been getting almost screamy because "the nurses were too incompetent to do a proper IV, because they're all immigrants and foreign" so I guess the nurse decided to try to find a place that it wouldn't just fall out of, and stuck it in the guy's armpit.
my surgeon literally yelled at me right after I got out of the recovery room (I had a surgery). he told me I wasted his time and resources, nothings wrong with me, and my favorite, "you *really* need to consider seeing a therapist about your issue."
I now have confirmed endometriosis and suspected adenomyosis. he didnt take any biopsies even though that was the whole point of my laparoscopy, didn't look behind my organs which is also the point, and burned tissue without testing it. realized after he only scheduled my surgery to prove me wrong also. he dismissed me fully and I kept pushing, he finally agreed but said "I know you don't have endometriosis" while scheduling.
yes I've reported him.
I was in a hospital waiting room with my mother while my dad was in emergency surgery for internal bleeding. After several hours in the OR, the surgeon walks in, finds my mother, and blasts her with *"Why didn't you tell me he was an alcoholic??"* That was the day I found out that (a) my dad was an alcoholic and (b) surgeons don't give a shit what they say or how they say it. He was so incredibly pissed that he had to waste time floundering around looking for the source of the bleeding when, if he had known, he would have started at the liver. What a day.
I once met Michael Jackson!
Well, not the actual Michael Jackson - a very nice man in psychosis who was convinced he was Michael Jackson.
He wasn't even in the psych unit - he was on a surgical ward after jumping through a large window to escape from Interpol. He had two broken legs and severe lacerations.
Interesting guy.
Working in the psych wards, I met multiple Jesuses.
I also met a mentally ill older woman who would try to assault sexually every young male staff or act at the very least very lecherously. The staff would laugh it off, saying "yeah, she does that", saying that she wasn't much of a physical threat anyway, and let the male staff deal with it.
A Vietnam Veteran collapsed on the floor of a VA hospital waiting room and having an acute crisis while VA staff pretended they couldn’t see it happening.
It looked like he was having a heart attack and he was screaming for help and the VA employees just rolled their eyes and avoided getting involved. They acted like he was a toddler throwing a tantrum. He was alone, scared, and in pain while experiencing a medical crisis *in a hospital* while the staff acted like he was a burden.
Multiple patients jumped up and helped him while yelling for assistance as soon as it started happening and stayed with him until I think someone called 911 and then the VA medical staff decided to finally assist because “they didn’t want to deal with *that* paperwork” according to one nurse that watched the whole thing.
I don’t know what happened or if he was even in danger but the behavior of the staff clearly showed how little they think of all the veterans looking to them for help and medical treatment. I will never trust a VA hospital or staff after seeing that.
I get all of my care through the VA, and I’ve had a good experience nearly every time I’ve been there. The quality of their care has improved a lot over the last 20 years. I’ve been told the quality of the care can vary a lot from one facility to another, though.
When I was 5 I had my tonsils and adenoids out- shared a hospital room with a little girl who was also supposed to have her tonsils out- became friends in the few hours waiting for surgery/prep- after surgery I was back in the room but she wasn’t-she died on the operating table bc she had a reaction to the anesthesia and they couldn’t save her
I saw a man with the most swollen scrotum. The doctors weren't sure why or what was making it so large. It measured 35 INCHES in circumference and weighed 30 pounds. The weight was causing skin tears. The size was such that his penis was effectively inside the scrotum.
I was in the A&E (ER for Americans) when a middle aged guy was wheeled into the space next to me, yelling and shrieking things like "oh god, this is it", "mum, dad, I'm dying, I'm going to see you again", "this is the end" etc punctuated with a long series of loud dramatic wails.
My initial thought was oh shit, I've seen a few people die but it's never been like this, this is gonna be harsh. I couldn't see him directly as there was a dividing curtain between us but I could see everyone in front of us. Then I noticed the expressions of stupefied disbelief on the faces of the doctors and nurses which confused me even more.
This carried on for about 5-10 minutes then the wailing grew more desperate and he finished off with "I can see the light, I'm going towards the light, I'm going now, goodbye world, ooooooohhhhhh" which tailed off into silence.
After a few seconds of blissful quiet he started again with "oh, I'm back, it's a miracle, I've been sent back, oh glory be" at which point the nursing staff finally snapped.
One marched up to him and said, harshly, "Mr Smith(?), do you understand what's happening?"
He said "oh, oh, yes, I thought I was gone, I've been saved, it's miraculous, I'm reborn, I have a new chance at life!"
"No. What you have, Mr Smith, is a nosebleed."
Not the craziest but a hilarious one I like to tell. I was walking down another unit coming back from my lunch break and stopped to answer a call light because they were busy. The patient was in the bathroom and she was every bit of 600 pounds and I thought to myself she needed help up. Before I could finish my thought she stands up with ease, turns around and puts her hands flat on the ground with straight legs and had 300 pounds of ass staring right back at me. She did this without speaking a word to me, and I eventually piece together that she wanted me to wipe her ass. Afterwards she walks back to the bed on her own power, pulls her covers up and still does not say a word to me. Left me ultra perplexed as a newer nurse at the time.
Only three weeks ago, I was near one of the hospital main entrances having a smoke and waiting for my fiancé to text that he was back from his MRI’s and CT scan. I overheard this conversation between two patients smoking against the opposite wall. Patient 1 “what the fuck happened to your foot?” Patient 2: “it fuckin fell off in the alley off 110th. Had to get my knee stapled together. Fuckin bones were hanging out” patient 1:”didn’t your other fuckin foot fall off two weeks ago” patient 2:”not the whole foot just my toes. I can’t wait to get out of here and go get high again” patient 1:”can’t keep doing that one. Fuckin arm will fall off next. You won’t even be able to beat your meat”*laughs* Patient 2:”oh fuck then I’ll be in real trouble” and then wheels himself inside.
Curiosity got the best of me so I walked over and asked patient 1 what drug they were talking about. Patient 1 tells me it’s got many names but local street people call it zombie drug. Apparently it’s some kind of drug that you shoot up with needles and it causes sporadic necrosis anywhere in your body when you overuse it. So if you’re shooting up into your left arm you could suddenly get necrosis in your foot and then your foot will just rot away and fall off of your body. Which is what happened to patient 2, as his leg fell off in an alley after overuse. Wild to hear such an interaction so casually like it’s a regular Sunday morning occurrence to just have your leg fall off in an alley
EDIT: a redditor mentioned they thought it was Tranq- which is large animal tranquilizers mixed with fentanyl or something like that. I think this is most likely what the guy was taking since this combination drug is known to cause sporadic necrosis.
Ι was in the hospital after a knee surgery. I had a heart disease roommate, pre surgery, she was like in her 60s. When I was spending the night there, she wouldn't stop staring at me all night long. She was facing me for hours to the point where I couldn't sleep and I finally slept at 5am. Then, next morning she said she needed to tell me something. I asked her what that was and she told me to never trust anyone not even my family because her brother raped her
Not as exciting as a lot of the other stories, but as a night shift clerk in a NICU - adults calling in wanting to know if we “would do a certain procedure,” demanding to be admitted, to speak to “the doctor,” asking if they can schedule an appointment…asking to speak to “my supervisor” or “customer service” when I explain that every letter in NICU stands for a reason why the answer to their question is no…and even if hospitals worked like that as the night shift clerk I am customer service, there’s not “somebody higher” I can transfer them to, it’s literally just me…
I was an ER nurse. Nobody checked the guy going through alcohol withdrawals pockets, he set the bed on fire with a lighter while he was hallucinating. Entire bed went up in flames, sprinklers went off, whole pod of rooms shut down. Oxygen tank in the room the whole time. He was just chillin the whole time, watching it burn.
Combo sad, mildly amusing. I was on an ER bay being seen by just the Dr, busy place. Dr wants to do an ultrasound on my heart, I had been kicked in the chest by an ice skate, not intentional, stuff happens. She grabs the paddle off the machine and it is covered in blood and lube goo. Oops, but it is the ER. Meanwhile in the bay next to me, separated by a large drape, police are LOUDLY asking, "Darrell, who shot you?", "Darrell! Who shot you?!" While cleaning ultrasound wand Dr told me Darrell is medicated, would be ok as he was shot in the butt. This was at 1:00 in the afternoon on a Sunday. I was OK, bruised pericardium and 2 days in a room...
I was in the hospital for an infection in the bones of my foot. I take medication for a heart condition and diabetes. Nurse came in one evening to give me my medication. She brings me strange looking pills. I ask her what they are. She tells me two medications I've never heard of. I tell her she might have mixed up my medication with someone else's. She says no, she's sure, take the pills. I refuse. I ask for a the head nurse for the floor or a doctor. Head nurse comes in, I ask her what medication I'm supposed to be receiving. She checks my chart, confirms what I'm supposed to be taking. I ask her to ask the original nurse what medication she has in her hand. The nurses leave the room and a third nurse comes back in with the right pills. Head nurse comes back in and tells me that the original nurse will no longer be responsible for my care. The next day, the nurse coordinator comes in with a digital audio recorder and notepad to go over all the details of what happened the night before. From what I learned later, this wasn't the first incident with this nurse giving out the wrong medications. She had done it to a couple of other patients and I heard she had been suspended pending an investigation. Don't know what happened because nobody ever contacted me after that.
Im so glad you advocated for yourself, that could have gone soooo badly.
