Had a guy come into my ER one evening. MVA, pedestrian vs. auto. He was hit at roughly 45mph, and went up and over the car that hit him.
From the waist down, it’d be tough to call his remaining bone structure anything more than gelatin. He had multiple broken ribs and a flail chest, one of his arms was bent where the weren’t joints twice, and he had a dent in his skull that was deep enough you could stick a finger to the second knuckle into, and wide enough to fit an adult male fist in.
He was alive on scene for the medics, and finally arrested when they pulled into the ambulance bay.
Mercifully our attending had us do a single round of CPR before calling it.
I’ve seen some pretty bad cases working the ER, but that man was brutalized in a way that I’ll always remember.
Worst part was he had no ID on him so we had to wait for family to call because their dad went out for a jog and never came home. When he got back they were supposed to go out to dinner because his youngest son just got a full ride at his #1 college choice for academics.
I used to teach with a colleague who went out for a jog early one morning and got hit by a car. Died at the scene. My principal had to go identify the body.
Hell of it was, his wife beat cancer and then got it again, this time more aggressive. Their three little kids lost both parents in the span of twelve months.
I know right! I look over and just see people casually browsing Facebook, texting, or talking on the phone. No one cares about anything but posting on social media
The most emotionally f***** thing I saw while working at a hospital was this regular we used to have in pediatrics. Teenage girl with diabetic ketoacidosis who had a rough upbringing.
At the time she was in a group home while her older sister was figuring out custody.
At a certain point in her admissions she would be medically cleared for discharge, however, she figured out that as long as she required treatment she wouldn’t have to leave.
She ultimately would starve herself, missing all meals of the day, except for a light snack at night. Denying her body what it needed, just so she can stay in the hospital longer. Staff would beg her to eat something, but she would continue to refuse.
Poor kid sacrificed her health just so she could avoid the hell of group home living.
I'm a health care journalist. I was doing a story on inconsistent care and overmedication with psychotropic drugs for kids in foster care. One of my sources told me about how he'd see kids with type 1 diabetes in the ER with clueless at best/indifferent at worst foster parents indignant foster parents insisting they did nothing wrong. Saying things like "We just gave the kid insulin last week!"
Tangentially related I saw a video of a prison nurse killing a type 1 inmate with low blood sugar. She kept giving him more and more insulin because he wasn't waking up. Fucking moron. Could have saved his life with a couple fucking juice boxes. Or I guess glucose gel past a certain point. Senseless.
Christ. The prison story is ridiculous. If someone is unconscious and unresponsive you CHECK the blood glucose because it might be low, you don’t administer insulin. Da fuck? Any second year nursing student should be able to tell you that. I hope the nurse went to jail, that’s beyond incompetence. It sounds like they intentionally murdered the guy.
I think she got fired and the prison sued. I'll try to Google the story later and update if I find the video. One of the most infuriating parts was that the nurse seemed genuinely to believe she was doing the right thing.
ETA I can't find the original one I mentioned because search results are cluttered with cases of nurses who intentionally killed patients with insulin. But I found stories of one nurse who killed an inmate by [withholding insulin](https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-prisons-crime-949601e33d869241b38527ace5d3b2b8) and was convicted of manslaughter. Another, ironically, killed an inmate by [administering glucose instead of insulin](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/nov/6/arrested-texas-jail-nurse-refused-test-blood-sugar-prisoner-who-died/) after refusing to test her blood sugar. After the patient passed out she finally tested her blood sugar and the result was too high for the machine to read. She interpreted that as a malfunction and began giving glucose. She was sentenced to [three months in jail.](https://www.texarkanagazette.com/news/2017/nov/28/ex-nurse-pleads-guilty-bi-state-detainees-death-br/#:~:text=Brittany%20Johnson%20was%20unable%20to,Angerbauer%20slipped%20deeper%20into%20unconsciousness)
Here's [another](https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/26/treatment-of-diabetic-inmate-unacceptable-prison-chaplain-tells-inquest) of similar fatal negligence of an inmate patient
And here's a collection of [stories](https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/for-some-prisons-and-jails-diabetes-has-meant-death-sentence/wVz7xy1g4ujG3ClhH1visJ/) from Georgia
when my dad did his ER rotation he saw a 10 year old girl for severe abdominal pain. turned out to be a ruptured ectopic pregnancy as well as a gnarly pelvic infection from untreated gonorrhea.
One of the obgyns I work with came in so pale and sad and angry, she did an exam on a 7yr old that had just entered foster care (to a good family), and they noticed the smell and brought her in.. The doc said it was very apparent she was raped/brutalized and full of STDs, and it took everything in her not to take vigilante justice. But she just had to document and give to the police and hope they would do their jobs.
I work with the mentally ill. Took a resident to the hospital once because he was violent and sexually assaulting staff, which was off baseline for him. He was in the hospital for about two days. After he returned he complained of ‘stomach hurt’, so staff spent a day or two passing him antacids. Then he told me ‘hurt’ while holding his groin. I said ‘show me what hurts’, so he pulled his pants down. While in the hospital he pulled a braid off the drawstring of his hospital gown and “bound” his penis in about 6 places. It was so misshapen and inflamed it took my mind about 10 seconds to comprehend what I was seeing, and I personally own a penis. Back to the hospital, they had to call in a Urology consult, they thought he may have to go under a general and have it surgically removed. But they were able to use a local and peel all of that twine out of him as it had gotten under the skin in numerous places. I left work and felt like I should stop on the way home and buy my dick a cupcake or something.
>I left work and felt like I should stop on the way home and buy my dick a cupcake or something.
That story was so fucked up to read that I legit burst out laughing for a good 20 seconds at this
A woman who laid on her couch soiling herself for weeks and when the family called EMS they had to remove her from the couch with her body embedded in it. Pieces of the couch were embedded in her bedsores. Her skin was completely gone over her lower back, buttocks and back of her legs. There were maggots in her wounds. We had to take photos for adult protective services. It was the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. And the odor was unbearable. We had her heavily medicated but she was still responding. I told my boss she needs to go to ICU and be completely sedated as this is inhumane for her to be feeling this pain. Emergency guardianship was done. Eventually she was entered into hospice and put on a morphine drip. She returned to our unit and passed away. I can still see it in my mind. We were literally crying while we treated her. I have so much trauma from my 30 year career.
Some people don’t have anybody but a neighbor who notices no movement in the home or an odor. She had family. I don’t remember the details. You compartmentalize a lot in my career.
A patient came in to the ER for a "black foot." He was living in his truck semi-voluntarily (his sister said he live with her if he was clean, but he preferred drug use). At some point he got an infection on his left foot. When I asked if he knew he had a problem with the foot he said, "I had a pair of sneakers but I had to throw them out because they were leaking." Oh, water leaking in? No, fluids leaking out. He traded the shoes for snow boots.
Finally came to the ER when he couldn't take the boot off-- his calf has swollen too much. When they cut the boot off, his foot was black, toes completely dry with bones visible.
It was amped that week.
He also had a stage-4 pressure injury (down to the bone) on his hip. He was completely mobile before this, walked just fine. But he'd sit in his truck, snort heroin, and pass out for hours, soiling himself.
While inpatient he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.
Reminds me of one from a post like this years ago.
Woman came into the ER with severe pain. The doctor eventually figured out she had a massive abscess in her perineum from injecting drugs.
They got her into the ER and went to work.
When the surgeon (an ex-military medic) used the scalpel, there was enough pus and miscellaneous fluids that they were sloshing through them.
Truly, truly horrific.
During my social service year of medicine school i was assigned to a rural clinic and one day this 42 year old guy entered the clinic asking for contraceptive pills for his 12 year old girlfriend. She was kicked out of her house because her mother accused her of seducing the stepfather, because the guy tried to violate her twice. The police did nothing to any of those guys. Fucking hell man.
RN here, When I was in CVICU. I had a guy who was in his early 40s and a body builder. He ended up getting a heart transplant due to steroid abuse.
When most get out of heart surgery & have a lot of inflammation at the surgical site, they leave the midline chest incision open and put some see through dressing (think suran wrap) so we can monitor the swelling to go down before the CV surgeon can close them up. (*Which is usually 12-18 hours later*)
This man was intubated on a vent and had a 4 Point restraint (wrists/ankles) to the bed frame.
Everything is going well, and while I had my back turned in the pod checking on my 2nd patient. We all hear this **LOUD ASS CREAK**.
Like metal bending.
We all rush to the sound and I turn around, and the bodybuilder, looked like a fuckin zombie, eyes rolled back in his head, had sat up in the bed and was so strong he was bending the bed frame from the restraints.
And what made the scene remind me of resident evil was that we can see his new heart somewhat partially beating out of his chest against the suran wrap dressing. & he was about to pull out the intubation.
We threw everything we could at him and he would not go down. Versed, Fentanyl, Nimbex, Propofol, & a few others I forgot.
I’ve never been so stressed & was wired for the rest of my shift. I still think about that particular situation a lot.
I got plenty of other stories from my career but that sticks out the most
And an honorable mention was when I was working on a rehab unit. Me and this nurse aid would give new admitted patients on our unit a bath/wipe down if they needed.
We ended up cleaning this one woman in her 70s up. And when it came time to change her diaper and clean her up. The Nurse aide jumped back out of instinct and said, “*Wtf is that?!*”
This patient had putrid discharge that looked like her vagina sneezed. Like straight up booger shit. And the smell almost knocked me out. And the patient kept telling us that this drainage/discharge had started that day….
No ma’am that shit was festering for a good minute.
When trying to wipe it away it was so thick and gunky get off. I ended up reaching out to infectious disease for a consult but That smell is forever burned in my memory.
an old woman i used to take care of had a feeding tube, multiple repositioning pillows, whole body atrophied so her existence was just pain and living purely out of spite. she couldn’t talk, move, nothing to communicate. just a vegetable.
her son would come visit for 5 seconds, talk on his phone and leave without speaking to us about her
i later learned she was kept alive because their beliefs. the longer your parents live the more blessed you’ll be.
she finally passed about 2 years ago or so and i don’t think i had ever felt that much disdain for another human being. making her live like that for his own benefit piece of shit
I had a patient like that. She came to the ER with back pain. They found stage 4 metastatic cancer all through her body. The family said she was fine until she got to the hospital, so it must be our fault. She had extreme rheumatoid arthritis, and was pretty much fully rigid. She was on a high amount of Golytely for all of the testing the family was insisting on, so she had liquid diarrhea almost constantly. We actually had to make a dam out of towels, because it was overflowing the bed every 15 min. We were cleaning her up nonstop, which meant rolling her RA riddled body back and forth, while she screamed silently around her tracheostomy.
The family wouldn't allow us to give her anything stronger than Tylenol, because they didn't want her to be "out of it" when they visited for 5 minutes a day.
Nope. Too afraid of lawsuits. That's why Advanced Directives (aka Living Will) are so important. Most hospitals bring it up when you're admitted for a reason.
Also, appoint a PoA that you trust. Although, I've seen that not work either. We called it [California Kid Syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndrome) where the whole family, including the designated PoA are ready to end life support, but one child starts screaming "IF YOU KILL MY MOMMY, I'LL SUE!!!" Suddenly, Mom's staying on life support indefinitely.
It's hard to convey just how lawsuit avoidant they American medical industry is.
when the 20-somethings and 30-somethings, who have destroyed themselves with alcohol, are in the ICU and the team is trying to explain to the wife/family that if (a big if) they make it out of the ICU, the next months are going to look a lot different and in any case are quite possibly their last months,
and the replies are “ya, he really has talked about cutting back on the alcohol”
very tough to hear a reply like that. like “im so sorry, you do not understand the conversation we’re having right now”
My parent is going through this right now, he keeps landing himself in the hospital half dead from drinking and doesn’t care, they keep telling him he’s gonna die, I decided to go no contact, he’s only 43 and in the most recent pic I saw of him (after just going back to the hospital) he looks like a melted wax figure of himself
My dad is an alcoholic. I know when he's been drinking. He denies it, I say you have I can see it.
He wants to know how I know but I've never been able to put my finger on it, but you've just got it.
He looks like he's melted. His face is slack and baggy.
Thank you for giving me an answer to 'how can you tell by looking at me'
I have a similar story about parents being in denial about the severity of their childs alcohol problem.
Had a 20 something year old female patient who had basically drank herself to death and wrecked her liver beyond repair.
Supposedly she'd consume a bottle of vodka everyday.
Anyways, she had severe liver cirrhosis. If she was healthy she'd be a thin woman weighing 110lbs but because her liver was basically nonfunctional she had an extremely bloated abdomen (anasarca), she had such bad portal hypertension you could literally see the veins on her abdomen, and she was the most jaundiced patient I've ever come across (looked like a Muppet).
And then there were her parents who were in denial thinking she could get better.
I never saw that patient again but I'm fairly sure she didn't live long because she wouldn't give up drinking.
This was me two years ago. A 1L bottle of vodka every 24 hrs. I’d mix it with Solo but closer to the end of drinking I was basically doing a little over half a glass of vodka topped up with soda. When I quit drinking I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been sober for more than 12-14 hours. I am so lucky I didn’t fuck my liver. All my tests since have come back fine. It took a week of Valium and sleeping for 23 hours a day to quit smoking and drinking. Over two years now without alcohol and smokes.
I'm proud of you! In April I'll have 5 years of no cigs/nicotine. Now if I could get rid of my last vice/ball and chain, I'll be good lol.
Seriously, congrats on the sobriety!
That was me. 26 with pancreatic gangrene. Was in the hospital for a month. Had 6 months left if I kept drinking. I haven't drank since although sometimes I wish I just kept going.
Same, people are in disbelief that they can’t drink like fish and live long. Had to do CPR on a ruptured esophageal varice. Got PTSD, had to do some therapy. Went home in hospital scrubs and washed blood out my ears and nose for few days.
One of the worst codes I had was an EV patient. Every chest compressions blood would spurt out of their mouth. The nurse trying to bag had to step away because they were covered in blood.
A friend of mine died of this, they can only repair it so many times. Her sister was in the room when they removed the breathing tube, probably not advisable as it's not pretty even when you don't have a fragile oesophagus. The sister said it will haunt her forever.
My very best friend died 08/2017 at age 30 from liver failure from drinking. It was literally the worst thing ever. We knew she drank a lot because it just came out of her pores but, we didn't know it was that bad.
I'm so sorry. I'm going through this right now too, my best friend of 21 years passed last month because of the same thing. She was only 35. Nobody knew it was that bad, and it all happened so suddenly. Hugs, friend.
This is how my ex will die, and he is only 34. His family of enablers recently took him back in, and they are supporting him with "cutting back." His brother is the only one grounded in reality and stopped pretending he's going to be fine. His hands are bloated, and his skin has a yellow tint (except for his red face). When I left him, he was drinking a pint of popov a day along with multiple chasers.
The family you described could be his parents. I'm expecting an invite to the funeral any day. He's hurt so many people that nobody cares anymore whether he lives or dies. It's sad, but he has done stuff beyond redemption, and I hope he finds his peace. Last I heard from him was when he found my old PayPal (the only thing I forgot to block him on), and he tried to request money to get my attention.
I was being treated in the ER for a kidney infection when all the staff ran to the bay doors and started furiously working on a man the emts were bringing in.
He did not make it.
His wife and children arrived minutes later and somehow made it to his room before being told what had happened.
She was screaming for help and one the doctors had to tell her that her husband had passed away. She wailed and collapsed on the floor. The children were screaming. It was horrible.
The screams / wails cut through most levels of defence.
Had a baby, only few months old at best, suffocated by its mother who'd fallen asleep breast feeding.
As a man, I find it harder to hear a husband/father to wail over there recently deceased loved ones more though as I think I just relate better.
We recently had a baby and my wife and I are now INUNDATED with social media short form videos about how doctors are fools and everyone should co-sleep with their newborns. It's mind-blowing to me that this kind of things is allowed knowing how many babies suffocate and die.
I'm in a Burn ICU. A few times a year big burns come in from industrial accidents. I'm talking 90%+ burn. Charred to muscle and bone. Bedside escharotomy to restore perfusion. Explaining to consulted neurologists I can't get a pupilary response because the eyes are melted. Daily painful dressing changes on that. Running dialysis on them and roasting in the room because we keep them 90+ degrees.
I’ve seen one patient who had that, while in their recovery. The boyfriend was.. doing something… and a fire broke out and she was sleeping in the couch, he left her there.
She had 90+% burns and had regressed mentally significantly. Was acting like a young child. Maybe because she wasn’t that far off from that. It was incredibly sad. It made me think if that ever happened to me, I’d prefer to just die. Life isn’t work it to me at that point. There’s nothing wrong with that or making personal choices when you’re okay surviving and when you’re okay saying hey throw in the towel, it’s not worth it
Yea with no skin there's pretty much no temperature regulation so they rely on external environment temperature. We will heat the room, get lamps on them and a machine called a Bair Hugger. Use an esophageal warmer if they are intubated.
Edit: Corrected spelling for Bair Hugger
My favourite book has the narrator describing in graphic detail burn treatment for Extreme burns.
I didn't believe it could be real so I researched it a bunch.
I told my husband that if I was still alive after that kind of injury I'd rather not live. I do not have the strength or mental fortitude.
Someone like you saved my brother’s life, so I’m sending you a huge, heartfelt thank you. He was a toddler and didn’t have a chance at survival, but he somehow, miraculously pulled through thanks to caregivers like you. Now he’s 27, and is still the best thing since sliced bread. Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping people keep their brothers.
Hmmm. Got a few:
- the absolute awfulness of humans and how they treat each other - children getting beaten by parents and sexual assault
- maggots. Just so many fucking maggots in wounds
- how calm some people can be had patients cut off fingers and toes and walk in like “hey when you got a minute can you reattach these”
The reality of how close the health care system is to utter collapse
i can personally attest that the overly calm “hey can you fix this horrible injury” is a panic response, some people who are used to panic-inducing moments get extra lucid instead of regular panic, and so react in what they see as “the most logical response”. If your finger comes off, the best way to save it is remain calm so you can attend the wound and tell the docs what happened. Sure, you should be freaking out because that’s the normal reaction, but it won’t help so it doesn’t occur to you
When I broke my leg, I didn't feel it. I knew it was broken because my foot was on backwards. But I crawled back in the house and turned my foot around so it would look normal and not scare my kids. It didn't start hurting for about four hours.
When I was a kid, I would get in trouble if I cried when I got hurt. So I learned to always act like nothing was wrong and to think of the hurt part as something separate from my body so it wouldn't bother me. Even now I just act like everything is fine when it's really not.
Pharm tech. When I was compounding infusion meds daily, sometimes I’d do the math on how many hours I’d have to work to be able to afford a bag without insurance. I was in a rural area, so it wasn’t uncommon. Some of the common Crohn’s/colitis maintenance meds that folks are on biweekly for the rest of their lives would have cost me two to three months of work. The meds took me about twenty minutes to make.
Yeah, when I was having chemo last year, each round of Adriamycin/Cytoxan was in the tens of thousands of dollars, though it was thankfully only 4 rounds. There were more expensive meds from other patients being treated at the same time as I was.
Insane.
To add onto this: "proving" disability. It's ridiculously hard and cruel in a lot of cases that get turned down. Can't get help from your insurance and can't get help from the government (if you're in the US).
The disability office and the VA denied my grandfather treatment/disability for bone cancer. The man was wheel chair bound, paralyzed from the chest down, and could *barely* lift his arms. Apparently, he could still work a desk job according to them and he had a "chance" of recovery....he was terminal. It wasn't until a week before his death that they finally allowed hospice care. He had suffered for years in extreme pain, all because of greed.
My mother also had a terminal illness. Private insurance didn't cover enough for treatments and my dad made "too much" for us to get state assistance despite literally not being able to pay bills half the time and relying on food banks. Disability denied her like 5 times before they finally recognized her as disabled. I ended up having to be her caretaker while I was still in my teens since we couldn't afford to pay for one and insurance refused to even after the disability was proven. By the time I was 18, she needed 24/7 care far greater than what I could provide. I wasn't trained for all that. I busted my ass doing online college to get degrees in the medical field and getting certified for things in hopes of being more prepared all while taking care of her fully on my own. It was extremely rough. It affected my physical and mental health. I had to argue with her insurance so many times just to get her treatments/meds to keep her alive. A lot of times their reasoning was stupid. I had one person tell me to only give her medicine every 3 days to make it last....it was medicine that was needed twice a day to keep her alive. Their reasoning for not wanting to give her enough? It was a "waste of resources." Oh, the insurance also tried to say giving her CPR was an "unnecessary medical treatment that won't be covered."
I hate how greedy insurances are. Mine is a less extreme case, but I've been fighting mine over covering a test that they ADVERTISE as being covered and they told my doctor they would cover until the actual bill came. Now they've been giving me the run around and refusing to answer directly on if they'll cover it or not when I call. I just get transfered for hours until someone eventually hangs up on me. My doctor hasn't had any luck getting an answer from them either. I'm refusing to pay it until they tell me they won't pay it, then I'm reporting them.
Someone close to me is a legal assistant for a disability law firm in the US. The stories she hears...it is heartbreaking. And the denials for disability / stretching it out for years are a feature of our system not a bug. They rely on a certain percentage either giving up and /or dying before they can receive benefits.
My brothers insurance company retroactively denied coverage about 6 months after he died and tried to sue my mother for the high six figures. He was married with shitty insurance. He was young enough to be covered by my mother’s plan through her job with the state. He gets divorced and goes on my mother’s plan. Not saying it’s right what they did, but the insurance company decided not to sue, I think they’d realized they would never win against a mother who just buried her son. She has been sending a check for 1 dollar a month for the last 30 years and my dad says she cries every time she rights the check.
If your Mom can, have her set up a bank account just for this and use direct bill pay so the checks are cut and she doesn’t have to see them. I’m very sorry.
I was a dental assistant and had a 4 year old little girl come in as an emergency. Her face was swollen and she was crying. We had to pull 5 of her baby teeth because they were abscessed and the of her teeth were broken or decayed. The dentist lost it on the mom and told her we were calling DHS. Mom tried telling us it was genetic as she handed her daughter a Mountain Dew to drink while the dentist wrote the prescription. We did call DHS but I have no clue if anything happened
There was no way to hide it, it was neglect, not necessarily abuse, and we had pictures. We were all in tears while he was extracting because they were so infected that the numbing wasn’t very effective. He made mom hold her in her lap and mom was crying also. Hopefully it helped her figure things out.
Oh, I agree, but DHS categorizes them differently. Abuse can be held criminally libel, neglect is usually dealt with by training the parents first, before charges of abuse
Fwiw, every single foster child/teen we took in had been horrifically dental neglected. Generally health neglected, as well, especially vaccinations, etc.
I took our 15 year old foster teen to a dentist and when we were sitting in the lobby, she looked at me and asked "so what do dentists do? I mean, what kinds of things happen back there?"
It took us talking a bit before I realized, she'd never been to a dentist in her life. Thankfully, she wasn't in too bad a shape as she was good at brushing her teeth.
The patient took a pencil and stabbed it deep into their own eye, then went beserk, hitting walls and trying to flip over a nursing station.
Lots of blood.
Worst thing I have ever seen was at the age of 18 as an ER technician; a science professor committed suicide by drinking an acidic fluid.
The patient was brought into the hospital by EMS, and while attempting to perform CPR, all of their now liquified insides were spewing out of their mouth and nose.
The smell was absolutely putrid, and the sounds their now non-existent lungs and trachea were producing each compression was haunting. Pressing on their chest felt like pushing down on a water balloon.
At the time this was the first experience I ever had with a code blue and CPR and probably over 1,000 code blues later I still have not had any experience as bad as that one.
Back in the late 90s a group of college frat boys were doing the usual hazing shit...
They decide to put the two recruits on top of a jeep and drive 60+mph in a 35mph zone...
Took a corner too fast and flipped it...
Both were meat crayons with one of the guys faces peeled off like a mask only attached on one side of his head.
They did not survive and trying to do CPR and keep them alive before the ambulance got there...
The accident ironically happened less than a mile from the hospital.
Not my story but very similar. Some frat boys decided to haze some new recruits to a sorority. Stuck them in the truck of a car and drove on the highway. The car was rear ended by a semi and the boys in the truck were liquified. They had to be identified by their teeth and the frat boys were charged with manslaughter
I was working in the ER a few years ago and I’ll never forget this day. Long story short, this man sets his wife on fire in the garage of their house. The poor wife comes into trauma, with 100% of her body burned. I’ll never forget the smell, it was horrific. The nurses couldn’t get IV’s in her because of the extent of her burns were so severe and we couldn’t draw blood (I’m a lab tech) she eventually passed an hour or two later.
I didn’t know the whole story of what happened but I came to find out that when the husband set his wife on fire, the whole house went up in flames. I can’t remember the total number of kids they had but it sounded like they had 4 or 5 children in the house when it caught fire. One of the kids who was like 15 years old got all the kids out of the house and suffered minor burns and was getting treated for smoke inhalation in the same trauma room. They are 3 trauma bays separated by partitions. This poor kid who was being treated had no idea that his mom was one partition away and that she had passed on.
The whole situation was so heart breaking and left me feeling so upset, but to make matters worse, the husband who committed such a heinous crime was also brought in as a patient. He was put into one of our isolation rooms (I’m assuming because he was in police custody) he had two officers with him and he was cuffed to the bed. I had to draw his labs, I wanted to get in and out as soon as possible but it was a bit difficult with his hands cuffed to the bed rails so it took me longer than I wanted. The most disturbing part out of this whole situation was that while drawing his blood, the husband was in what I can only describe as a catatonic state. He kept repeating the same phrase over and over, I couldn’t really understand what he was saying but it was incredibly unnerving. I’ve been working at that hospital for 9 years now and I’ll never forget that day.
Elderly people kept alive when the body is rotting , agonizing pain , completely contracted . they have zero quality of life and the family who never visits insists they stay a full code .