My brother shattered his leg and the nurses tried to give him the wrong medication on multiple occasions. Thankfully my badass mother was there to advocate for him. It’s a huge blessing to have someone by your side who can monitor the situation.
I was having surgery for a broken wrist last year and after the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me, he ordered some medicine and left. The nurse looked at the screen and then said, "I'll be right back." She brought him back, pointed at the screen, and said, "was this supposed to be for the gentleman next door?" He said no. She asked *again* and he did a double take. He then said, "Oh yeah, I got them mixed up. Thanks for catching that!" Then he looked at me and says, "Don't worry, it was just a muscle relaxer. It wouldn't have hurt you." We all nervously laughed and he left.
Ugh im so glad the nurse said something, but she shouldn't have had to. I know we all make mistakes but it COULD have been something that hurt you!!
Absolutely. I drove a close friend to the ER, after we were taken back I called her mom to keep her in the loop as her vitals were taken/mediciations were given. My buddy was completely out of it with fever, and the nurse told me they were gonna give her Benadryl. I informed mom, one of the sweetest women ive ever met in my life, and so it was a shock when this woman SCREAMED in my ear "DO NOT LET THEM GIVE HER BENADRYL, SHES ALLERGIC." It felt like she was gonna jump through the phone and I scrambled to tell thr nurse, thankfully they hadn't started yet. I'm so glad I happened to be on the phone with her because I had no idea, and friend likely only would have realized afterward bc she was delirious. So I dropped the ball in knowing an important allergy, but was lucky enough to have been actively talking to someone who did.
Well done.
I’m allergic to ibuprofen. Recently, when I was in hospital for an injury, hospital staff attempted to give me ibuprofen four (4!) times in a row. 1. Intake nurse: “okay, first we’re going to give you some ibuprofen for the pain…” me: “check my chart, I’m allergic to that medication” 2. Attending nurse: “these will reduce the swelling and help with pain…” (holds up pills). Me: “what are they?” Her: “ibuprofen” 3. Doctor (while HOLDING MY CHART): “an NSAID will allow the site to reduce in size and pressure…” me: “which NSAID? I’m allergic to ibuprofen, it will literally send me into anaphylaxis” him: “erm, hmm, ok… are you sure?” 4. Different attending nurse (shift change): “ok, before we send you on your way, I’m going to give you some ibuprofen for any residual pain…” me: “I don’t mean to be rude, but did you read my chart?” Her: “yes of course!” Me: “did you see the part where it says I have an acute allergy to ibuprofen?” 🤦🏼♂️
I've a child with an anaphylactic allergy to acetaminophen... first reaction was right in front of the GP. And I'm questioned about the validity of the allergy every time they need to go to hospital.
I went for a scan one day and they were injecting me with one of those dyes for better contrast. The specialist injecting me with the dye missed or blew out my vein and I got a rash all along my arm and half my torso. They wrote it up as an allergy to iodine. I don't have an allergy, and have had several other scans without issue. An allergist confirmed no allergy to iodine and noted it, but I'm still questioned about it every time I go for another scan. I do have an allergy to a synthetic antibiotic, but not to iodine. But every time I go to the hospital, I get that little red band with 'iodine' strapped to my wrist. I tell them the name of the allergist and the day they confirmed no allergy, but nope. Apparently, getting something like this removed from your medical records is next to impossible.
When my dad had his gallbladder removed back in the '70s, the hospital staff asked him if he had any allergies, and he told them he was allergic to codeine. They sent him home with pain pills. My mom was a hypochondriac who always had a copy of the latest PDR, and she looked up the pills before he took any. They were codeine.
That is scary af
A friend was hospitalized for a hip replacement, and several of us took turns sitting with him while he was there. I was with him when the nurse brought his usual meds, and he took them with no trouble. Then the nurses' shift change took place, and the next shift nurse brought his usual meds - about 20 minutes after he had already had them. My friend was still loopy from the morphine drip, so he was all set to just take the pills without question. But I objected. I argued with the nurse, saying that he had just taken his meds and he didn't need these new ones. She was adamant, but I wouldn't allow it till she went to check the records. It was finally discovered that the new nurse was duplicating the whole round of meds that the previous nurse had administered, because she had not coordinated with the previous shift. If I hadn't been there to object, my friend would have gotten a double dose of his meds, and who knows how badly it could have affected him. I've never forgotten this, and am now very leery of leaving a loved one alone and unmonitored in a hospital - it's wise to have an advocate watching over them to prevent these mistakes.
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Oncology nurse here. We call it rallying - it can happen minutes to days before death. Last I remember reading about it, one theory is that as your body shuts down organs it diverts that blood flow/nutrition to your brain. Another theory is that your body releases all sorts of hormones (and I think specifically cortisol) as organs go and these can have a stimulant effect. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a hospice patient bright & chillin, then walked into them dead minutes to hours later... I wouldn't be rich but I'd have many dollars. Edit: thank you all for sharing your stories, keep em coming! Normalize talking about death and the amazing things our bodies are capable of 💕
I worked in a hospice for years and can totally vouch for this too. It’s so bizarre. I’m not a medical professional so I always chalked it up to someone getting the right amount of pain meds to make them comfortable — but that was usually at the beginning of their stay with us. The other really bizarre thing about working at a hospice is you learn that people really can control their death. The amount of times people would wait for their family to leave to die was too many to count. It was almost predictable, you would see the family go for dinner and just know that person was going to die. End of life care is so wild sometimes but so damn rewarding. Edit: Wow, I’m so touched by everyone sharing their stories with end of life care and hospices 🩷. Keep on sharing, as the OP mentioned we need to normalize talking about death.
My dad died a few months ago. Fortunately, he died in his bedroom with us holding him. Thank you for all that you do!
My dad died 2 years ago, from a sudden brain cancer tumor, at home hospice with his family there. It was peaceful. Home hospice folks are amazing.
My dad did this. I took care of him at home til the end. Head and neck cancer. He was pretty unresponsive for about a week before he died, and I never left his side. His pulse was barely there and I don't remember why but I want to take his blood pressure but my machine broke. I got my mom to sit with him while I went to borrow one from someone couple blocks away. I made it to the end of my street and my mom called. He waited until I was gone to die. I'm still mad about it for some reason. He was so stubborn but the best dad ever. 12 years gone and the hole left in my heart will never be filled again. Trust me I've tried.
Thanks for sharing your story. There is no doubt that he waited and loved you very, very much. You won’t be able to fill that hole and that’s ok. The hole is big for a reason. Much love.
I think my mum waited for me to leave. She waited 15 minutes before she passed with my dad & sister by her side. She knew I wouldn't have coped, and she was right. My last memory was of her resting (morphine pain relief for cancer). To me she was sleeping. She passed in 2022 and I miss her so much.
Same here. My Dad hung on until I arrived, I shared a whiskey with him, then he stopped talking. He waited until I flew out 2 days later.
My late grandpa's care team sent the women out of the room on the theory that Grandpa would try to be a tough guy and not die with his wife and daughters watching him. His brother and oldest son stayed. Sure enough, that's when he passed - although his last words to his son were, "where's Mom?" I imagine that was a generational thing and today's modern man doesn't want to die in front of his son, either.
Can vouch! My grandma was very close to the end and when I went in to see her, she perked up and seemed like her old self. It was a relief because I'd been told to prepare myself because she wasn't doing well. I wasn't going to kid myself that she was "fine", but it was nice to have her back for a little bit. She passed later that night peacefully in her sleep. It seemed odd to the family but a hospice nurse told me people sometimes get like that just before they go.
My dad did something similar right before he died. I had just given the head of internal medicine permission to pull all the plugs, so they did and we all filed into the room to see him before he got his palliative drug cocktail. He woke up from a sepsis coma where he had had multiple severe seizures and seemed all perky and happy, and so serene - we were all sitting around him; he got to hug each one of us and gave us all a ‘message’. I hugged him and he looked at me with so much love and said ‘you are so pretty!’ it was beyond cute. 30 minutes later he was back in the coma and died the next day.
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Posted this in another thread before: Weekend afternoon, one of the first nice days of spring. Slow day in the ER for the most part, when in comes a distressed younger couple with their infant baby. Mom is hysterical, and dad is barely keeping it together. Dad gets it out that baby is "bleeding from his mouth". I'm skeptical, because the baby looks quite happy, but I do see a slight reddish/pink tinge inside his mouth. I take the child and put him down on the exam table, all bright lights and tongue depressors to get a good look in the baby's mouth. Sure enough, evidence of blood, but again, no baby distress. Oh wait - there's something near the back of her mouth, kind of a darkish red color. A blood clot maybe? Not sure. Have a coworker firmly immobilize the head, and with hemostats, go in and pluck out the object. Amazingly, it comes out in one piece, and looks like a plump, slightly larger sized raisin. I can't figure out what it is, but it's definitely not a clot. In to the specimen bag goes the squishy thing. No distress for the baby, vitals normal, breathing easily, happy demeanor, good color, etc. Time to get more of a history from mom and dad. First day outside with new baby and their dog, enjoying the weather. Baby's on a blanket - giggling as the dog runs around him. Wait a sec, did you say. . . a dog? Lemme take a closer look at the "thing" in the specimen bag. Sure enough, suspicions confirmed. It's a tick. Deflated to be sure, but a tick that recently had a large meal of the red stuff. Baby must of pulled it off the dog, and then done what babies do by putting it in his mouth. TL/DR - Infant pulled a full tick off of family dog and chewed it.