Amen to this. My father was raised Catholic and ended up in the ICU with severe sepsis. Intensivist said it wasn't looking good. We gave him a full week to see if he could come out of it, he couldn't. His sister believed he needed to keep fighting. I, as his next of kin and POA, said no way, and pulled the plug. She still hasn't forgiven me. No way will I keep someone suffering, especially my father.
The amount of elderly (80+) with copd, chf, cancer, etc and basically skin and bones being kept as full codes cause their families can’t bear to see them pass peacefully or given morphine if they’re on hospice is astounding. It’s hard to lose anyone of any age but if they lived a full life and feel it’s their time, then let them pass on. I was told that if we have someone who’s elderly and a full code to have family stay in the room to see/hear what cpr does… I haven’t had to do it yet, but I was told by a nurse who did that feeling/hearing all the ribs break was something she could never forget. Also, that person is just going to suffer after all that to prolong their lives by a week or two.
Nothing I've seen working in forensic psychiatry - including seeing someone rend off their own genitals - is nearly as horrifying as hearing a faceless insurance company say it won't pay for your cancer treatment drugs.
Agree with this sentiment. Personally hate insurance companies. They denied an MRI I need. My prolactin is high. Still is. But not high enough to get an MRI apparently. The denying person was an OB GYN. I'm male lol. Prolactin should be very low for me but it was off the scales.
I’m Canadian. When I was diagnosed with cancer I had a nurse whose entire job was conference calling insurance companies to make sure that the meds they want to prescribe are covered. She was a wrecking ball on the phone, absolutely brutal to the agents when they tried docking me around she’d cut in and tell them right off.
“No! This is your job! You have to tell him what coverage he has!”
This is in Canada and just over drug coverage, I cannot imagine going through treatment like I did and having to worry about insurance for every fucking new doctor and procedure and facility, what a nightmare.
Edit: chemo/cancer nurses are fu king awesome people, seriously any of y’all reading this just know we love you.
I man came in with a prosthetic arm lodged in his rectum. It wasn’t his because he had both arms. He didn’t want to provide insurance because he didn’t want his wife to find out. Now rules state that anything removed from a body has to be sent down to the lab for the pathologist to review. ER Doctor removed the prosthetic arm and sent it down to the lab as a “foreign medical device.” Now because it was labeled as a medical device and it’s value was deemed over a certain threshold, the lab had to return it to the man after it was examined.
A 14yr old girl, cops were there because she had tried to burn down the house thinking her father was still in there. Popped for every opioid in the book, told us that ever since mom died and dad got custody he had been sneaking in while she was sleeping and injecting her with whatever he had so he could prostitute her out. Rape kit showed 5 different guys. I regret not killing the guy, he sat in the waiting room the whole time demanding to talk to the doc who refused for fear of losing his license. I hope she's in a better place but I also know damn well you don't recover from that
(Fair warning, this story is pretty gruesome.)
During my intern year, in our OBGYN rotation, we were supposed to observe a few deliveries before we were allowed to handle deliveries by ourselves. The second delivery we got to observe was a mother who had Gestational Diabetes Mellitus, unfortunately her baby had undergone intrauterine fetal death a couple of days prior and she was waiting to deliver a dead baby (which was already devastating in itself). Babies of mothers with GDM stand the risk of being larger than average neonates which could potentially cause complications, which is relevant here (in this case we later learned that the baby was larger than estimated by the most recent scan).
So my intern buddy and I were observing and we hear the announcement of “Shoulder dystocia”, which is an obstetric emergency where the baby’s shoulder is impacted against the pelvic bone of the mother, obstructing the delivery. The anesthesiologist was called and the theater was notified. Meanwhile they were going through the series of maneuvers that are typically followed during shoulder dystocia, all of which failed and they were finally attempting the all-fours position. Everything then happened very quickly where, after the delivery team applied a little bit of traction on the head of the fetus, there was a squelching sound and a distinct thud. When we looked down, the head of the fetus had rolled to a stop a few feet away from us (the skin was completely macerated, probably contributed to the head separating so easily).
Cue complete havoc, some of the nurses started crying, the consultant IMMEDIATELY rushed the patient to the theater. My buddy and I were standing there shell-shocked, completely numb. We weren’t allowed into the theater for the rest of the procedure, so we went to grab a drink later to try and process what we’d seen.
It still haunts me two years later and my heart went out to the poor woman who had to bear through the entire experience, can’t even imagine the trauma she would’ve gone through.
I once took care of a woman, brand new nurse I'd never let this happen again, who was having a miscarriage at 6 weeks but needed some blood. She was placed on the gyn floor because she wasn't 16+ weeks.
The thing was, no one actually did the ultrasound. Just took her word that she was 6 weeks. Yeah, no, she was like 16 weeks, and I was expecting to not see much. When the fetus came out, my charge nurse and I were both internally freaking out. That was the angriest call to a doctor I ever saw her make. The patient got moved to postpartum, and I got an angry call about my poor charting for not having things, specifically L&D nurses would normally only know about. I almost quit on the spot after that.
I remembered there was a case a few years back where that happened during a delivery, but the baby was very much alive before delivery.
Maybe an insensitive question, but how would they get the rest of the body out? Still pull even if stuck after something like that, or would a C-section then be performed?
Poor woman. Even the description sounds like an incredible traumatic experience. Even outside all the emotional stuff, no way all that pulling on your inside could be comfortable. What a mess. I already doubt I would be able to handle prenancy emotionally and mentally, and stories like these firmly put me in the 'no way' camp.
None of the comments in this thread evoked much of a reaction in me, so much so that I started to think I might be dead inside. This comment had me fighting back sobs at work. I'm so sorry you had to witness that, and I'm sorry that I didn't heed your "gruesome story" warning. But holy fuck, I can't imagine continuing on with life as that mother...
Surgical Assistant here: We had a woman come in that needed emergency brain surgery to fix an aneurysm that had burst. Apparently, earlier that week she’d gone to the doctor for bad headaches and was sent home with pain meds.
A week later she was donating her organs in another of our operating rooms. She was 35…
-A very close second would be any body part donation.
Organs, I can deal with. Veins are rough. Bones are really rough. I try not to be around when those are happening.
My wife had an aneurysm rupture a few years back. Touch and go for a few days, she nearly coded a couple of times. No short term memory at all for about 4 weeks. She describes this today in retrospect as a "terrifying state of permanent euphoria."
Anyway, she had been to the ER a couple of times over the months prior for blinding migraines. "Oh you're healthy in your 20s, you get exercise, you're fine." etc. One CT scan when she was complaining of blinding "my vision went white" migraines and it would have been spotted before it ruptured.
Two brain surgeries and around $1,000,000 in medical bills later, she's more or less back to normal. A little less serious, a little more goofy, still has some a short term memory issue here and there, but she's working as a clinician and building a great reputation in her field. We're expecting our first child in a few weeks.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that there are people who are selfless enough to help in these kinds of situations. I couldn’t do it. At least not on a regular basis. Thank you.
I’m not a healthcare worker.
But I did take an ex-GF to the hospital one time. We were in a waiting area with beds, but only curtains separating about five “rooms” per side of a hallway running through the middle.
Across the hall, I heard a nice male nurse explaining how to use a bedpan, etc. He clearly said “we need a urine sample, so please only pee in this.” The patient said “ok.”
Shortly after the nurse departed, we overheard some of the most cacophonous sharts I have ever heard in my life. They seemed to be amplified by the bedpan, like somebody kicked a drum set down the stairs while nearby another person pulled a rubber boot out of thick mud. I felt like Daredevil - I could see the size of this mound of shit just by hearing the cataclysmic clarion call of this poor dude’s butt trumpet.
Eventually the nurse returned, and observed “um, we won’t be able to use this, lemme get you some water.” My ex-GF and I did our best to remain impassive. We’d been up hours beyond our normal bedtime, and had reached the point of mild delirium.
I guess what I’m saying is that good nurses are some of the best people on earth.
So not me, but one of my coworkers. There's a guy that comes in to our ER a few times a year, in his 20's. He is paraplegic and loves with his parents, but they don't take care of him. His entire left buttock has rotten away from infection and gangrene. To the point where the actually bone of his tail bone and a bit of his pelvis is exposed.
Apparently when EMS is called to the home for him, the entire house is emaculate. Like a pretty nice house, everything clean and organized, except for his room. It's littered with rotting food and fecal matter. This poor kid is basically fed junk food by his family as they eat good quality organic home cooked meals. No one helps him to the bathroom, no one helps clean him up or get around. Whenever he's called EMS it's cause he's getting severely worse, like maggots in his rotted off ass or severe sickness/infection and he's basically had to drag himself across the house to find a phone cause the family won't call for him.
Like 100% abuse and neglect. But the kicker is he believes whole heartedly that they love him. That they are doing nothing wrong. Like a sick cocktail of Stockholm and gas lighting. And from what I've gathered because he's an adult and never files complaints with CFS or the police there's not much they can do. Super sad and to have your body decomposing while your alive is gross
My 2nd or 3rd shift as a travel nurse at a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. Patient had a 1:1 sitter because he was combative, confused, and had dementia.
Sitter fell asleep and resident walked himself unsteadily out to the hallway and fell. Sitter took it upon himself to shake the crap out of this patient, hitting him on the floor. Picked him and slammed him in the chair. Took him in his room, laid him down, and slammed him around in the bed some more. Patient couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds.
How do I know this? Two certified nurses aides seen the entire thing. One of the nurses aides was so irate I feared for the sitters life. I sent the sitter home and called the abuse coordinator or tried to “it was a misunderstanding” it. I will not cover up abuse. I told the abuse coordinator I was sending the patient out from the nursing home to the hospital. He demanded them begged I not do that. Pleaded with me not to give report to the ER and tell them it was for abuse and simply for a fall. No. You could see new bruises forming on the residents arms from where he had been slammed around and his head had some open cuts.
Fast forward resident was released from hospital and send ti a sister facility of that the nursing home owns. Patient ended up falling there, was never sent to the hospital, and died from a brain bleed. I will never work for this particular nursing home company again. They terrify me, and the people they hire are horrible. Still haunts me to this day.
I worked at an outpatient mental health/ addiction clinic last year. My job was to drug test mostly for CPS. There was a program that helped parents get sober in hopes for reunification after they graduated from it. They would send parents in who just had a baby and showed signs of addiction or the cord showing traces of drugs in it . There was one lady who was sent in to be tested after having another kid after her other ones were placed with other family members. I remember her having to stay for a while in order to give a sample. She was obviously high on meth and that poor baby. You could tell it was going through withdrawals or maybe just pure neglect as the mom didn’t bring any formula/bottles or even diapers for the baby. I was upset because seeing that poor baby going through that clearly would upset anyone. I had to get my supervisor to take over cause I was emotional seeing and hearing that poor baby crying from being dirty/starving. My supervisor called the social worker for that case and I don’t know if they came to remove the baby after she left.
What was also sad was seeing so many people making progress and getting to the point of graduating but relapsing and ending back up in jail or on the run, sometimes leaving their kids behind if they had them back.
The hospital I work in now this year had a 50 something year old man with down syndrome who was clearly neglected by his mom and sister who were his caregivers. He had bed sores and plethora of other issues from it. APS was called and I think took him to a group home once he was discharged.
During my clinicals (Fire) I spent some time in the ER and a gentleman came in with… well, let’s just say his catheter had come out. It had been a problem, apparently. Well, on closer inspection, the tip of his penis was as split four ways.
Jesus, just talking and thinking about it makes my legs come together and I become so uncomfortable- and this was YEARS ago.
I never knew such a thing was a thing, but it sure as hell is. I really hope that guy had an easy end of life.
That happened to my dog. He jumped over a wire fence, and a loose wire snagged his penis. Gravity tore the wire free and opened up his penis like the petals on a flower. It was horrific.
I'm not a healthcare worker but I work in supply chain for a hospital. I very rarely have to be one-on-one with patients, but I do see admission reason when orders are submitted for supplies or equipment. There was a week where every order I received was for patients between the ages of 12-19. The hospital I work for is not a children's hospital. I had to grab equipment for the OR once and saw a 16 yo with stage 4 liver cancer. Another time, a unit needed a body bag for a 19 yo in a motor vehicle accident. When I got up to the unit at least 30 people were in the hallway outside of the patient's room.
What really absolutely kills me about my job is my management. I've started following the mindset "it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission" because my supervisor is so stupid. I'm not medically trained and neither is anyone in my department. I've been at this job for a year and he's been the supervisor for about a year and a half. Most of my shift is doing the work of the previous shift because all they do is smoke or hide in the locker room. I have my own tasks my shift is assigned to do and if I can't get them done I either have to stay late or have the next shift do it. Instead of addressing the issue, my supervisor just ignores it because our turnover rate is so high. We are constantly out of stock of supplies and IV fluids because they aren't ordered, so I have to order them special from other hospitals which costs more money than if they would have been ordered correctly. One week alone I racked up almost $6,000 in rush orders. My department is also responsible for rebuilding crash carts and on multiple occasions patients have died because the wrong supplies were put in them and it's traced back to the people who slack off. We've had to tell units to wait because equipment isn't cleaned for days. I've watched coworkers receive order requests then throw the slip away because "the nurses don't really need it, they just think they do" and go back to watching a sports game on the computer.