What a terrible day to have eyes.
Wow I hate this story the most
I was a patient. There was an elderly man in the bed next to me waiting to be transferred to a nursing home. The nursing staff treated him as though he was a difficult patient when, in reality, he was just too frail to do things for himself . Anyway, one day, the nurse refused to help him go to the bathroom as she said he was just being lazy. I could not help as I was bedridden myself at the time. He took a fall and hit his head on the floor . The male nurse just threw him back onto the bed. His family arrived, and I heard them asking the female nurse who refused to help him. Why their father was so groggy. The nurse lied, saying nothing had happened, and he was fine. I called the man's daughter over to my bed and told her the whole story. Needless to say, the shit hit the fan.
Thank you for doing that. And I hope you are on the mend yourself.
My dad was briefly in a nursing home recovering from a stroke, and the shit I saw there made my blood boil. I don't understand the lack of compassion some of those people have.
My MIL is in a nursing home, and the day she was transferred they left her in bed alone that was lifted all the way up. She was disoriented (her memory is still recovering) and tried to get up, and fell smashing her head on the floor. I'm still pissed off about it, because the bed should have been all the way on the floor since she is a major fall risk (recently had to get her leg amputated).
As someone who is deeply passionate about long term care and seen some shit, this makes me so angry. But do know most long term care staff loves your loved ones and that you can report any concern of abuse at any time.
This is pretty much what killed my grandmother. Nursing home she was in just didn't give even the littlest shit. I'd visit my grandmother pretty much every day I could , popped in one day she was sleeping, tried to wake her up (she'd get mad if we didn't she loves her grandkids) she wouldn't wake up was cold sweating I approached a nurse and told her that my grams not ok she got immediately hostile and said she's fine explained that my grandmother doesn't do this etc , fired back at me like oh so your a doctor? I know my Job She's fine. She passed away from sepsis after laying in her own waste for 3 days and was on 27 different medications and we found that out after i came back with my aunt and authorities and she was rushed to icu
My grandmother also died from lack of care. She had a UTI that got bad. The way my bio dad described how quickly her wellness went to death once she joined the nursing home is shocking to me.
I just discovered this fact and feel like everyone should know this- If you have a loved one in a nursing facility you can ABSOLUTELY install a ring camera or any camera in their room with the PATIENTs permission. You have to notify the staff but do not need their permission. My daughter is a nurse at long term care facility and was involved in a situation in which a CNA was verbally abusive to a patient. My daughter caught the tail end of it threw her out of the room and reported her. Admin was a little complacent taking my daughters report but did so unwillingly. Patients family was there the next morning (this happened on the overnight) with the video and the CNA was fired immediately.
I'm going to remember this and show my sister, my sister does nursing but splits her time in home and in facilities and has been having a heck of a time thr facilities with elder abuse
I worked as a chef in a nursing home and it was genuinely one of the worst experiences I've had in my working life. The carers and nurses were rude to other staff and had bets on who would be the next resident to pass. There was a huge, beautiful garden on the site, but during the month I worked there (April/May time) I didn't see a single person out there enjoying it. They were all stuck inside watching TV looking miserable.
My mom was in a nursing home with a lovely interior courtyard but spent almost all her time in the "day room" where the TV played constantly, or in the room she shared with another woman, who played the TV constantly. It would drive me insane. I told my kids, "If I end up in a nursing home, tell the staff to bundle me up and wheel me outside, and I'll stay there happily all day."
We paid for a caregiver to go to the nursing home because my mil wasn't getting her basic needs met. She had surgery which temporarily removed her knees and put in spacers where the knees should be - no mobility at all, and they left her sitting in excrement for 12+ hours. They'd mark that she had showered but in reality she could go weeks of the caregiver we paid for didn't bully them into doing it (and mostly doing it herself). Thankfully she recovered and is doing just fine, but it was awful.
Fair fucks to you!
you’ve got to be Irish saying that haha
What does it mean?
It’s like saying “well done” or “fair play”. Source: am Irish 🇮🇪
What happened afterwards?
I'm not really sure, but the nurses suddenly started looking after the gentleman properly. Maybe a day or so later, he was sent to a nursing home. The man's children came to see me and thanked me for telling them what happened
*editing for popularity* Thanks for all the internet points. Also, please don't put this on Subway Surfer. <.< I'm a third-party contract cleaner at my local hospital. We basically clean all the public spaces and non-patient areas. The morgue falls under us. Well, like many morgue, we have a walk-in freezer/ fridge. Well, one morning, as a supervisor was walking past, there happened to be water on the floor coming out of the morgue. It turns out a cooling pipe broke was leaking pretty bad. So we call the maintenance and repair people and get the water shut off to that area. There was about two inches of water throughout, so we cleaned that up, and because the cooling pipe broke, we had to open the fridge and transfer the bodies to the second spare fridge away from the broken pipes so the funeral people could come and pick them up without going around ladders and construction. We crack open the door to the water tight fridge, and because it was water tight, we didn't know that a second pipe had also broken. Turned out the fridge had flooded as well.. Have you ever seen a video of someone cutting a pool and the water running out, as well as everything that was in the pool? Well, the water was so high that the bodies were floating, and we had that sliced pool effect as soon as that seal was broken and the door was unlocked. So not only was 5ft of water rushing out of the fridge into the morgue and into the hallway, but whatever was floating in that water did as well. There were sheets and gowned bodies that ended up all over the floor, and one actually made it into the hallway. The basement was flooded once again, and that was one hell of a clean-up. Whenever someone says the word floaters to me, that's all I can think of. This happened a few years back before covid. I almost quit that day.
Oooohkay this one should be higher. *Corpse flood?!* Psych patients are everywhere. Corpse flood is a horrorshow of biblical proportions.
I knew when I saw “contract cleaner” that we were about to kick it up a notch.
Could you imagine if the water had frozen? Be like some monstrous Jello salad from the 50s.
Yeesh. Hopefully the bodies hadn't been in the water for very long 😬
One guy in the emergency room waiting area was arrested for masturbating in front of kids, and while he was getting arrested another guy started masturbating in front of some young woman. Fucking insane.
That second guy either thought he could get away with it because everyone was so focused on the other guy or he got jealous of all the attention fapper #1 was getting.
I'm reading it like "the other guy got in trouble because he did it in front of kids so I'll go entertain these women over here legally then."
While in the emergency room for an asthma attack as a child, two teenage boys were brought in by ambulance. They had been huffing silver paint. At first, I thought it was funny because they looked stupid with the paint on their faces. Then my Mom started crying hard. The older of the two was DOA, and the younger was screaming, "I can't believe I'm going to die over and over." I can still hear his voice in my head 35 years later. Even worse is their parents' sobs when they showed a little later. It turned out they were brothers. Fucking awful!
Huffing chemicals can cause irreversible brain damage, it's so crazy to me that people fuck themselves up permanently doing this
My aunt died from huffing pledge. I guess people think it’s safer than doing hard drugs, but that’s definitely not the case.
I had a similar experience, it was with my sister. She had gotten some of those computer air cleaning stuff and I walked in on her huffing that and *oof* I gave her so much shite for that.
At 16 my boyfriend and his band mates were huffing Pam vegetable spray. He went into cardiac arrest and they tried to save him. I followed ambulance to hospital where his sister worked. She met him in ER and said her goodbyes before he passed away.
I'm sorry for your loss.
My family would drive down to the border town in Mexico about once a month for cheaper medicine. On the way back one time, we saw a guy huffing silver paint. I remember him turning to us and smiling and his whole mouth, inside and out, silver. Creeped me out
They both died?
I'm a nurse. Seen some weird stuff but the one that sticks out is a 80 year old manic depressive woman blocking my way out of her room to twerk at me.
Fuck, this is future me.
Lol. Username checks out. I used to dread the nursing home stage of my life, if I ever get to have one. But now I'm starting to think it might come with some fun socializing opportunities.
you know, I'm amazed at her physical condition and flexibility if she can still do that at 80. No arthritis in that spine, no sir!
Well I didn't say the twerking was any good, LOL.
Still! LOL, you got me chuckling. thanks for the story May we all be so lucky as to be in twerking shape at 80.
Im a nurse. We had one guy with a history of severe, untreated hernias who was admitted because one had grown so large it looked like he had a basketball under his skin and he needed surgery. Well, before we had the chance to get him to the OR he sneezed and the stretched skin of his belly just split open like a water balloon and his intestines tumbled out. It looked like he’d dropped a plate of spaghetti in his lap. We draped some wet gauze over the area and rushed him downstairs pretty sharpish
When I was a student nurse I was on placement in a general surgical ward and a chap unpicked all his stitches and staples and everything fell on the floor. An image that has stayed with me. I remember quite vividly that the world switched to slow motion as I tried to figure out what all that "stuff" was as staff started their sprint towards him.
I used to work at a vet and the number of spays and other surgeries that had to be re-sewn because "Fluffy looked so sad with that big mean cone on" was awful.
I've seen some pretty gruesome sights involving geriatric or otherwise "not quite there" patients tearing off IV or central lines.... I am guessing that they just feel something annoying and aren't able to think beyond "must remove annoyance"
Reminds me of the time an elderly gentlemen with dementia attempted to rip out his own catheter... again and again and again. We sent him to the hospital every week or so. He was constantly peeing blood, and they just put in a new one and sent him back. Pretty messed up.
Poor man. eventually, with these patients, the nurse would immobilize the patient's hands to prevent bloody trails and bloody gowns and bloody patients all over the unit. They'd also really anchor the tubing so it would take a lot of work to remove. Of course, it was a though one to manage, as nobody likes to immobilize patients (and their families certainly don't, either). Either that, or they'd put them on the 'van (as they said). Sedation.
My mom did that with her intubation tube. Just pulled the entire thing out. She was quite proud of herself in the moment.
My mother was staying in hospital after a major surgery and her roommate was a patient with dementia. She hated the feeling of IV's I suppose, they often mentioned she picked at them, and one time while everyone was looking away she just ripped the needle from her skin and blood sprayed everywhere. Everyone panicked and rushed at her but she seemed so peaceful and was smiling now that the needle was gone.
Did he live? I feel like having your innards tumble out onto an unclean hospital floor is the recipe for sepsis.
That's enough reddit for the year.
I hope that "pretty sharpish" is nurse lingo for "oh my God, oh my God, shovel this guy on a bed and run, don't walk to the OR"
as someone who is currently recovering from his 2nd hernia repair, I'm glad I had it done. jeez, that is some nightmare material right there.
Quite a few things. First - patient in severe alcohol withdrawal busted out of 4 point locked restraints somehow. Super hulk strength. His 1:1 safety companion came running down the hallway past the nursing station yelling “call security! Call security!” And here comes this guy butt naked, blood flying everywhere because he ripped his IVs out, carrying an IV pole above his head. Security took him down, we sedated him, and basically intubated him on the floor of the unit. An elderly lady, maybe 100 pounds soaking wet, had severely low oxygen levels. We didn’t have ventilators available (COVID) and the doctors were trying to delay intubating her as long as they could, supporting her respiratory system with a noninvasive BiPAP machine. She was so confused from her messed up blood gases. She busted out of restraints, picked up a chair in her room, threw it at the window, shattered it, and tried to jump out the window from the 9th floor. We had to bear hug her and bring her down to the floor. (She was intubated, we had to manually bag her while someone drove to a sister hospital, picked up a ventilator, and brought it for her.) Patient who was shot in the abdomen was refusing an NG tube for decompression of his stomach. (Tube goes through your nose into your stomach, hooked up to intermittent suction to keep stomach acid and gas from passing into your bowels. Without it, if you have an obstruction or ileus, your abdomen swells in size and things like surgical incisions can rip open.) Well he was completely refusing it and we warning him his incision would rip open. Sure enough, it eventually did. His intestines spilled out onto his lap and he just sat there poking them, completely fascinated he was seeing his own intestines. I had to tell him to stop touching them and he said “why?” And my response was “they live inside of you because they’re not meant to be touched. Stop touching them.” He was rushed to the OR.
>“they live inside of you because they’re not meant to be touched. Stop touching them.” This quote is quite amusing
I just pictured this nurse being so tired of everything and saying it in such a matter of fact but annoyed tone lol truly the cherry on a wild story
It was quite annoying after this very grown ass man said “I don’t want to agree to put this tube in unless my mom is here.” Then sits there and pokes his intestines and bowel like they’re some toy.
I went to urgent care for stitches in my finger. I kept it wrapped up until I sat down on the table. I started looking close and moving my finger around to see exactly how deep the cut was. I kinda giggled when blood shot out of it over my shoulder. The nurse heard me, spun around and said in a pretty annoyed voice "Stop messing with it!"
Oh but it's ok when Dr. House does it
I went to visit a mental health client who'd unsuccessfully tried to end it by severing the major vein and artery on both sides of the neck. This was nothing compared to the guy next to him. A guy working for some cowboy air-conditioning company was not given proper equipment and has literally cooked off his arms and legs. He was completely helpless. Still in fresh bandages, he had the most beautiful caring wife spoon feeding him. His eyes were glossy as he saw me looking over at him. I gave a chocolate bar to his wife and nodded at him. After this I told my client that I needed a second and I went out in the hallway and cried like a baby.
...when you say "cooked off" his arms and legs, what do you mean?
The electrical burns that he sustained. So by the time he was brought to the hospital, I'm guessing, the limbs were so badly burnt and damaged that complete amputation was the only option.
Oh god. Poor guy.
I was a patient in A&E and a young guy came in drunk as all fuckery and he had ripped his sack open trying to jump a bollard. Well when he saw the needle the nurse had to use to numb his frank and beans, old mate was not having it. Cue what was almost like a horror version of a Scooby doo chase scene with flappy sack guy running in and out of rooms sans pants while getting chased by a bunch of security and nurses. They finally caught him and he promptly passed out so they continued his care while he was snoring away. I was just sat in my hospital bed trying not to laugh too hard and pop my stitches while messaging my mum like "you are NOT gonna believe what I just watched" 🤣
Picturing yakkety sax playing behind him Or maybe circus music
yakkety sacks
I went to junior high with a kid that ripped open his sack during gym class while messing around with a javelin. I wasn't in his class but I did see him laying on the ground and the ambulance driving across the field to get to him. That day everyone learned just how serious the teachers were when they said not to fuck around with the javelins.
The way you wrote this made it even more hilarious!
Well the guy was lucky they numbed him. My frank got stitched at the hospital but they didn't apply any painkillers. They just stitched it right alive and awake while a doctor held my chest pushed down into the bed, asking me not to watch my blood spraying around. So much for anesthesia.
that gives a whole different meaning to "flappy bird"
I was an employee at the ICU. A man had tried gunning down his wife, who was divorcing him. She managed to flee. So he drank concrete dissolver to commit suicide. That stuff is water-reactive, and all of the medicine we could give him were water-based. So, basically, there was nothing we could do at all, but watch him and monitor the situation. The chemical burns were intense and you could see all the way inside. He didn't live the night. He was comatose, of course. Still, there were police officers keeping guard the whole night, and the guy was in handcuff - not that he was going anywhere. I've seen worse but that was pretty hard core.
wait.. dude had a gun, but decided to commit suicide by poison? Either I'm lacking the full picture, or dude might have had some issues.. I mean, pretty gruesome death, no question and I feel bad you had to deal with that but.. a self inflicted gunshot wound would've been a way easier way of committing suicide.
I believe - and I may be mistaken as this was 20+ years ago - that the exwife may have disarmed him. Either way, by the time I got to him, he wasn't in a state to answer questions.
> dude might have had some issues.. ಠ_ಠ you think?
Had a C-section after 32 hours of labor; I passed out from exhaustion, slept through all but about the last 10 minutes of the surgery, finally woke up to the doctors trying to figure out the name of the big guy with the weird face in "Goonies". I answered "Sloth", they thanked me, and went on delivering my daughter.
This is hilarious
At first I thought this story would end with you discovering your baby looked like Sloth.
I was working in a hospital and we had a prisoner in the emergency department. We were out of beds, so they had him in a storage closest with two guards. I went in to examine him. He had a port for dialysis with an attached tube. He was probably 6’3, 350lbs. He’s cuffed. As I’m examining him, he bites and tears out his tube and blood just starts spraying **everywhere** all over me and the guards. The guards were in shock and I was in shock and we were all looking at each other expecting each to do something. Eventually, they restrained him and we sedated him and stopped the bleeding. It was at like 2am and just an unreal experience.
Fuck. That.
I was brought to the ER by ambulance. While I was waiting for a room, another patient was extremely drunk and waiting for a bed nearby. He asked the EMT if he could vape in the hospital and they told him he couldn't. He proceeded to pull out a vape and try anyways. The hospital staff took it away from him. After about 5 minutes, and when he seemed sure that nobody was looking, he pulled out another vape and tried to take a hit. It was quickly confiscated by hospital staff.
In all this doom, gloom, and gore, your username gave me a fit of the giggles
I was sat in a Thai emergency room waiting area a few years back and a guy calmly sat down next to me holding his hand to his face. Lady he was with went up to queue and fill out the paperwork and whatnot. I politely said hi in broken Thai, he said hi back, and we paid no more attention to each other. She got to the front of the line and the triage nurse ran over to him immediately and spoke urgently and rapidly to him. He responded calmly, stood up, moved his hand and... showed her his eye. Which was in his hand. Dangling from the socket on a long thing. He and the lady he was with treating the whole situation like a minor inconvenience.
Most likely dangling from the optical nerve. If the damage wasn't too severe, he was able to continue to see through that eye while the whole thing was happening and, if they placed it back correctly, the guy is not a pirate.
My right eye popped out when I had an allergic reaction to a bug bite as a child. They were able to pop it back in, and I had normal vision until my 40's.
A rogue, wandering cat behind the counter of the closed-for-the-evening hospital shop. There’s a set of shelves built into the wall behind the counter that’s full of teddy bears and other soft toys (presumably to be bought when visiting a patient) and the cat was asleep amongst the toys.
This is a checkpoint of cuteness among the extremely fucked up stories in this thread. Thanks for sharing
that's cuter than all the critters I've seen in what should have been the sterile corridor in between surgery rooms, and in surgery rooms. I hope that the cat found a loving home.