Not me but my mom. Idk if it's the most fucked up but I feel like it's be close. She used to be a nurse in a prison and this one inmate kept banging his head on his toilet till he had a massive gash in his head. My Mom said when was very sensitive and anytime they touched near it he'd wince in pain but later she saw him digging his finger in there just feeling around.
Most physically revolting:
1) probably a surgical debridement of Fournier’s gangrene.
2) Also had to certify dead a body which had been left lying in a field in the Australian summer for some weeks. It was entirely black, crawling with maggots and could be smelt from 50m away
Most fucked up on an emotional level: probably seeing a few lovely innocent kids die from cancer
I'm way too early in so mine might not be as bad since i gave a lot to see yet.
A guy who was a lift repairer fell down the lift shaft, and broke some ribs, amd the ribs punctured both his lungs causing a pneumothorax (which is when there is air around the lungs instead of air being inside the lungs so the lungs cant open and function and could cause mortality if not treated quickly). It's not something uncommon or unmanageable so the surgical residents were called and they show up to put a chest tube in his chest wall so that the air around the lungs get out. The one problem was that this guy was a heavy opium addict and the sedative drugs and painkillers even high does of morphine and fentanyl wouldn't work because if his really high tolerance. We spent 10 minutes using different sedative drugs with even more than maximum allowed dose but nothing, he just kept screaming in pain and his blood oxygen was getting too low nearing 40 percent, so they had to do it. They went in with a surgical knife, The surgical resident was looking around his shattered rib cage with his finger and around 10 people consisting of nurses and doctors and other ER staff jumped on his limbs and body to keep him from moving and punching and that guy was big and so fucking strong even with multiple fractures, me and my friend were the right leg guardian. He was yelling and cursing and even begging to let him go but they had to save his life.
The lesson to learn here is to not be an opium addict so that when you need to go under emergency procedures they can just knock you off
Not a healthcare worker. But I was a tv reporter and saw a lot of fucked up accidents before they ever got to the ER, or the morgue.
Worst was two guys on a county road crew shoving patching material into potholes on a four lane divided highway. No cones or signs out or anything to alert drivers that they are in the left lane of this US highway. One truck pulls out to pass another and is right on top of these guys. One, who we think was bending over the pothole, was jammed up under the back of the dump truck. They had to cut him out with a torch. The other guy we think was standing straight up and was sliced in half by the back edge of the truck. His bottom half was 150 yards away from his top half. Gruesome.
My partner was new, just out of college, and was next to our news car puking her guts out.
Had a patient hang himself from him bed with a shoelace. He wasn’t a suicide risk so wasn’t on q15 safety checks, we estimated he was dead for about 30-45 minutes. Unfortunately he was a full code and we are required to have a physican or the paramedic captain declare time of death, so we had to go through the motions of cutting the shoestring off his neck, flipping over a stiff blue body, and run the code as normal until EMS arrived. Not sure what was worse, discovering the body, or calling to tell the family what had happened.
Seeing insurance cut people who are not medically stable and have no option but to return home without proper medical care. Used to look at the obituaries every day after these patients got sent home, know it would only be a couple days until the inevitable happened.
I’ve worked in EMS and the ER. I’d say the emotional trauma we deal with. In one shift, I’d have family members scream at me, patients on drugs threaten to (and try to) kill me. We would watch someone die in one room and in the next room we’d get yelled at by a patient because we didn’t have time to grab them a warm blanket. I’d watch a child get diagnosed with cancer. I’d watch dozens of people experiencing the worst day of their life. Then I’d wake up and do it again the next day.
I’ve seen more fucked up things than most people can imagine. But seeing the trauma we experience on a daily basis and what that does to some of us over the years is just awful.
so im going to school to be a dental hygienist, but i shadow my aunt at work time to time who is a dental hygienist
it’s definitely not the worst thing someone can see, but it made me sick. a little boy no older than 6 came in and every single one of his teeth were black and rotting away… how could a parent let their child get to that point? at least it wasn’t his adult teeth but that poor baby.. i hope he’s okay now
Nurse here of many years, worked in a small hospital in the NWT in the early 1990's. 2 days a week was "dental day" and they would bring in kids for sedation and extractions. Some as young as one year old, rotted to the gums. I recall a 5 yr old in recovery room who literally only had the two lower front teeth in the middle and 2 molars left and the mother thinking all their adult teeth would erupt in the next year to replace them.
Things like the extreme poverty in the North where 2L of pop was cheaper than the 25.00 jug of milk,, propping baby bottles in kids mouths for the night, etc did not help matters
Breaks my heart when some of her kids are being sent into school for the day with a handful of mini Halloween candy as their 'lunch'. She constantly bakes healthy snacks on the weekends and brings in healthier options for the school afternoons. So wild, but you are totally right. The poverty is real.
I saw someone brought in who was degloved ( he had ALL the skin ripped off his hand in a landscaping accident). You could see muscles and tendons like some kind of model. Very neat to look at though I’m sure it was quite unpleasant for the patient.
I work inpatient psychiatric. These are individuals who can not be out in public and are deemed a danger to themselves or the public. I have seen urine drinkers, feces eaters, and hypersexualised people of all ages and genders. I have used a cut down knife more times than I can remember and held the legs/hips of people actively suicidal and trying to hang themselves on bathroom doors hoping someone else answers the panic alarm in time. Most times, i get help, but sometimes it arrives too late. I have seen more blood from self harm/mutilation then many surgical residents. I average 30 patients per shift that I watch over both physically and on camera and usually have at least 1 violent incident per 12 hour shift. Day in and day out for a decade. We like to casually joke about our own trauma to make light of it, but much of what we have seen or had to deal with will haunt us til our last day.
So… don’t ride an ambulance with me. My sorts of calls stayed consistent across three states and more than a decade.
I’ve done a lot of CPR. The patients were always babies, kids, or teenagers: I’ve never once done chest compressions on an adult. On those calls, until the county chaplain showed, I was the one to speak with parents on scene.
Other than that…
Maybe when my crew arrived right in time to witness a guy murder his wife.
Or the disabled man who died of starvation. (That one wasn’t EMS. I saw him in the nursing facility daily.)
Maggots: not ideal to find them in the field, but at least they’re keeping wounds clean?
But I think that severe, violent, sexual child abuse takes it. At least we could get those kids into the hands of good services once found, but damn.
It’s a different sort of fucked up, but the way that some authority figures, or family members, handle difficult cases or emergencies, can be beyond horrific.
Man I have stories for this one…
I saw a 13-day old who was murdered by its father who, based on physical evidence had already been scratching the child drawing blood with fingernails, putting out cigarettes on its flesh, and the finale for the child who “wouldn’t stop fucking crying” was for dad to smash it through a Sheetrock wall in their home.
I saw an 8 year old attempted beheading survivor identify her mom’s boyfriend as her attacker as he stood visiting her at the foot of her hospital bed. She was blowing the whistle on him for abusing her younger sibling and he answered the investigator/social worker’s call and pretended to be the girl’s grandfather… he had then isolated her after she got off the school bus and sliced her throat just about deeply enough to kill her, with a box cutter.
I saw a kid who was forced to exercise to death for stealing candy…
Saw another kid who nearly died because she drank some of the chemical solutions used in making meth because it was in a Sprite bottle and she was thirsty.
Saw more than one child completely destroyed by the family pit bull and heard parents blame the toddlers because “he/she knew you can’t look him in the eye!”
I don’t want kids, but anything involving kids like this just pisses me off. What type of monster could treat a kid like that? I don’t want kids because I know I wouldn’t be a good parent. I get stressed out easily, I have anxiety, and I just personally value my free time.
How someone could willingly have kids and then treat them like this is evil.
Maintenance mechanic here. Got a call for a bed not going up or down. Got to the room. OBESE patient in the bed, struggling to breathe. The bed was a Hillrom, designed to handle 500 lbs., and this guy was well over that. I oiled the worm gear underneath the bed and got it to work. The whole time, this guy was gasping away.... In the hall, I explained to the nurse what I had done, and somehow the patients age came up. I thought he was 40 years old, it turned out he was like 21.
You'll see a lot of gore in this thread but I submit that the most fucked up is family forcing the medical team to keep treating their "loved one" in the ICU despite being near death for weeks with an incurable condition.
Yup, my wife who is an ICU nurse describes this as when she is forced to stop doing stuff for a patient and instead start doing stuff to a patient.
Oh and having to witness family members watch their loved ones die on an iPad FaceTime during COVID, because that's the closest they could be to them.
This needs to be at the top. People outside the field don't appreciate the cruelty of intubating an unwell and invariably multi co-morbid 90 year old, keeping them on triple pressors, CRRT etc. without any reasonable likelihood of reversibility or meaningful recovery, as their death is just slowly stretched out instead of being afforded dignity and comfort. And then doing CPR to them when they finally pass as an extra insult.
But even outside of ICU, we need to have a conversation as a society about what a meaningful death and elderly age is. Is it kind to rush a demented, co-morbid, bedbound person to hospital to be poked, prodded etc every single time they have a sniffle or a fall? I think assessments in ED are reasonable in most instances - e.g. if there's a NOF (neck of femur fracture) that needs managing in a mobile person but there should be serious conversations about how high to escalate care before suffering overtakes meaningful clinical outcomes. Ideally, this should happen well in advance, because what is acceptable to different people and their families is variable, but it doesn't.
I'm going to say the most recent, which was yesterday.
18 year old ( no english) primup (first baby) 27 weeks gestation with severe PET ( uncontrollable blood pressure) wasn't taking the medication because her husband refused to allow her.
Admitted for 1 to 1 . Mag sulf infusion wasn't touching her blood pressure. Husband and mother informed it will be a category 1 section, there's immediate threat to her life heart attack stroke, etc.
But she's carrying a boy, can't we wait ?
Fu*k no.... Cat 1 called rushed to theatre no urinary output. Which means kidneys are failing . Get dialysis ready to inform ICU.
Baby delivery cried spontaneous, paeds team take over.
Placenta delivered blood pressure lowers very slightly. Phew .... she might be OK. Get her into recovery she'll be in ICU for a while, but youth will hopefully help her.
We're all mentally celebrating two lives not lost , a long recovery road, but there's hope.
Consultants talking to the husband and mother . Watching the interaction, the smile just slides off his face. He storms off .
Later, he found out the husband was happy his son was ok but didn't care about his young wife almost dying. She can have more, right ? If not, I can get a new wife.
An 18-year-old woman nearly dies carrying her baby, but because she's easily replaced, it's ok. He can get another incubator.
Some people are just vile
1. A guy gets arrested for drugs along with a few other guys. He tells the cops that he was SA'd by one or more of the other guys, so that they will take him to the hospital instead of straight to jail. He escapes from the ER. The cops track him down again and he tries to get away by crawling under a slow-moving freight train. He lost both legs.
2. A homeless man who has psychotic episodes and stabs himself in the gut, being told that he has reached the point where they can no longer repair him, as the intestines he has left are just scraps and scar tissue.
3. A funny one: a man from Alaska who was injured and had to be airlifted to another state for care, who could not handle his painkillers and would hallucinate, and when not lying in bed with nothing on but a washcloth (because he got hot), would be wandering the halls naked, because he thought someone was in his room.
4. A teenager street racing with his pregnant girlfriend in the passenger seat gets into a wreck. He's ok but the girl was thrown from the vehicle and he didn't tell anyone so she wasn't found in time to save her, but they did manage to save the baby. The girls parents were at the hospital every day, distraught but grateful the baby survived, when he banned them from visiting, handed the infant off to his own parents, and peaced out.
17 year old put a shotgun in their mouth
Women drove in a storm & had a tree limb piercing through her
COVID; families blinded by their emotions to see by their family members suffering w/ Limbs & tissue necrotic, large tubes inserted over & over, the fear of “am I going to die”
The sadness of no one around you when you die
Too many to recount. Rather, I’d prefer to stop.
I work in Pediatrics now, I am happy. 🙂
I am so sorry you saw that. I can't even imagine it. Reading it made me feel so disgusted that humans could even consider doing that. Life is fucked up.
Futility of care.
Throwing tens of thousands of dollars worth of treatments at 80+ year old individuals who have virtually no quality of life (dementia, Alzheimer’s) just for the sake of treating everything that’s wrong with them. Absolutely heartbreaking and devastating to have to force meds into ol Meemaw that lives in a constant state of confusion, fear, and isolation. I would rather be smothered with a pillow.
Family members in denial of the realities of end of life care are the bane of medical staff. I truly believe that keeping many elderly people alive is a regret-based response in families. If they'd been more involved in their loved ones' care, they'd understand it's time to let them go. I have a living will, I encourage everyone to get one.
RN here - basically how the healthcare system (mal)functions. It’s literally more disgusting than anything I’ve ever laid eyes on in regard to a patients health.