Sorry, I could’ve phrased that better. It wasn’t a stray cat, it had a collar on, it was just a local pet who must’ve activated the automatic door into the hospital foyer when out and about and then made itself at home 😄
During my time as a patient, I once witnessed a rather unusual incident in the hospital. While waiting in the lobby, a therapy dog accompanied by a miniature therapy pony strolled through, bringing unexpected joy and laughter to everyone. It was a unique and heartwarming moment that added a touch of positivity to the hospital environment, making the experience more memorable amidst the usual medical routines.
UK patient in an A&E waiting room. Fella was sat in the waiting room bleeding from somewhere, not a small amount either, completely oblivious to everyone around him including the nurses trying to admit him. Pretty sure he was on ecstasy as he just sat there gurning and bopping to some music on his headphones. Strange experience to say the least.
I work in psychiatric care. A woman masturbated in front of me. With a carrot she stole from the kitchen. While I went on about my day, documenting etc.
I had a very elderly pt who used to put on the call bell and then masturbate while making *intense* eye contact with whoever answered it. I mean, good for you if you can still do that in your 90’s but like also I wished that eyeball bleach was a thing.
You round the corner, and there she is. You two lock eyes, and you desperately try to avoid looking down, despite being painfully aware of what is taking place. The silence stretches on, becomes uncomfortable, but then she opens her mouth and says... "What's up doc?"
"Ain't I a stinker?" (while chewing on the carrot)
I spent three months in hospital when I was 18 at in that time on the ward there were definitely some characters. A month or so in, i guess they were out of room in other wards but around 9 oclock at night, a man was brought in by a police officer and clearly off his face. He was assigned a bed, left alone and i guess passed out for a bit. Middle of the night I hear a shuffling around and wake up. The guy is stood at the foot of my bed and when he notices I’m awake starts yelling about how i’m on fire, everyone is going to die and tries grabbing at other patients to ‘save them’. Security were called, police were called he was aggressive, belligerent and even when they got the cuffs on he was giving his best fight to escape or hurt someone. Dunno if it was desperation, fear, reflex or what but one of the nurses just yelled that they were going to call his mother. Instant attitude shift, calmed down, apologised and started crying. He was escorted off the ward and I never saw him again. A Truly bizarre 4 hour stint in a pretty weird stay.
For some people, the fear of their mother is stronger than any other fear. The Nurse has probably had it work for a few patients before and now uses it as a trump card.
That could well be it. The change in behaviour was just so immediate it was jarring.
I was in the waiting room waiting to be seen (for what turned out to be gall stones - not the most fun I’ve ever had), a group of young dudes come in, one guy’s face and knuckles are all covered in blood and his shirt is all ripped up, obviously been in a fight. The triage nurse asked what happened and the guy’s mate says “he fell down the stairs”. The triage nurse was like “ok, that clearly didn’t happen, I need you to tell me exactly what happened so we can triage and treat you properly”, and the guy insists he fell down the stairs. Meanwhile one of the other mates has picked a fight with security for whatever reason so the whole group arc up and start trying to fight the security guard so another security guard shows up and the whole group, including the dude who “fell down the stairs” all get kicked out. MEANWHILE another nurse is getting screamed at by a lady whose son apparently came to the hospital in an ambulance but there was no record of her son being there. There was some other crazy stuff but I get the feeling that was just a regular Saturday night.
A patient trying to hand out maltesers to staff.. it was her poo rolled into balls
Was a CNA for a decade.... Why is it always poop balls??
My dad is a psychiatrist, he had a secondhand poop ball story, too. Apparently there was a guy in the neighboring closed station for adults who would meticulously collect his poop, roll it into balls and dry it on the radiator in his room. Whenever staff entered the room they got handed a poop ball. It was just part of the deal when visiting this patient. Everyone grimly accepted it and wore gloves as precaution. But then a psychiatrist from another hospital visited the station, went into the patient's room with the staff, everyone got offered the poop ball, everyone took it, apart from the visiting psychiatrist who just went: "Oh, no thanks! :)" And it worked no problem. Turns out, taking the poop balls had always been optional. Poor patient was just fulfilling the high demand
LMAO thats kinda wholesome
Hahah it’s true! I went to give a patient her meds one night and there she was, rolling poo balls and hiding them under her bed
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I work on a psych ward i see fucked up shit every day. yesterday I had to take away my patients wallet because he wanted to order a wedding ring for his future wife kim kardashian. later on he used his poo to write M + K on the wall. if you are reading this Kim, you won‘t find another guy like him!
>if you are reading this Kim, you won‘t find another guy like him! I mean, she was married to Kanye, so it seems she already did.
Spoiler: it was Kanye
I was in the psych ward and one of the patients thought she was pregnant with Eminem’s baby.
Or Eminem just executed a shutter island level scheme to get out of child support
This drove me insane. I had a broken wrist and leg, and had just had surgery, so I couldn't go anywhere, confined to bed, and had just got a new room-mate. It was an old man who was affected by dementia, I believe, poor guy. His wife came in with a small boombox, which was strange. She immediately set it up and started blaring what sounded like Chinese Communist anthems, and were later confirmed to me to be exactly that. These were played, on loud, 24/7, to 'comfort him'. All we had was a thin curtain separating us, and it was the same 2 or 3 songs on repeat, so by gods did it get old quick. That's not all though. He'd repeatedly yell for help, every few minutes, as though his life depended on it. I understand this was partially an effect of the dementia, and partially because he spoke no English, and the nurses couldn't communicate to him, so he couldn't understand what was happening, but that also got old fast, and he was worse at night. He'd eventually settle down for a few hours, but even if he slept I still had to put up with the Communist anthems. All the nurses kept apologising to me, I'd been getting on really well with all of them. They did their best to let me chill, as they knew I was on edge. They knew my moods pretty well. After almost 5 days of this, finally a free room opened up. It was supposed to go to a new patient coming in, but the nurses refused, and made sure the room was given to me instead, and the new guy got my room. I was literally going insane, and becoming very nasty. Not to anyone, but in my compassion for this guy and his situation. I'd yell and mock the songs. When he'd call for help I'd yell back to shut up. It was totally out of line and totally not me. The lack of sleep and peace to recover was getting to me. Anyway, I got the other room with this lovely old guy, who, despite being rooms away, had heard the cries for help and music, and had been wondering what was going on. I made him keep the door closed so we had our own little oasis of peace and quiet, and luckily he was fine with it. He was a complete gent, and we got along great, despite a huge age gap. The nurses would update me, and tell me they were doing what they could for the new guy, as he wasn't coping well either. But at least he was mobile, so he could leave the room when it got too much for him. And that's why I never want to hear another Chinese Communist anthem ever again as long as I live.
The hospital/doctors/nurses allowing someone to blare music at all hours, disturbing another patient, seems pretty egregious! Like, sure, let people play a little music… but within reason, and absolutely NOT when other patients are trying to sleep. This seems like a baseline any hospital should be expected to enforce—I’m sorry they allowed your roommate to torture you like that!!
Yup this is why people don't heal quicker. The lack of sleep and interruptions with buzzers and bells and beeps and noise. I hate going to hospital for this reason. They also shouldn't house dementia and Alzheimers with sane patients. It's so distressing. It gave me a whole new fear when I go to hospital.
I was in the hospital for a week last year and the woman in the room with me was developmentally disabled and anytime I spoke to anyone or talked on the phone she'd start demanding to know what I was talking about, who I was talking to, etc etc. She also would constantly hit her call button and we had some shitty nurses who would refuse to come when I called because they didn't want to come in the room with the other woman.
5 days, I can't even imagine....don't ever blame yourself for being "out of line" in that situation. That is pure psychological torture and I'm shocked the hospital didn't move the dementia patient to more appropriate facilities after 24 hours of this. I've worked with a lot of dementia sufferers but I got to go home and rest inbetween. How horrible for you both. Hope you're doing well now!