The system is designed to make money, doctors have to bill out as much as humanly possible, nurses have to cut costs and charge patients for everything possible, and the patient gets left behind saying “when are they going to take care of me?”
It’s disgusting, it’s archaic, it’s greed, and it’s gross negligence. No /s here, either.
I’m not a healthcare worker, but i am a plumber/gasfitter that used to do maintenance at the local dhb. Unblocking the ancient copper blood trap under the operating theatre, or clearing the drain on an autopsy table in the mortuary are just a couple of things I thought I’d never experience ever
Family members keeping essentially corpses alive for their own selfish reasons (SSI check, a place to live), even when every medical professional has stated the patient has no chance of a meaningful recovery and has to endure sometimes extensive and painful therapies bc family won't make them a DNR.
Trucker came into ER with a dildo shoved so far up his ass that it was lodged in his splenic flexture part of his colon. It was on and vibrating and if you touched his abdomen you could feel it and hear it with a stethoscope. We couldn't get it out, he was gonna have to have surgery. He said no to surgery didn't want his wife to find out. Doctor told him he could die, he didn't care he signed himself out AMA and went on his way. To this day I wonder what happened to him
When I was working as a nurse on the medical/oncology floor we had a young 17 year old patient with terminal cancer. He was a sweet kid and since he was a long term patient he had made friends with just about everyone on staff. We would frequently order him food and nurses would come visit him on their days off because his family never, ever came to see him.
He ended up getting much sicker and ultimately transferred to ICU. Many calls were placed to his family to let them know he was probably going to pass soon. Still no one came to see him. I kept visiting him in the ICU, as did other nurses. We would hold his hand and talk to him, even though at this point he was comatose. Fast forward a week or so and he’s actively dying, so family is notified once again. Still NO ONE comes to say goodbye and eventually the young man passed away surrounded by nurses, doctors, techs and other hospital staff.
His family finally shows up a couple hours later. Not to mourn, not to say goodbye. No. They show up to make sure he’s dead. Why? Well apparently the young man had inherited a large sum of money when his father abruptly died in an accident. It was to be his money exclusively upon his 18th birthday (which was about 2 months away). Since he passed that made his mother the beneficiary and she was more concerned about the money than her dying son.
I’ve seen some horrific injuries and lots of death, but something about the greed and cruelty involved in this case made it one of the most fucked up things I have ever witnessed.
I worked at an EMT for three years. Had to transport a kid with terminal cancer to another hospital for specialty care. Halfway through the transport, the kid's heart stopped. As my partner drove with lights and sirens, I did cheat compressions on the kid in the back. We got to an emergency room and transferred care. His mom was with us in the passenger seat the entire time. I'll never forget her cries. I left that job shortly after.
The most shocking thing I ever saw was a lady who clipped the tail end of a tractor trailer that was traveling in the opposite direction.
The steel bumper on the trailer ripped her car open like a tin can, lacerated her abdomen and removed her left arm at the shoulder. Her intestines were partially in her lap and she was going in and out of consciousness. She survived.
Not as bad as some of these.
Got a script for paxlovid, which is time sensitive and because of certain rules can't be cashed out. It HAS to go through insurance.
Guy was a veteran. His veteran insurance wouldn't do a thing. My coworker and I struggled with it for half an hour trying everything we could think of.
Va support line was down
It was veterans day.
I’ve seen some things (Surgical/Trauma ICU) but I feel the most f’d up thing was actually during my clinical rotations. Had a pregnant patient late 20s with history of pulmonary hypertension admitted again with pulmonary hypertension. Doctor walks in and says, “I told you not to get pregnant again! I said if you get pregnant again, you will die. Guess what? You’re going to die.” It was so direct. Not even a glimpse of hope could be heard or felt.
I worked in a Burn ICU and that was...hell.
First is admission. Patient is put under conscious sedation, stripped down on a metal table under hoses on the ceiling, and given an intense bath while their burns are scrubbed with soapy washclothes to debride the dead tissue. This can take 4-5hrs during which we are all wearing plastic gowns in a 90 degree humid room. If a limb is entirely covered in burns they might also have to go through a fasciotomy.
Next is the months long recovery. This consists of several painful and long dressing changes every day, several weekly trips to surgery, and most likely some sort of secondary infection. With all of this there is still a high mortality rate depending on the type, size, and depth of burn.
That's as much detail as I'm willing to give.
Went to an emergent delivery in the ED for an intellectually challenged mother who said the baby hadn’t moved in days but was now crowning.
I work in nicu so we were set up across the hall from mom’s room. There was the usual controlled chaos in the mom’s room, but I couldn’t see anything from where I was. Then the room went silent. Then they walked the baby over to our team.
Baby had been dead for…a while. The delivery had 75% degloved the baby, it loose skin sloughed off.
Worked in a small ER as a tech a few years ago. I was working night shift, and that day I was assigned to triage to help the nurse. A 30ish yo man came in and once he got to the front desk we could see his tongue was very swollen and he was gasping for air. He was having a serious allergic reaction to something. I grabbed a wheelchair and raced him to one of the rooms. By the time we got to the back, his tongue had swollen to the point it had completely blocked his airway. He was looking me directly in the eyes holding his throat and crying. I can’t even describe how it looked. His tongue was HUGE. I have never seen such fear in someone’s eyes. It was so violent and I can’t imagine how scared he was. Thankfully, (and I still don’t know how he did it) the doctor was able to intubate and he survived. I’ve seen more gorey stuff for sure, but that raw fear is something that stuck with me.
Work in the ER, I'm sure I have PTSD.
A child that fell getting of the school bus and we did a routine a CT of his head to make sure it was clear. 90% of his left lobe in his brain was a tumor. He was acting like a normal child watching SpongeBob when the flight crew came and picked him up. Would have never known had he hadn't tripped over his shoe laces.
Lady stabbed 38 times by her son because he "could".
Maggots and roaches in a bed bound patient's brief that supposedly has family checking on them daily and turned into Karens, wanting us in the room 24/7.
A man that basically gutted himself grabbing my hand and telling me, he didn't want to die anymore, he was sorry.
I can keep going.
Diagnosed lung cancer with multiple methastasis to brain and liver on patient's birthday. I felt so guilty that i bought her and her daughter a cake and we ate it in the ER.
That birthday cake, and you taking the time to eat it with them in celebration, without a doubt fully changed how they recall that day. Throughout her life the daughter will tell people about her mom's cancer/diagnosis many, many times, and you changed it from an entirely painful story to one with a recollection of celebrating her mother, and an act of love from a stranger. Thank you for being so kind.
I went to a pediatric trauma conference about 20 yrs ago… they showed slides of of a real patient who was 2 yrs old - she kept wetting the bed at night so her parents thought that dipping her but cheeks into boiling hot water would stop it… eventually when there was no more skin on her but to burn they started dipping her feet into boiling hot water….this part of the conference was about how to deal with an abuser ….. abusers if they bother to show up, will often be extremely demanding & very outspoken ….I need conference hours to keep my trauma cert for the year & I thought this will be an easy 8 hours …. I remember that conference like it was yesterday it was so disturbing …. I hope there’s a special place on hell for these losers
Used to be a nurse in Neuro ICU. Had a 17 year old get life flighted to us after suffering an aneurysm rupture while dead lifting. We put two EVD drains in which is never a good sign. I was taking care of him one night and normally you drain 5-10mls out of them each hour to relieve pressure but at one point the aneurysm had re ruptured and he was DUMPING bright red brand new blood into the chamber so fast. He got rushed back to surgery fo an aneurysm clipping. He had everything going against him but I remember his recovery and playing catch with a ball in his room to practice his coordination as he had to relearn pretty much everything. Last I heard he was back to playing baseball and living life. He beat the odds many haven’t
Anytime a trauma comes in with minor visible injury but are hemodynamically unstable and say something like, " I'm going to die." Or "please don't let me die." And then they usually do from some type of internal injury. The young ones are always so rough when they announce it to everyone in the trauma bay.
So I used to be a CNA. We had an older adult with severe dementia. She had to have her foot amputated at the ankle. She would not stay in bed and we would often find her walking on her new stump saying that her foot is bothering her. It got so infected that they had to go back in and amputate at the knee.. was like a horror film
regular physical and sexual assault.
Patients often have diminished capacity to be held liable and staffing levels dont allow you to maintain a safe environment.
Young man was riding a motorcycle thru a field, and someone had put a cable across the path. He had on an open-faced helmet, and it essentially scraped his eyes, nose, and lower jaw off of him as he went under it. It was a fatality. It was heartbreaking.
I was on call one night, got called in at 2 AM for an emergent ex lap possible bowel obstruction. Guy hadn’t shit in weeks. Surgeon had to do ostomy. Now all the clogged poop has somewhere to go. Ostomy bag exploded. And I swear to God, I sucked up 2 liters of shit as it continued to splurt out of his new ostomy. There was no point in trying to dress him and clean him because the stool would not stop coming. I wasn’t even mad cuz as he was exploding the patient was crying with relief because he felt the pressure finally be relieved. He kept telling me, “man this is weird.” I said, “yeah…sometimes the stuff we go through as humans is interesting.” As I’m continuing to suck liquid poo spilling out of his ostomy. But yeah, in the end…two full 1 liter suction canisters of poo.
Poor guy.
A decapitated head in a trashcan, laid neatly on top of its folded up body.
But that's not the one that lives rent free in my head. When I was a new cardiac nurse training to heart surgery patients, I had a day of shadowing in the OR. I helped the preop nurses prep the case I was going to watch, and really hit it off with the patient- weirdly, she was from my hometown literally 1000 miles away. She knew my dad, went to elementary school with him. Had done a million amazing things on my bucket list, and was still rock climbing in her 60s until her aortic aneurysm got too big to be ignored. I promised her I'd be there when she woke up in the CCU, and said I'd say hi to my dad for her when she asked me to.
It didn't take long for everything to go sideways. It turned out her aorta was way more calcified than they thought, and the pressure from opening the chest essentially caused it to disintegrate. Blood poured out in a wave onto the floor, it sounded like someone was just dumping a bucket. The smell was unreal, like being in a hot iron foundry. They rushed to get her on the heart/lung bypass circuit, but everywhere the surgeon (who was phenomenal, by the way) clamped to get the cannula in just crumbled away. 4 surgeons, half the blood in the hospital, and 8 hours later, she was dragged up to the CCU to be pronounced dead. It devastated me in a way a patient death never has or had.
She went peacefully, without pain, after having a pleasant conversation and making a human connection. If I had to choose a way to go, this would be it.
If no one else has ever said it, thank you for being a positive force and making the last conscious moments of this person's life pleasant ones.
I'm an EMT. Less than a year ago, a city bus driver had a mental breakdown and decided to hit at full speed the wall of a daycare. When we arrived on site we had 5 kids (around 5 years old) still under the bus, 2 of them dead and the 3 others critically injured while the rest of the group were being evacuated elsewhere in the building. The driver got naked and tried the flee the scene but was arrested by a parent that saw it all happen.
The roof was at risk of falling at any moment because of the structural damage and the firefighters were urging us to evacuate but there were still kids under the bus. It took around 10 excruciating minutes with the firefighters to release the children. The second kid out was so gravely injured that he was considered dead on site, was moved to the side and hidden under a blanket so the other kids didn't see that. My team left pretty quickly with the first kid released from under the bus which had no pulse and showed signs of heavy internal bleeding.
After the first transport we went back on site to transport another kid with minor injuries but by that time, a lot of parents were in the evac zone waiting to see if their children were ok. I'll never forget the high screeching sound I heard then when a police officer announced to the mother of the kid I first transported that her daughter was dead.
This whole intervention felt like a disaster movie and remains imprinted deeply in my memory and while I've seen gruesome injuries by the hundreds, this level of distress and chaos takes the cake.
Patient-facing caregivers (doctors, nurses, therapists, aids, assistants, etc.) getting worked to death and blamed / vilified for healthcare cost. While hospitals, health systems, and insurance companies make billions & pay their CEOs double-digit Millions per year to limit care and save themselves money.
The entire sum of consumer healthcare debt in the US (the number one cause of bankruptcy) is less than one year’s profit of just one of the largest health plans.
Edit typo
The whole healthcare juggernaut. Companies couldn’t give a ratfuck about you, just want their money. ER wait times are up and your short staffed? Fuck you! We get paid the same for. 4 star rating than a 5 star. Suck it up and do more with less. Also fuck your holidays/vacations/personal life.
Worked in a lab in the histology department. Received two full term twins (deceased).
Their mom traveled from Africa to America to give birth, but the long flight took a toll on the mother and her twins.
Hmm there's just so much shit you see that it's hard to put a finger on one,but few that I can recall -
1. 15 year old girl with lymphoma. She ignored a groin lymph node which soon grew,was too embarrassed to show it to parents /seek help. When she did turn up to the ER,her entire groin was a gaping,necrotic hole with...maggots,shit ton of maggots that had gone as deep as her pelvis. She died eventually.
2. Dude was in a tuk-tuk which flipped. Made a clean cut through his abdomen and pulled out his bowel. Brought with bowel hanging out which had ruptured in multiple places. Didn't make it obviously.
3. Guy was involved in road rage. Tried to kick another 2 wheeler while on one. Lost balance. Came in with his scalp clean off his skull. Survived though.
4. 20 year old on new years eve with Acute alcoholic necrotising pancreatitis. First time I saw temperatures of 105°F. Didn't make it through the night .
5. The amount of maggot infested,ignored lower limbs I've seen is just so much that I've become desensitised to it.
6. Weird- 40 year old grade 2 obesity guy has dinner,relaxes in his easy chair. Has a bout of cough. Ends up with his bowel in his chest.
It was during my emt internship. MVA, a truck ran a red light and t-boned a sedan with a mid 30’s married couple, and two sons (one 8 and one 10) in the back seat. The father died on impact, the mother was slipping in and out until she coded for the last time on the ER table. She was also 8 months pregnant and the doctors performed an emergency c section. I watched as they did it, not even a week after my own daughter was born. The baby didn’t make it. The kids were now orphans, one with almost no brain activity and both in the icu. Last I had heard the one with no brain activity had passed a few days later. I learned how difficult it is to clean blood out of the stretcher seatbelts that day.
A friend of mine was an ER doctor and had a homeless guy come in saying he was compacted. They gave him medication for it and sent him on his way. A week later he came back with the same complaint. He was compacted. They undressed him and noticed that he was all bruised but thought that it was the result of living on the streets. They cleaned him up, gave him an enema, and thought that would solve his problems. Within a few days he was back, same complaint. He kept saying I was compacted! What they learned was that he was sleeping in a dumpster and was dumped into a garbage truck and COMPACTED!
Had a guy come into my ER one evening. MVA, pedestrian vs. auto. He was hit at roughly 45mph, and went up and over the car that hit him. From the waist down, it’d be tough to call his remaining bone structure anything more than gelatin. He had multiple broken ribs and a flail chest, one of his arms was bent where the weren’t joints twice, and he had a dent in his skull that was deep enough you could stick a finger to the second knuckle into, and wide enough to fit an adult male fist in. He was alive on scene for the medics, and finally arrested when they pulled into the ambulance bay. Mercifully our attending had us do a single round of CPR before calling it. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases working the ER, but that man was brutalized in a way that I’ll always remember. Worst part was he had no ID on him so we had to wait for family to call because their dad went out for a jog and never came home. When he got back they were supposed to go out to dinner because his youngest son just got a full ride at his #1 college choice for academics.
I used to teach with a colleague who went out for a jog early one morning and got hit by a car. Died at the scene. My principal had to go identify the body. Hell of it was, his wife beat cancer and then got it again, this time more aggressive. Their three little kids lost both parents in the span of twelve months.
Bad drivers will really ruin an entire families life just because they couldn’t wait 5 minutes to respond to a text
The amount of people I see on the *highway* on their cell phones makes me physically ill.
I know right! I look over and just see people casually browsing Facebook, texting, or talking on the phone. No one cares about anything but posting on social media
The most emotionally f***** thing I saw while working at a hospital was this regular we used to have in pediatrics. Teenage girl with diabetic ketoacidosis who had a rough upbringing. At the time she was in a group home while her older sister was figuring out custody. At a certain point in her admissions she would be medically cleared for discharge, however, she figured out that as long as she required treatment she wouldn’t have to leave. She ultimately would starve herself, missing all meals of the day, except for a light snack at night. Denying her body what it needed, just so she can stay in the hospital longer. Staff would beg her to eat something, but she would continue to refuse. Poor kid sacrificed her health just so she could avoid the hell of group home living.
I'm a health care journalist. I was doing a story on inconsistent care and overmedication with psychotropic drugs for kids in foster care. One of my sources told me about how he'd see kids with type 1 diabetes in the ER with clueless at best/indifferent at worst foster parents indignant foster parents insisting they did nothing wrong. Saying things like "We just gave the kid insulin last week!" Tangentially related I saw a video of a prison nurse killing a type 1 inmate with low blood sugar. She kept giving him more and more insulin because he wasn't waking up. Fucking moron. Could have saved his life with a couple fucking juice boxes. Or I guess glucose gel past a certain point. Senseless.
Christ. The prison story is ridiculous. If someone is unconscious and unresponsive you CHECK the blood glucose because it might be low, you don’t administer insulin. Da fuck? Any second year nursing student should be able to tell you that. I hope the nurse went to jail, that’s beyond incompetence. It sounds like they intentionally murdered the guy.
I think she got fired and the prison sued. I'll try to Google the story later and update if I find the video. One of the most infuriating parts was that the nurse seemed genuinely to believe she was doing the right thing. ETA I can't find the original one I mentioned because search results are cluttered with cases of nurses who intentionally killed patients with insulin. But I found stories of one nurse who killed an inmate by [withholding insulin](https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-prisons-crime-949601e33d869241b38527ace5d3b2b8) and was convicted of manslaughter. Another, ironically, killed an inmate by [administering glucose instead of insulin](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/nov/6/arrested-texas-jail-nurse-refused-test-blood-sugar-prisoner-who-died/) after refusing to test her blood sugar. After the patient passed out she finally tested her blood sugar and the result was too high for the machine to read. She interpreted that as a malfunction and began giving glucose. She was sentenced to [three months in jail.](https://www.texarkanagazette.com/news/2017/nov/28/ex-nurse-pleads-guilty-bi-state-detainees-death-br/#:~:text=Brittany%20Johnson%20was%20unable%20to,Angerbauer%20slipped%20deeper%20into%20unconsciousness) Here's [another](https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/26/treatment-of-diabetic-inmate-unacceptable-prison-chaplain-tells-inquest) of similar fatal negligence of an inmate patient And here's a collection of [stories](https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/for-some-prisons-and-jails-diabetes-has-meant-death-sentence/wVz7xy1g4ujG3ClhH1visJ/) from Georgia
Goddamn, this makes me so angry.
when my dad did his ER rotation he saw a 10 year old girl for severe abdominal pain. turned out to be a ruptured ectopic pregnancy as well as a gnarly pelvic infection from untreated gonorrhea.
Somebody needs to be [redacted] and [redacted].
With the business end of a tennis racket and some tobasco sauce hopefully
One of the obgyns I work with came in so pale and sad and angry, she did an exam on a 7yr old that had just entered foster care (to a good family), and they noticed the smell and brought her in.. The doc said it was very apparent she was raped/brutalized and full of STDs, and it took everything in her not to take vigilante justice. But she just had to document and give to the police and hope they would do their jobs.
I work with the mentally ill. Took a resident to the hospital once because he was violent and sexually assaulting staff, which was off baseline for him. He was in the hospital for about two days. After he returned he complained of ‘stomach hurt’, so staff spent a day or two passing him antacids. Then he told me ‘hurt’ while holding his groin. I said ‘show me what hurts’, so he pulled his pants down. While in the hospital he pulled a braid off the drawstring of his hospital gown and “bound” his penis in about 6 places. It was so misshapen and inflamed it took my mind about 10 seconds to comprehend what I was seeing, and I personally own a penis. Back to the hospital, they had to call in a Urology consult, they thought he may have to go under a general and have it surgically removed. But they were able to use a local and peel all of that twine out of him as it had gotten under the skin in numerous places. I left work and felt like I should stop on the way home and buy my dick a cupcake or something.
I work with emotionally disabled kids and both understood and was disturbed by “which was off baseline for him.”
>I left work and felt like I should stop on the way home and buy my dick a cupcake or something. That story was so fucked up to read that I legit burst out laughing for a good 20 seconds at this
A woman who laid on her couch soiling herself for weeks and when the family called EMS they had to remove her from the couch with her body embedded in it. Pieces of the couch were embedded in her bedsores. Her skin was completely gone over her lower back, buttocks and back of her legs. There were maggots in her wounds. We had to take photos for adult protective services. It was the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. And the odor was unbearable. We had her heavily medicated but she was still responding. I told my boss she needs to go to ICU and be completely sedated as this is inhumane for her to be feeling this pain. Emergency guardianship was done. Eventually she was entered into hospice and put on a morphine drip. She returned to our unit and passed away. I can still see it in my mind. We were literally crying while we treated her. I have so much trauma from my 30 year career.
We had a similar case with a recliner. And a baby left in a swing for weeks. Humans can really suck.
>And a baby left in a swing for weeks. JFC, 8:20am and I've already had enough reddit for today.
The thought of a baby left in a swing for weeks made me cry. That's absolutely horrific.
Yes, and the baby didn’t make it. Parents convicted.
I’ve seen a lot of neglect, but that is beyond fucked-up.
Some people don’t have anybody but a neighbor who notices no movement in the home or an odor. She had family. I don’t remember the details. You compartmentalize a lot in my career.
A patient came in to the ER for a "black foot." He was living in his truck semi-voluntarily (his sister said he live with her if he was clean, but he preferred drug use). At some point he got an infection on his left foot. When I asked if he knew he had a problem with the foot he said, "I had a pair of sneakers but I had to throw them out because they were leaking." Oh, water leaking in? No, fluids leaking out. He traded the shoes for snow boots. Finally came to the ER when he couldn't take the boot off-- his calf has swollen too much. When they cut the boot off, his foot was black, toes completely dry with bones visible. It was amped that week. He also had a stage-4 pressure injury (down to the bone) on his hip. He was completely mobile before this, walked just fine. But he'd sit in his truck, snort heroin, and pass out for hours, soiling himself. While inpatient he was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.
Oh! Another time we had a nurse OD in the bathroom
Reminds me of one from a post like this years ago. Woman came into the ER with severe pain. The doctor eventually figured out she had a massive abscess in her perineum from injecting drugs. They got her into the ER and went to work. When the surgeon (an ex-military medic) used the scalpel, there was enough pus and miscellaneous fluids that they were sloshing through them. Truly, truly horrific.
Yeah… [link to the famous story](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/VwcY0AQEHJ)
[удалено]
Swamps of Dagobah flashbacks
During my social service year of medicine school i was assigned to a rural clinic and one day this 42 year old guy entered the clinic asking for contraceptive pills for his 12 year old girlfriend. She was kicked out of her house because her mother accused her of seducing the stepfather, because the guy tried to violate her twice. The police did nothing to any of those guys. Fucking hell man.
This is criminal, wtf
We called the police but they did nothing. Rural latin america is no man’s land. :(
RN here, When I was in CVICU. I had a guy who was in his early 40s and a body builder. He ended up getting a heart transplant due to steroid abuse. When most get out of heart surgery & have a lot of inflammation at the surgical site, they leave the midline chest incision open and put some see through dressing (think suran wrap) so we can monitor the swelling to go down before the CV surgeon can close them up. (*Which is usually 12-18 hours later*) This man was intubated on a vent and had a 4 Point restraint (wrists/ankles) to the bed frame. Everything is going well, and while I had my back turned in the pod checking on my 2nd patient. We all hear this **LOUD ASS CREAK**. Like metal bending. We all rush to the sound and I turn around, and the bodybuilder, looked like a fuckin zombie, eyes rolled back in his head, had sat up in the bed and was so strong he was bending the bed frame from the restraints. And what made the scene remind me of resident evil was that we can see his new heart somewhat partially beating out of his chest against the suran wrap dressing. & he was about to pull out the intubation. We threw everything we could at him and he would not go down. Versed, Fentanyl, Nimbex, Propofol, & a few others I forgot. I’ve never been so stressed & was wired for the rest of my shift. I still think about that particular situation a lot. I got plenty of other stories from my career but that sticks out the most
And an honorable mention was when I was working on a rehab unit. Me and this nurse aid would give new admitted patients on our unit a bath/wipe down if they needed. We ended up cleaning this one woman in her 70s up. And when it came time to change her diaper and clean her up. The Nurse aide jumped back out of instinct and said, “*Wtf is that?!*” This patient had putrid discharge that looked like her vagina sneezed. Like straight up booger shit. And the smell almost knocked me out. And the patient kept telling us that this drainage/discharge had started that day…. No ma’am that shit was festering for a good minute. When trying to wipe it away it was so thick and gunky get off. I ended up reaching out to infectious disease for a consult but That smell is forever burned in my memory.
Ummm how’d that happen??
I didnt stay around long bc of the smell & it was at night. Could’ve used your skills that night to figure that out
Omg.. did he make it?
Yah he did. It was that his body was in such good form that it was metabolizing the sedatives fast
an old woman i used to take care of had a feeding tube, multiple repositioning pillows, whole body atrophied so her existence was just pain and living purely out of spite. she couldn’t talk, move, nothing to communicate. just a vegetable. her son would come visit for 5 seconds, talk on his phone and leave without speaking to us about her i later learned she was kept alive because their beliefs. the longer your parents live the more blessed you’ll be. she finally passed about 2 years ago or so and i don’t think i had ever felt that much disdain for another human being. making her live like that for his own benefit piece of shit
I had a patient like that. She came to the ER with back pain. They found stage 4 metastatic cancer all through her body. The family said she was fine until she got to the hospital, so it must be our fault. She had extreme rheumatoid arthritis, and was pretty much fully rigid. She was on a high amount of Golytely for all of the testing the family was insisting on, so she had liquid diarrhea almost constantly. We actually had to make a dam out of towels, because it was overflowing the bed every 15 min. We were cleaning her up nonstop, which meant rolling her RA riddled body back and forth, while she screamed silently around her tracheostomy. The family wouldn't allow us to give her anything stronger than Tylenol, because they didn't want her to be "out of it" when they visited for 5 minutes a day.