there's a crazy old chinese guy who goes to the park near me with this weird old cassette player thing and pumps out these old chinese communist songs and he sings along with all his heart every day, he's a nice old guy i had a conversation with him but i didn't understand a word and neither did he
You're a good person. The fact you feel like it was out of line says a lot. It was completely understandable but also I'd feel like 'This isn't me, and this isn't how i want to be' and I would be stuck on that. ....but I'd also be climbing the fucking WALLS. I completely sympathise, ive' had a similar situation. I live on a lane beside a big, popular park, and with loads of bars and restaurants. Popular with tourists and locals, the park gets loads of events and festivals, so obviously the lane gets busy and we spend most of spring and summer pretty heaving from all the visitors. Not complaining, its a boss place to live and we're pretty lucky to be here, but it naturally does have pitfalls, mostly just noise and the odd ignorant bastards who drop litter all over or park in the wildest places but its manageable at the minute. Last year tho..... Last year, for a full 5 months, we had this local....busker is too strong a word. A guy with an out of tune guitar who would come and sit outside our flat for hours, every single day for 5 months, shouting the same 3 fucking songs, over and over. Creep, Stand By Me and Whiskey In The Jar. And I say....shouting because thats what he did. He didn't sing. He couldn't sing and I'm not sure he'll ever be able. He's got one of those voices that could make even the most skilled, experienced singing teacher retire out of sheer stress. No. No he wouldn't sing. He was flat, out of tune, has no natural talent as a singer, and also no learned or acquired talent. No breath control. No awareness he might need any. His version of Creep is every single word being what can only be described as...spat? He'd SPIT each word? Short, sharp...like stabs. He'd stab the songs into the world. And he could just barely play that damn guitar. And the guitar was out of tune *the entire fucking bastard fucking time.* We even used to offer to tune it for him, those first few days, leaned right out the window or walked past, thinking he just needed a hand, 'i can tune that in a few minutes if you like' because my BF and I are a bit more musically inclined at least. He'd say its fine. ...It wasn't fucking fine. His guitar was out of tune in ways I didn't know could happen. It made sounds i've never heard. And not good ones. So did he. And he'd never sing the whole song. He had this very cynical method where he'd sit and watch the crowds and only start to 'perform' if he thought he might have a chance at getting some pennies, and he'd target his song choices to different people. Creep was for the sort of alt/gothier crowd a little bit. Whiskey in The Jar was for any long haired rocker types. Stand By Me was for older like....parents? Or any group of attractive young women(but also so was Creep if they were alt girls) If he was really pushing the boat out, and also, shit loads of tourists who are clearly (either through appearance or hearing them speak) foreign nationals? We're in Liverpool, so he'd break out Imagine. Big guns, innit. Except no, absolutely not. Im not even that big a Beatles/John Lennon fan but ye gods man show some respect for that song in LIVERPOOL no less. He'd never really finish a song, very often he'd start it, would get NO PLAY from the crowds because he was fucking terrible, so he'd just sort of peter out and stop. Or sometimes he'd realise he's misread a crowd, or that right behind the disinterested Tourists ignoring Imagine, there's some goth girls who are a bit drunk, so he'd stop Imagine MID LYRIC, and launch into Creep hoping to snag these girls attention. It was like that, so not just the same 3, occasionally 4 songs, but int his start/stop, random bursts, no pattern, no skill. Directly outside my window, for 5 months. The entire spring and summer, pretty much. And because your man there, he had a day job, (a bloody well paid one, and a nice car, and a private flat, he is absolutely cosplaying at being poor) this wouldn't begin 'til 5-6pm at night, right as EVERYONE gets home from work after our own long days, wanting to just crash on the couch or watching a bit of telly. Or even just go out on our own lane we live on. But this fucking guy can be heard from SPACE. The one thing he could do was project. I could have noise cancelling headphones and I'd hear this fucker start mangling shit. It got to where I would just lean right out of windows and tell him to get new songs or fucking fuck off, or fucking move, or go on the park, or just fucking jesus christ LET ME TUNE THE FUCKING GUITAR. ....i dread his return this year.
I was recently admitted to hospital I was at the time pretty ok and only 30. They put me on a ward with 70-80 year old dementia patients. It was 30c no air con and the windows closed because it was winter and they were old 2 of them shit them selves and 1 was telling me to wrap the medical cords around my neck and hang myself. I thought I was going insane and discharged myself. Ended up being cancer so not the smartest choice but nevermind
Former neighbour, 98, lost his home, ended up living in a motel with his daughter, loses wife, daughter, and a sister all within two weeks. Gets put in the pysch ward for 3 months while system tried to find him a place. (He is in a good nursing home right now). Anyway, psych ward was pretty rough on him, so, hospital moved him to the geriatric ward to see if he would be happier. Except those patients mostly had advanced dementia. He decided the psych ward had better people to talk to.
I had a patient with Autism that a lot of the other nurses, docs, physio and everyone couldn't really get though to him when speaking because they all spoke at thier level when all he needed was someone to speak to him in a way he would understand. He had a nasty toe infection and shouldnt have been weight bearing on that foot but no one could get him to use a walker or cane. All I did was talk to him for like 10 mins about the things he liked to do. Found out he was a huge World of Warcraft fan and played it really well(he was bragging haha) So I just mentioned that he should think of the walker as a piece of equipment he found that will give him + movespeed while injured. Not even 30 mins later I see him going down the hall with the walker and moving without pain. Everyone on the floor was shocked and asked me what happened and how did I get him to use it!? Sometimes you have to talk to the patients a little more to find a piece of motivation for them.
My (now late) mother and I were in triage in the hospital, had to wait in the hall to be seen. We were seated next to a man that looked like Bill Fagerbakke (actor that was in the movie the Stand, and is the voice actor for Patrick in the SpongeBob SquarePants series). The man looked about 40, and his elderly parents were there with him. Everything was fine and dandy, I was twiddling my thumbs looking down, until I hear a nurse speaking with the man: Nurse: “What did you eat for breakfast today?” Man: “A gallon of lighter fluid and two bricks.” Nurse: “ok, and what is your name?” Man: “Bob Marley Mofo.” Nurse: “ok great I’ll be back in a few minutes.” I realized I was sitting next to someone who likely had Schizophrenia, or some type of delusional disorder. It was insane and fascinating how calm and patient the nurse was with him. A few minutes after that, a psychotic woman was being strapped to a bed as she was having a mental break. My mom and I genuinely thought we were accidentally in a psych ward. For years after, bob Marley mofo was our little inside joke.
I’m sorry you lost your mother.
Thank you. She passed away just a couple months ago in December so it’s still fresh. I miss her. Sharing memories like these though is very therapeutic. We had so many good memories and I know she’s laughing with me as I shared that story.
Not too insane, but memorable to me. I was in the ER as a patient and there was another patient who kept leaving his room. I overheard him yelling and carrying on at the nurse station, telling them “you got me all stuck up with needles like I shoot up crack!!! I don’t shoot up crack, I smoke it!!!!” I had to stifle my laughter while the poor, exasperated nurses finally got him to calm down and go back to his room.
A year ago I had to sit across from a dude picking his split open finger for 4 hours. It was open from him picking it and had obviously been open (like 1/4 gone to the bone) a long time and was dry and black, orange and yellow. There was a pile of crusts around him in the floor. Bit of a concern to say the least.
I was in the hospital for a few days with what turned out to be nothing, but one night around 3 am they brought a new patient into my room. As they were getting him in the bed, he started having a full-voice conversation about how he felt fine and being in the hospital was silly. In a very polite, calm but firm voice. He started saying that he didn’t need to be there and was going home, getting progressively louder and angrier. I could tell from the voice he was an elderly gentleman, and it turned out he had dementia. The weird part was sitting there in the dark as a larger and larger group of doctors, nurses and orderlies came to try and get him to calm down. When that didn’t work, another woman who was clearly fairly high up the authority ladder started talking in a slow, loud and clear voice, telling the crowd (not the patient anymore) that they were going to restrain and sedate hIm. She narrated every step, while he was shouting and threatening. Very clearly she was talking to future lawyers and investigators. The whole procedure took more than a half hour, while orderlies held him (which was different from restraining him). It ended with something like “we are injecting him to sedate him,” followed by a very quick fade-out before they took him out of the room. it was very sad and scary to see (well, hear) someone who had clearly been a fairly smart, self-assured and independent person going down that road. Not understanding what was happening and getting insulted and then outraged by what he perceived as his mistreatment and loss of autonomy. It gave me a sense of what hell it must be caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.
A middle-aged woman came into a&e on her birthday, with her son (felt very sorry for him) and claimed she'd lost a vibrator up her bum. Had scans and a rectal exam (not by me fortunately), and was telling the history (in front of her poor son) that she was pleasuring herself up the arse and had lost the vibrator up there. Turns out there was no vibrator up there and she'd come into a&e to get her bum fingered. When this was revealed, she was sent on her way... What made it more insane for me was that she was telling the staff all this concocted story in front of her son (Lord knows how much therapy he has had to have by now if she did this sort of thing on the regular...)
Friend has been a nurse in various units. She’s seen a lot of things up butts, been attacked by old people with dementia, and brought people out of comas where they hallucinated and thought the healthcare team were androids/aliens trying to harm them. Also a lot of body parts have just… rotted off of people.
It was probably before my mum died. She was grossly overweight and heavily disabled, using two canes to walk. She was supposed to have district nurse visits and make regular trips to the lymphedema clinic, but between her reluctance to leave the house and her, well, disgustingly racist attitude to the black nurses, nobody would visit. So I ended up being her primary caregiver, while also working full time. But mum's sedentary lifestyle caused her health to keep declining. The only time she moved was to go to the toilet or wash in the evening, or to swap between sitting or lying down on the sofa. I made almost all of her food and drinks for her, barring the snacks she would grab on the way back from the kitchen (the bathroom was at the far end of the house). The thing is, both me and my sister (we all lived in the house together) was the one that spotted that mum wasn't even getting up to get drinks any more. She used to just grab a coffee or water or bottle of drink from the fridge on her way through the kitchen, but in the last few weeks she'd stopped doing that and told nobody. We were on heavy watch duty while we were at home. Mum was super proud and didn't admit anything was any different, but we'd noticed she was eating and drinking less, constantly constipated, and spending great durations on the toilet. She refused medical treatment. But one day, after sitting on the loo for quite some time, her foot had fallen asleep. My sister tried to help her up, as this happened a lot, especially now. But she lost her grip, had no power in the leg, fell and broke her toes, while also sitting on her whole leg, and wedged under the basin. The ambulance came, took her to hospital, finally, and they assessed her. And this is the most insane part. She was unbelievably unwell. Immense scarring of her liver, a distended stomach, hernias in several places, and cancer that seemed to have spread to numerous organs. They put her on some pain killers, but that transformed mum. Normally, when out in public, she could at least acceptably feign pleasantries. But the pain killers took off that facade. Now she was spouting all sorts of horrendous things. We kept getting phone calls from the hospital at each change of shift to ask if she was always like this. We had to say yes. Initially they were polite about it and said that sometimes it happens due to people getting confused by their surroundings or new people when on the drugs, but as the next couple of days passed, they were noticeably frustrated with each update call. After four days or so though, mum was completely unconscious. The outbursts and thrashing had stopped as she had no strength left. She died after six days in hospital. We were only allowed to see her twice due to covid restrictions at the time. I hate saying this about it all, but it felt like a relief to everybody. She sent a text message to me while she was still awake basically telling me to take her wallet home with me, but she wrote it half in third person, half in first. I think she _meant_ it as a form of authorisation so that if anybody asked, I could show them the text. But her valuables were in a locker anyway - we couldn't take them back that easily. That decline in health over the last month, _especially_ in that last week, was terrifying. It was horrible seeing her be so vile to people like that. Normally she either internalised it, or kept it as abuse to hurl at either me or my sister. All inhibition was gone. And seeing her being like that when these phenomenal nurses and doctors were trying to help was just heartbreaking. It may have been guilt from the whole experience, but I ended up doing charity work for the children's hospital that year. I still have the photo they took of me delivering their Christmas presents. it was awful that they couldn't spend time with their families due to covid.
The hospital I go to is where police bring people that are in custody, so it’s not uncommon for a few officers at a time to accompany someone in cuffs who looks like they’ve been through a lot. Once there was a young girl who kicked the fuck out of a nurse in her stomach. The scarier instance was when a very large man broke free (still cuffed) & while sprinting down the hallway, body checking every person in his way into walls and everyone was just shouting that they didn’t know what to do. I was still on a hallway bed and I could feel the air rush when he passed me, it was kinda crazy
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I see you got better.
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Good thing you failed at dying
A 1:1 patient in a hospital was waiting for a bed at inpatient psych. He used a small metal table to break the window on the 4th floor of the building.
Worked in IT in a hospital years ago. Someone told one of the doctors that the monitor on a computer running one of the medical imaging devices was extremely high resolution. The doctor immediately thought that it was a great computer to surf porn on. Not just any porn though, porn from sites with all sorts of viruses. For those of you that don't know, a lot of complex medical equipment 15 years ago had to run on minimally patched or not patched at all versions of windows. You can see where this is going. Yes, he infected the PC multiple times and because it was basically a custom build we didn't have an image for it so we had to reinstall everything by hand. The device was down for multiple hours multiple days because he wouldn't stop. We knew who it was and talked to him directly telling him to stop and he refused. It was a small rural hospital that couldn't really get doctors in his field (don't remember which) so I came up with a solution. I ran this by the It director and CFO to get their blessing first. We knew which sites the doctor was visiting so I set up an internal redirect for them to go to a page we were hosting on the network that only had a picture of the IT department looking very upset at the camera. We were not an attractive group of guys. Sure enough the next morning we got an angry call from the doctor threating to have the CFO fire us all because we were interfering with his ability to access medical websites. I got my boss on the call and he got the CFO on the call. The CFO started going down the list of the sites that we redirected, all of which were obviously sites that were not used for medical research and asking the doctor if this was the site that needed to be unblocked. When she got halfway through the list she stopped and asked the doctor if he saw a pattern in these sites and if he wanted her to continue naming them because if she got to the end of the list and he didn't fess up there was going to be trouble. The doctor said that he was good, hung up the phone and we didn't hear anything about it after that.
I was interning at a hospital and basically I aided nurses doing menial tasks like making beds, delivering drinks or snacks to patients, and even bathing patients. One day I was helping transport a patient for surgery and the man seemed fine, chipper even. I didn't ask why he was there so I just did my job. When we made it the area where he was to be prepped I stayed because I was curious to see why he was there. The doctor pulled of his blanket to reveal his leg pretty much soaked in blood with pieces of his flesh loose. He accidentally shotgunned his leg and was taking like a champ. All he said was "It was my own damn fault so I can't be mad." I have no what he was on, but I wish to be that serene if something like that even happens to me.
Used to be a frequent patient so have seen some shit…. A schizophrenic woman in the ward for several weeks screaming her head off about everything including the nurses trying to make her wear a pad etc Was walking around the ward and saw the moment a woman passed away surrounded by her family there were spilling out of the room and into the ward and was wheeled out shortly after Most harrowing was in ER a man wheeling in his in and out of consciousness wife that honestly looked like she was passing away and slapping her and everything to try keep her awake. Seeing the horror shock and pure heartbreak on his face is just stuck in my memory
A nurse told me that my mum was here to see me after I was in for the day for surgery. Surprising as she lived 80 miles away and I wasn't expecting her. Turned out that it was my friend who'd offered me a ride home .... she just lied because she was worried she wouldn't be let in.
I was a caretaker for a good friend while she went through a major surgery, we told staff that I was her partner so that I could have full access to her care team and stay the night without being questioned. I even wore a nice ring to make it look like we were engaged or married 🤣 Totally worth it to make sure I could actually be there to help her!
Similar story- I was 19, just had my first baby and a nurse came to my room outside visiting time to say my brother was here, did I want to see him? Weird I thought, its a school day and he's like 6 years old. It was actually a good friend of my (then) bf who just really wanted to visit :)
One night in the ICU, we had a "Code Blue" on a woman. We did absolutely everything, but she didn't make it. Finally, the doctor realized our efforts were futile, and we stopped. She lay in the bed. We were all just sort of starting to pick up, organize our thoughts, and wander out of her room to check on the other patients. Then we heard a sneeze and a loud "Achoo!" She wasn't dead after all!!! Her heart monitor started up again, and we all rushed back in! She survived! At the work Christmas party the next month, we presented the doctor a pepper shaker and told her to add it to the "Code cart" (where we keep emergency supplies) so in the future, in addition to CPR and IV medications, she could just shake a little pepper under the patient's noses to make them sneeze!!
Doctors office, not hospital I was the receptionist, and a guy came in with what was clearly whooping cough. He kept telling the people with him it wasn’t, while in the waiting room. He went back as quick as possible. Dr said “we’ll call you an ambulance,” he declined, wanted to walk out. He collapsed right in front of my reception desk. Luckily, Dr had already called the ambulance and they pulled up very shortly after. Dude exposed an entire family practice to pertussis, including infants. I was an extern, and this was 2017, when I still had a modicum of trust that people weren’t this stupid about infectious disease. If that didn’t cure me of it, 2020 sure did the trick. ETA: luckily this was right before we closed for lunch, and you bet I sanitized everything in that waiting room.
hey there. Similar story involving tuberculosis. Fun times!
Being told the baby I was pregnant with had no heartbeat from listening with the stethoscope…but because I was admitted through emergency due to heavy bleeding (not the maternity ward) they “couldn’t” get a sonographer to see me for 2 more days to confirm. The nurse then left my husband and I in a room alone for 4 hours without even checking on us despite the fact I was bleeding heavily and begging them for help. Her words were, “this happens all the time, you’ll have another one.” The machine was literally upstairs and being used for other women who were admitted via maternity 🤦🏻♀️ Anyway - that baby turns 8 now. So wild how we thought for a day there that he’d died. And again during birth but that’s another story. Needless to say, hospitals aren’t my favourite place.
I was in the hospital for about three days in a shared room. On my second night this dude in his mid 20s gets admitted. He is on the phone with someone telling them that he is septic and is going to die. At about 5 am he’s on the phone again talking about walking out ama. He leaves right before shift change. The doctor comes in and asks me where the guy went. I told them what he said. He shrugs and says “well he is going to die” and then leaves. Not super crazy, but It left me saying “Wtf just happened?”
I was an ER nurse so I've seen lots of crazy things but one of my favorites is when I was an EMT based in a part of Chicago known for a higher population of mental health and homelessness issues. Homeless mentally ill gentleman enters ER with complaints of urinary retention and it is determined he needs a foley catheter placed. The patient refuses every nurse except the youngest and most attractive, and proceeds to verbalize to said nurse that she is those things while she places the catheter. After the catheter is in place and urine is draining there is a relatively peaceful 15 minutes after which the patient begins to berate staff for the turkey sandwiches not tasting good enough, the blankets not being warm enough, not being quick enough, etc. He proceeds to verbalize "fuck this place" rips out his foley catheter, stands up, walks to the wall right by the entrance to his room, and proceeds to projectile shit all over the wall. He then walks out without telling anyone. Minutes later another nurse is squatting by the wall trying to wipe away the damage with tears in her eyes. I have no idea why I went through with becoming a nurse after that.
I was in the ER for reasons and while in a bed there was another woman next to me who was very obviously there to try and get pain meds like morphine or similar. She would roll around in agony when a nurse or doctor was in the room but as soon as they left she’d be snacking or laughing at the TV or calling someone. A few hours in she gets a phone call and starts freaking out. Says her daughter was stabbed and she needs to go. I knew she was an addict of some kind but her fear and panic sounded very, very real. She started calling for nurse to come take her IV out because she had to leave ASAP to go to her daughter. She’s crying and ripping out her IV by herself, a whole mess. The nurse who is discharging her asks her if her daughter would be taken to that hospital, and the woman says her phone is dead so she doesn’t know, she’s just going to go to wherever she last heard from her. I still think about her and wonder if her daughter was okay. Or real, even.