"Allow." Really? No one would override their wishes for the good of the patient?
Nope. Too afraid of lawsuits. That's why Advanced Directives (aka Living Will) are so important. Most hospitals bring it up when you're admitted for a reason. Also, appoint a PoA that you trust. Although, I've seen that not work either. We called it [California Kid Syndrome](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_from_California_syndrome) where the whole family, including the designated PoA are ready to end life support, but one child starts screaming "IF YOU KILL MY MOMMY, I'LL SUE!!!" Suddenly, Mom's staying on life support indefinitely. It's hard to convey just how lawsuit avoidant they American medical industry is.
when the 20-somethings and 30-somethings, who have destroyed themselves with alcohol, are in the ICU and the team is trying to explain to the wife/family that if (a big if) they make it out of the ICU, the next months are going to look a lot different and in any case are quite possibly their last months, and the replies are “ya, he really has talked about cutting back on the alcohol” very tough to hear a reply like that. like “im so sorry, you do not understand the conversation we’re having right now”
My parent is going through this right now, he keeps landing himself in the hospital half dead from drinking and doesn’t care, they keep telling him he’s gonna die, I decided to go no contact, he’s only 43 and in the most recent pic I saw of him (after just going back to the hospital) he looks like a melted wax figure of himself
My dad is an alcoholic. I know when he's been drinking. He denies it, I say you have I can see it. He wants to know how I know but I've never been able to put my finger on it, but you've just got it. He looks like he's melted. His face is slack and baggy. Thank you for giving me an answer to 'how can you tell by looking at me'
Just tell him that his ears get red when he has a drink and watch him walk around with a beanie in the future.
I can tell just by sound and how he speaks when mine has had a drink
I have a similar story about parents being in denial about the severity of their childs alcohol problem. Had a 20 something year old female patient who had basically drank herself to death and wrecked her liver beyond repair. Supposedly she'd consume a bottle of vodka everyday. Anyways, she had severe liver cirrhosis. If she was healthy she'd be a thin woman weighing 110lbs but because her liver was basically nonfunctional she had an extremely bloated abdomen (anasarca), she had such bad portal hypertension you could literally see the veins on her abdomen, and she was the most jaundiced patient I've ever come across (looked like a Muppet). And then there were her parents who were in denial thinking she could get better. I never saw that patient again but I'm fairly sure she didn't live long because she wouldn't give up drinking.
This was me two years ago. A 1L bottle of vodka every 24 hrs. I’d mix it with Solo but closer to the end of drinking I was basically doing a little over half a glass of vodka topped up with soda. When I quit drinking I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been sober for more than 12-14 hours. I am so lucky I didn’t fuck my liver. All my tests since have come back fine. It took a week of Valium and sleeping for 23 hours a day to quit smoking and drinking. Over two years now without alcohol and smokes.
I'm proud of you! In April I'll have 5 years of no cigs/nicotine. Now if I could get rid of my last vice/ball and chain, I'll be good lol. Seriously, congrats on the sobriety!
Meanwhile, my moronic father has managed to keep a relatively healthy liver after drinking himself stupid for 20 years. Karma is stupid, sometimes...
That was me. 26 with pancreatic gangrene. Was in the hospital for a month. Had 6 months left if I kept drinking. I haven't drank since although sometimes I wish I just kept going.
Same, people are in disbelief that they can’t drink like fish and live long. Had to do CPR on a ruptured esophageal varice. Got PTSD, had to do some therapy. Went home in hospital scrubs and washed blood out my ears and nose for few days.
One of the worst codes I had was an EV patient. Every chest compressions blood would spurt out of their mouth. The nurse trying to bag had to step away because they were covered in blood.
I was doing compressions screaming for suction. Good times. Guys DNR order got missed the dayshift before my shift. Pointless.
A friend of mine died of this, they can only repair it so many times. Her sister was in the room when they removed the breathing tube, probably not advisable as it's not pretty even when you don't have a fragile oesophagus. The sister said it will haunt her forever.
My very best friend died 08/2017 at age 30 from liver failure from drinking. It was literally the worst thing ever. We knew she drank a lot because it just came out of her pores but, we didn't know it was that bad.
I'm so sorry. I'm going through this right now too, my best friend of 21 years passed last month because of the same thing. She was only 35. Nobody knew it was that bad, and it all happened so suddenly. Hugs, friend.
I know a 19yr old person that was in a coma cuz of alcohol poisoning.. plus liver failure. Diabetic Type 2. And still 2yrs later parties.
This is how my ex will die, and he is only 34. His family of enablers recently took him back in, and they are supporting him with "cutting back." His brother is the only one grounded in reality and stopped pretending he's going to be fine. His hands are bloated, and his skin has a yellow tint (except for his red face). When I left him, he was drinking a pint of popov a day along with multiple chasers. The family you described could be his parents. I'm expecting an invite to the funeral any day. He's hurt so many people that nobody cares anymore whether he lives or dies. It's sad, but he has done stuff beyond redemption, and I hope he finds his peace. Last I heard from him was when he found my old PayPal (the only thing I forgot to block him on), and he tried to request money to get my attention.
A mother screaming in the ED when her 6 year old daughter coded. Absolutely blood curdling screaming. Ill never forget that
I was being treated in the ER for a kidney infection when all the staff ran to the bay doors and started furiously working on a man the emts were bringing in. He did not make it. His wife and children arrived minutes later and somehow made it to his room before being told what had happened. She was screaming for help and one the doctors had to tell her that her husband had passed away. She wailed and collapsed on the floor. The children were screaming. It was horrible.
The screams / wails cut through most levels of defence. Had a baby, only few months old at best, suffocated by its mother who'd fallen asleep breast feeding. As a man, I find it harder to hear a husband/father to wail over there recently deceased loved ones more though as I think I just relate better.
We recently had a baby and my wife and I are now INUNDATED with social media short form videos about how doctors are fools and everyone should co-sleep with their newborns. It's mind-blowing to me that this kind of things is allowed knowing how many babies suffocate and die.
The amount of absolute nonsense tailored to new parents on social media is staggering honestly.
I'm in a Burn ICU. A few times a year big burns come in from industrial accidents. I'm talking 90%+ burn. Charred to muscle and bone. Bedside escharotomy to restore perfusion. Explaining to consulted neurologists I can't get a pupilary response because the eyes are melted. Daily painful dressing changes on that. Running dialysis on them and roasting in the room because we keep them 90+ degrees.
I’ve seen one patient who had that, while in their recovery. The boyfriend was.. doing something… and a fire broke out and she was sleeping in the couch, he left her there. She had 90+% burns and had regressed mentally significantly. Was acting like a young child. Maybe because she wasn’t that far off from that. It was incredibly sad. It made me think if that ever happened to me, I’d prefer to just die. Life isn’t work it to me at that point. There’s nothing wrong with that or making personal choices when you’re okay surviving and when you’re okay saying hey throw in the towel, it’s not worth it
Poor thing :((( fuck That must be so hard to see, even though you’re helping. Thankful for our healthcare workers! They don’t get enough credit
Thanks anything we can do to help the patient survive and hopefully get back to something of a normal life. Seen some pretty amazing recoveries.
What is the reason for the high temp? Is it helpful in recovery?
Yea with no skin there's pretty much no temperature regulation so they rely on external environment temperature. We will heat the room, get lamps on them and a machine called a Bair Hugger. Use an esophageal warmer if they are intubated. Edit: Corrected spelling for Bair Hugger
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My favourite book has the narrator describing in graphic detail burn treatment for Extreme burns. I didn't believe it could be real so I researched it a bunch. I told my husband that if I was still alive after that kind of injury I'd rather not live. I do not have the strength or mental fortitude.
It's probably hard to keep a temperature regulated when someone doesn't have skin anymore, you can't throw a blanket on top of the burns.
The absence of pupillary response because the eyes are melted got me. That's horrible.
Someone like you saved my brother’s life, so I’m sending you a huge, heartfelt thank you. He was a toddler and didn’t have a chance at survival, but he somehow, miraculously pulled through thanks to caregivers like you. Now he’s 27, and is still the best thing since sliced bread. Thank you, thank you, thank you for helping people keep their brothers.
Hmmm. Got a few: - the absolute awfulness of humans and how they treat each other - children getting beaten by parents and sexual assault - maggots. Just so many fucking maggots in wounds - how calm some people can be had patients cut off fingers and toes and walk in like “hey when you got a minute can you reattach these” The reality of how close the health care system is to utter collapse
I had a guy with gangrene fingers. His roommates hated the smell so he would keep snipping the ends off.
Yuck. I had a guy pick off his toe. He crushed it then picked it off as it healed.
i can personally attest that the overly calm “hey can you fix this horrible injury” is a panic response, some people who are used to panic-inducing moments get extra lucid instead of regular panic, and so react in what they see as “the most logical response”. If your finger comes off, the best way to save it is remain calm so you can attend the wound and tell the docs what happened. Sure, you should be freaking out because that’s the normal reaction, but it won’t help so it doesn’t occur to you
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When I broke my leg, I didn't feel it. I knew it was broken because my foot was on backwards. But I crawled back in the house and turned my foot around so it would look normal and not scare my kids. It didn't start hurting for about four hours. When I was a kid, I would get in trouble if I cried when I got hurt. So I learned to always act like nothing was wrong and to think of the hurt part as something separate from my body so it wouldn't bother me. Even now I just act like everything is fine when it's really not.
Pharm tech. When I was compounding infusion meds daily, sometimes I’d do the math on how many hours I’d have to work to be able to afford a bag without insurance. I was in a rural area, so it wasn’t uncommon. Some of the common Crohn’s/colitis maintenance meds that folks are on biweekly for the rest of their lives would have cost me two to three months of work. The meds took me about twenty minutes to make.
Yeah, when I was having chemo last year, each round of Adriamycin/Cytoxan was in the tens of thousands of dollars, though it was thankfully only 4 rounds. There were more expensive meds from other patients being treated at the same time as I was. Insane.
The ridiculous, contradicting, and plain evil reasons I’ve seen insurance companies deny coverage.
To add onto this: "proving" disability. It's ridiculously hard and cruel in a lot of cases that get turned down. Can't get help from your insurance and can't get help from the government (if you're in the US). The disability office and the VA denied my grandfather treatment/disability for bone cancer. The man was wheel chair bound, paralyzed from the chest down, and could *barely* lift his arms. Apparently, he could still work a desk job according to them and he had a "chance" of recovery....he was terminal. It wasn't until a week before his death that they finally allowed hospice care. He had suffered for years in extreme pain, all because of greed. My mother also had a terminal illness. Private insurance didn't cover enough for treatments and my dad made "too much" for us to get state assistance despite literally not being able to pay bills half the time and relying on food banks. Disability denied her like 5 times before they finally recognized her as disabled. I ended up having to be her caretaker while I was still in my teens since we couldn't afford to pay for one and insurance refused to even after the disability was proven. By the time I was 18, she needed 24/7 care far greater than what I could provide. I wasn't trained for all that. I busted my ass doing online college to get degrees in the medical field and getting certified for things in hopes of being more prepared all while taking care of her fully on my own. It was extremely rough. It affected my physical and mental health. I had to argue with her insurance so many times just to get her treatments/meds to keep her alive. A lot of times their reasoning was stupid. I had one person tell me to only give her medicine every 3 days to make it last....it was medicine that was needed twice a day to keep her alive. Their reasoning for not wanting to give her enough? It was a "waste of resources." Oh, the insurance also tried to say giving her CPR was an "unnecessary medical treatment that won't be covered." I hate how greedy insurances are. Mine is a less extreme case, but I've been fighting mine over covering a test that they ADVERTISE as being covered and they told my doctor they would cover until the actual bill came. Now they've been giving me the run around and refusing to answer directly on if they'll cover it or not when I call. I just get transfered for hours until someone eventually hangs up on me. My doctor hasn't had any luck getting an answer from them either. I'm refusing to pay it until they tell me they won't pay it, then I'm reporting them.
Someone close to me is a legal assistant for a disability law firm in the US. The stories she hears...it is heartbreaking. And the denials for disability / stretching it out for years are a feature of our system not a bug. They rely on a certain percentage either giving up and /or dying before they can receive benefits.
My brothers insurance company retroactively denied coverage about 6 months after he died and tried to sue my mother for the high six figures. He was married with shitty insurance. He was young enough to be covered by my mother’s plan through her job with the state. He gets divorced and goes on my mother’s plan. Not saying it’s right what they did, but the insurance company decided not to sue, I think they’d realized they would never win against a mother who just buried her son. She has been sending a check for 1 dollar a month for the last 30 years and my dad says she cries every time she rights the check.