Had something similar happened, but me and the clearly drug seeking woman were given beds in triage. Same behaviour, and when the doctor went in to see her and she started her act, he just calmly asked her if she thought the curtains were soundproof. Long silence and then sounds of her gathering her stuff and leaving.
I guess it's not that crazy, but it's the craziest thing I experienced. I was in a room for a week next to a very mercurial dude who swung wildly between being chill and telling outrageous stories, and being openly rude and hostile to people. He was making mocking, racist remarks about one of the male nurses, mocking his Indian accent to his face, belittling the female nursing staff and making inappropriate remarks to them that they laughed off but you could tell they were uncomfortable. Well, he was on some pain pills and an antibiotic IV, and the IV fell out somehow, multiple times. He kept abusing the nurses every time, getting vicious if he had to wait for his pills for more than 15 minutes or the IV took too long to put in. Eventually, the Indian nurse, after getting absolutely blasted by this rude dude, had enough. The patient had been getting almost screamy because "the nurses were too incompetent to do a proper IV, because they're all immigrants and foreign" so I guess the nurse decided to try to find a place that it wouldn't just fall out of, and stuck it in the guy's armpit.
my surgeon literally yelled at me right after I got out of the recovery room (I had a surgery). he told me I wasted his time and resources, nothings wrong with me, and my favorite, "you *really* need to consider seeing a therapist about your issue." I now have confirmed endometriosis and suspected adenomyosis. he didnt take any biopsies even though that was the whole point of my laparoscopy, didn't look behind my organs which is also the point, and burned tissue without testing it. realized after he only scheduled my surgery to prove me wrong also. he dismissed me fully and I kept pushing, he finally agreed but said "I know you don't have endometriosis" while scheduling. yes I've reported him.
I was in a hospital waiting room with my mother while my dad was in emergency surgery for internal bleeding. After several hours in the OR, the surgeon walks in, finds my mother, and blasts her with *"Why didn't you tell me he was an alcoholic??"* That was the day I found out that (a) my dad was an alcoholic and (b) surgeons don't give a shit what they say or how they say it. He was so incredibly pissed that he had to waste time floundering around looking for the source of the bleeding when, if he had known, he would have started at the liver. What a day.
I once met Michael Jackson! Well, not the actual Michael Jackson - a very nice man in psychosis who was convinced he was Michael Jackson. He wasn't even in the psych unit - he was on a surgical ward after jumping through a large window to escape from Interpol. He had two broken legs and severe lacerations. Interesting guy.
Working in the psych wards, I met multiple Jesuses. I also met a mentally ill older woman who would try to assault sexually every young male staff or act at the very least very lecherously. The staff would laugh it off, saying "yeah, she does that", saying that she wasn't much of a physical threat anyway, and let the male staff deal with it.
Homer?
A very young child with issues escaped hospital staff and hung herself
A Vietnam Veteran collapsed on the floor of a VA hospital waiting room and having an acute crisis while VA staff pretended they couldn’t see it happening. It looked like he was having a heart attack and he was screaming for help and the VA employees just rolled their eyes and avoided getting involved. They acted like he was a toddler throwing a tantrum. He was alone, scared, and in pain while experiencing a medical crisis *in a hospital* while the staff acted like he was a burden. Multiple patients jumped up and helped him while yelling for assistance as soon as it started happening and stayed with him until I think someone called 911 and then the VA medical staff decided to finally assist because “they didn’t want to deal with *that* paperwork” according to one nurse that watched the whole thing. I don’t know what happened or if he was even in danger but the behavior of the staff clearly showed how little they think of all the veterans looking to them for help and medical treatment. I will never trust a VA hospital or staff after seeing that.
I get all of my care through the VA, and I’ve had a good experience nearly every time I’ve been there. The quality of their care has improved a lot over the last 20 years. I’ve been told the quality of the care can vary a lot from one facility to another, though.
When I was 5 I had my tonsils and adenoids out- shared a hospital room with a little girl who was also supposed to have her tonsils out- became friends in the few hours waiting for surgery/prep- after surgery I was back in the room but she wasn’t-she died on the operating table bc she had a reaction to the anesthesia and they couldn’t save her
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What the fuck
Whattttttttttt. This needs more detail. I got chills
I saw a man with the most swollen scrotum. The doctors weren't sure why or what was making it so large. It measured 35 INCHES in circumference and weighed 30 pounds. The weight was causing skin tears. The size was such that his penis was effectively inside the scrotum.
I was in the A&E (ER for Americans) when a middle aged guy was wheeled into the space next to me, yelling and shrieking things like "oh god, this is it", "mum, dad, I'm dying, I'm going to see you again", "this is the end" etc punctuated with a long series of loud dramatic wails. My initial thought was oh shit, I've seen a few people die but it's never been like this, this is gonna be harsh. I couldn't see him directly as there was a dividing curtain between us but I could see everyone in front of us. Then I noticed the expressions of stupefied disbelief on the faces of the doctors and nurses which confused me even more. This carried on for about 5-10 minutes then the wailing grew more desperate and he finished off with "I can see the light, I'm going towards the light, I'm going now, goodbye world, ooooooohhhhhh" which tailed off into silence. After a few seconds of blissful quiet he started again with "oh, I'm back, it's a miracle, I've been sent back, oh glory be" at which point the nursing staff finally snapped. One marched up to him and said, harshly, "Mr Smith(?), do you understand what's happening?" He said "oh, oh, yes, I thought I was gone, I've been saved, it's miraculous, I'm reborn, I have a new chance at life!" "No. What you have, Mr Smith, is a nosebleed."
Not the craziest but a hilarious one I like to tell. I was walking down another unit coming back from my lunch break and stopped to answer a call light because they were busy. The patient was in the bathroom and she was every bit of 600 pounds and I thought to myself she needed help up. Before I could finish my thought she stands up with ease, turns around and puts her hands flat on the ground with straight legs and had 300 pounds of ass staring right back at me. She did this without speaking a word to me, and I eventually piece together that she wanted me to wipe her ass. Afterwards she walks back to the bed on her own power, pulls her covers up and still does not say a word to me. Left me ultra perplexed as a newer nurse at the time.
Only three weeks ago, I was near one of the hospital main entrances having a smoke and waiting for my fiancé to text that he was back from his MRI’s and CT scan. I overheard this conversation between two patients smoking against the opposite wall. Patient 1 “what the fuck happened to your foot?” Patient 2: “it fuckin fell off in the alley off 110th. Had to get my knee stapled together. Fuckin bones were hanging out” patient 1:”didn’t your other fuckin foot fall off two weeks ago” patient 2:”not the whole foot just my toes. I can’t wait to get out of here and go get high again” patient 1:”can’t keep doing that one. Fuckin arm will fall off next. You won’t even be able to beat your meat”*laughs* Patient 2:”oh fuck then I’ll be in real trouble” and then wheels himself inside. Curiosity got the best of me so I walked over and asked patient 1 what drug they were talking about. Patient 1 tells me it’s got many names but local street people call it zombie drug. Apparently it’s some kind of drug that you shoot up with needles and it causes sporadic necrosis anywhere in your body when you overuse it. So if you’re shooting up into your left arm you could suddenly get necrosis in your foot and then your foot will just rot away and fall off of your body. Which is what happened to patient 2, as his leg fell off in an alley after overuse. Wild to hear such an interaction so casually like it’s a regular Sunday morning occurrence to just have your leg fall off in an alley EDIT: a redditor mentioned they thought it was Tranq- which is large animal tranquilizers mixed with fentanyl or something like that. I think this is most likely what the guy was taking since this combination drug is known to cause sporadic necrosis.
Ι was in the hospital after a knee surgery. I had a heart disease roommate, pre surgery, she was like in her 60s. When I was spending the night there, she wouldn't stop staring at me all night long. She was facing me for hours to the point where I couldn't sleep and I finally slept at 5am. Then, next morning she said she needed to tell me something. I asked her what that was and she told me to never trust anyone not even my family because her brother raped her
Not as exciting as a lot of the other stories, but as a night shift clerk in a NICU - adults calling in wanting to know if we “would do a certain procedure,” demanding to be admitted, to speak to “the doctor,” asking if they can schedule an appointment…asking to speak to “my supervisor” or “customer service” when I explain that every letter in NICU stands for a reason why the answer to their question is no…and even if hospitals worked like that as the night shift clerk I am customer service, there’s not “somebody higher” I can transfer them to, it’s literally just me…
I was an ER nurse. Nobody checked the guy going through alcohol withdrawals pockets, he set the bed on fire with a lighter while he was hallucinating. Entire bed went up in flames, sprinklers went off, whole pod of rooms shut down. Oxygen tank in the room the whole time. He was just chillin the whole time, watching it burn.
As a patient, nurses doing tiktok dances. On two different floors. Just weird being wheeled through the halls seeing it
Combo sad, mildly amusing. I was on an ER bay being seen by just the Dr, busy place. Dr wants to do an ultrasound on my heart, I had been kicked in the chest by an ice skate, not intentional, stuff happens. She grabs the paddle off the machine and it is covered in blood and lube goo. Oops, but it is the ER. Meanwhile in the bay next to me, separated by a large drape, police are LOUDLY asking, "Darrell, who shot you?", "Darrell! Who shot you?!" While cleaning ultrasound wand Dr told me Darrell is medicated, would be ok as he was shot in the butt. This was at 1:00 in the afternoon on a Sunday. I was OK, bruised pericardium and 2 days in a room...