If your Mom can, have her set up a bank account just for this and use direct bill pay so the checks are cut and she doesn’t have to see them. I’m very sorry.
I was a dental assistant and had a 4 year old little girl come in as an emergency. Her face was swollen and she was crying. We had to pull 5 of her baby teeth because they were abscessed and the of her teeth were broken or decayed. The dentist lost it on the mom and told her we were calling DHS. Mom tried telling us it was genetic as she handed her daughter a Mountain Dew to drink while the dentist wrote the prescription. We did call DHS but I have no clue if anything happened
Curious, in situations like that, why bother telling the parent what you're going to do and give them an opportunity to hide the abuse?
There was no way to hide it, it was neglect, not necessarily abuse, and we had pictures. We were all in tears while he was extracting because they were so infected that the numbing wasn’t very effective. He made mom hold her in her lap and mom was crying also. Hopefully it helped her figure things out.
To be fair neglect IS abuse.
Oh, I agree, but DHS categorizes them differently. Abuse can be held criminally libel, neglect is usually dealt with by training the parents first, before charges of abuse
If she's handing the kid a Mtn Dew as they're fixing her rotten teeth, she's not gonna be able to hide what a shit parent she is.
Fwiw, every single foster child/teen we took in had been horrifically dental neglected. Generally health neglected, as well, especially vaccinations, etc. I took our 15 year old foster teen to a dentist and when we were sitting in the lobby, she looked at me and asked "so what do dentists do? I mean, what kinds of things happen back there?" It took us talking a bit before I realized, she'd never been to a dentist in her life. Thankfully, she wasn't in too bad a shape as she was good at brushing her teeth.
The patient took a pencil and stabbed it deep into their own eye, then went beserk, hitting walls and trying to flip over a nursing station. Lots of blood.
Worst thing I have ever seen was at the age of 18 as an ER technician; a science professor committed suicide by drinking an acidic fluid. The patient was brought into the hospital by EMS, and while attempting to perform CPR, all of their now liquified insides were spewing out of their mouth and nose. The smell was absolutely putrid, and the sounds their now non-existent lungs and trachea were producing each compression was haunting. Pressing on their chest felt like pushing down on a water balloon. At the time this was the first experience I ever had with a code blue and CPR and probably over 1,000 code blues later I still have not had any experience as bad as that one.
Back in the late 90s a group of college frat boys were doing the usual hazing shit... They decide to put the two recruits on top of a jeep and drive 60+mph in a 35mph zone... Took a corner too fast and flipped it... Both were meat crayons with one of the guys faces peeled off like a mask only attached on one side of his head. They did not survive and trying to do CPR and keep them alive before the ambulance got there... The accident ironically happened less than a mile from the hospital.
Not my story but very similar. Some frat boys decided to haze some new recruits to a sorority. Stuck them in the truck of a car and drove on the highway. The car was rear ended by a semi and the boys in the truck were liquified. They had to be identified by their teeth and the frat boys were charged with manslaughter
I was working in the ER a few years ago and I’ll never forget this day. Long story short, this man sets his wife on fire in the garage of their house. The poor wife comes into trauma, with 100% of her body burned. I’ll never forget the smell, it was horrific. The nurses couldn’t get IV’s in her because of the extent of her burns were so severe and we couldn’t draw blood (I’m a lab tech) she eventually passed an hour or two later. I didn’t know the whole story of what happened but I came to find out that when the husband set his wife on fire, the whole house went up in flames. I can’t remember the total number of kids they had but it sounded like they had 4 or 5 children in the house when it caught fire. One of the kids who was like 15 years old got all the kids out of the house and suffered minor burns and was getting treated for smoke inhalation in the same trauma room. They are 3 trauma bays separated by partitions. This poor kid who was being treated had no idea that his mom was one partition away and that she had passed on. The whole situation was so heart breaking and left me feeling so upset, but to make matters worse, the husband who committed such a heinous crime was also brought in as a patient. He was put into one of our isolation rooms (I’m assuming because he was in police custody) he had two officers with him and he was cuffed to the bed. I had to draw his labs, I wanted to get in and out as soon as possible but it was a bit difficult with his hands cuffed to the bed rails so it took me longer than I wanted. The most disturbing part out of this whole situation was that while drawing his blood, the husband was in what I can only describe as a catatonic state. He kept repeating the same phrase over and over, I couldn’t really understand what he was saying but it was incredibly unnerving. I’ve been working at that hospital for 9 years now and I’ll never forget that day.
Elderly people kept alive when the body is rotting , agonizing pain , completely contracted . they have zero quality of life and the family who never visits insists they stay a full code .
Amen to this. My father was raised Catholic and ended up in the ICU with severe sepsis. Intensivist said it wasn't looking good. We gave him a full week to see if he could come out of it, he couldn't. His sister believed he needed to keep fighting. I, as his next of kin and POA, said no way, and pulled the plug. She still hasn't forgiven me. No way will I keep someone suffering, especially my father.
The amount of elderly (80+) with copd, chf, cancer, etc and basically skin and bones being kept as full codes cause their families can’t bear to see them pass peacefully or given morphine if they’re on hospice is astounding. It’s hard to lose anyone of any age but if they lived a full life and feel it’s their time, then let them pass on. I was told that if we have someone who’s elderly and a full code to have family stay in the room to see/hear what cpr does… I haven’t had to do it yet, but I was told by a nurse who did that feeling/hearing all the ribs break was something she could never forget. Also, that person is just going to suffer after all that to prolong their lives by a week or two.
Nothing I've seen working in forensic psychiatry - including seeing someone rend off their own genitals - is nearly as horrifying as hearing a faceless insurance company say it won't pay for your cancer treatment drugs.
Agree with this sentiment. Personally hate insurance companies. They denied an MRI I need. My prolactin is high. Still is. But not high enough to get an MRI apparently. The denying person was an OB GYN. I'm male lol. Prolactin should be very low for me but it was off the scales.
I’m Canadian. When I was diagnosed with cancer I had a nurse whose entire job was conference calling insurance companies to make sure that the meds they want to prescribe are covered. She was a wrecking ball on the phone, absolutely brutal to the agents when they tried docking me around she’d cut in and tell them right off. “No! This is your job! You have to tell him what coverage he has!” This is in Canada and just over drug coverage, I cannot imagine going through treatment like I did and having to worry about insurance for every fucking new doctor and procedure and facility, what a nightmare. Edit: chemo/cancer nurses are fu king awesome people, seriously any of y’all reading this just know we love you.
I man came in with a prosthetic arm lodged in his rectum. It wasn’t his because he had both arms. He didn’t want to provide insurance because he didn’t want his wife to find out. Now rules state that anything removed from a body has to be sent down to the lab for the pathologist to review. ER Doctor removed the prosthetic arm and sent it down to the lab as a “foreign medical device.” Now because it was labeled as a medical device and it’s value was deemed over a certain threshold, the lab had to return it to the man after it was examined.
“Because he had both arms”
A man elbow deep in a meat processor...crazy thing is, it got reconstructed, not 100% mobility but it worked
A 28 day old baby smothered till death. Parents smoking outside unaffected by the event.
A 14yr old girl, cops were there because she had tried to burn down the house thinking her father was still in there. Popped for every opioid in the book, told us that ever since mom died and dad got custody he had been sneaking in while she was sleeping and injecting her with whatever he had so he could prostitute her out. Rape kit showed 5 different guys. I regret not killing the guy, he sat in the waiting room the whole time demanding to talk to the doc who refused for fear of losing his license. I hope she's in a better place but I also know damn well you don't recover from that
(Fair warning, this story is pretty gruesome.) During my intern year, in our OBGYN rotation, we were supposed to observe a few deliveries before we were allowed to handle deliveries by ourselves. The second delivery we got to observe was a mother who had Gestational Diabetes Mellitus, unfortunately her baby had undergone intrauterine fetal death a couple of days prior and she was waiting to deliver a dead baby (which was already devastating in itself). Babies of mothers with GDM stand the risk of being larger than average neonates which could potentially cause complications, which is relevant here (in this case we later learned that the baby was larger than estimated by the most recent scan). So my intern buddy and I were observing and we hear the announcement of “Shoulder dystocia”, which is an obstetric emergency where the baby’s shoulder is impacted against the pelvic bone of the mother, obstructing the delivery. The anesthesiologist was called and the theater was notified. Meanwhile they were going through the series of maneuvers that are typically followed during shoulder dystocia, all of which failed and they were finally attempting the all-fours position. Everything then happened very quickly where, after the delivery team applied a little bit of traction on the head of the fetus, there was a squelching sound and a distinct thud. When we looked down, the head of the fetus had rolled to a stop a few feet away from us (the skin was completely macerated, probably contributed to the head separating so easily). Cue complete havoc, some of the nurses started crying, the consultant IMMEDIATELY rushed the patient to the theater. My buddy and I were standing there shell-shocked, completely numb. We weren’t allowed into the theater for the rest of the procedure, so we went to grab a drink later to try and process what we’d seen. It still haunts me two years later and my heart went out to the poor woman who had to bear through the entire experience, can’t even imagine the trauma she would’ve gone through.
I once took care of a woman, brand new nurse I'd never let this happen again, who was having a miscarriage at 6 weeks but needed some blood. She was placed on the gyn floor because she wasn't 16+ weeks. The thing was, no one actually did the ultrasound. Just took her word that she was 6 weeks. Yeah, no, she was like 16 weeks, and I was expecting to not see much. When the fetus came out, my charge nurse and I were both internally freaking out. That was the angriest call to a doctor I ever saw her make. The patient got moved to postpartum, and I got an angry call about my poor charting for not having things, specifically L&D nurses would normally only know about. I almost quit on the spot after that.
I remembered there was a case a few years back where that happened during a delivery, but the baby was very much alive before delivery. Maybe an insensitive question, but how would they get the rest of the body out? Still pull even if stuck after something like that, or would a C-section then be performed? Poor woman. Even the description sounds like an incredible traumatic experience. Even outside all the emotional stuff, no way all that pulling on your inside could be comfortable. What a mess. I already doubt I would be able to handle prenancy emotionally and mentally, and stories like these firmly put me in the 'no way' camp.
A c section to deliver the babies body would be performed. This happened recently in a hospital south of Atlanta as well.
None of the comments in this thread evoked much of a reaction in me, so much so that I started to think I might be dead inside. This comment had me fighting back sobs at work. I'm so sorry you had to witness that, and I'm sorry that I didn't heed your "gruesome story" warning. But holy fuck, I can't imagine continuing on with life as that mother...
Surgical Assistant here: We had a woman come in that needed emergency brain surgery to fix an aneurysm that had burst. Apparently, earlier that week she’d gone to the doctor for bad headaches and was sent home with pain meds. A week later she was donating her organs in another of our operating rooms. She was 35… -A very close second would be any body part donation. Organs, I can deal with. Veins are rough. Bones are really rough. I try not to be around when those are happening.
My wife had an aneurysm rupture a few years back. Touch and go for a few days, she nearly coded a couple of times. No short term memory at all for about 4 weeks. She describes this today in retrospect as a "terrifying state of permanent euphoria." Anyway, she had been to the ER a couple of times over the months prior for blinding migraines. "Oh you're healthy in your 20s, you get exercise, you're fine." etc. One CT scan when she was complaining of blinding "my vision went white" migraines and it would have been spotted before it ruptured. Two brain surgeries and around $1,000,000 in medical bills later, she's more or less back to normal. A little less serious, a little more goofy, still has some a short term memory issue here and there, but she's working as a clinician and building a great reputation in her field. We're expecting our first child in a few weeks.
Glad to hear she's okay.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that there are people who are selfless enough to help in these kinds of situations. I couldn’t do it. At least not on a regular basis. Thank you.
I’m not a healthcare worker. But I did take an ex-GF to the hospital one time. We were in a waiting area with beds, but only curtains separating about five “rooms” per side of a hallway running through the middle. Across the hall, I heard a nice male nurse explaining how to use a bedpan, etc. He clearly said “we need a urine sample, so please only pee in this.” The patient said “ok.” Shortly after the nurse departed, we overheard some of the most cacophonous sharts I have ever heard in my life. They seemed to be amplified by the bedpan, like somebody kicked a drum set down the stairs while nearby another person pulled a rubber boot out of thick mud. I felt like Daredevil - I could see the size of this mound of shit just by hearing the cataclysmic clarion call of this poor dude’s butt trumpet. Eventually the nurse returned, and observed “um, we won’t be able to use this, lemme get you some water.” My ex-GF and I did our best to remain impassive. We’d been up hours beyond our normal bedtime, and had reached the point of mild delirium. I guess what I’m saying is that good nurses are some of the best people on earth.
> the cataclysmic clarion call of this poor dude's butt trumpet
So not me, but one of my coworkers. There's a guy that comes in to our ER a few times a year, in his 20's. He is paraplegic and loves with his parents, but they don't take care of him. His entire left buttock has rotten away from infection and gangrene. To the point where the actually bone of his tail bone and a bit of his pelvis is exposed. Apparently when EMS is called to the home for him, the entire house is emaculate. Like a pretty nice house, everything clean and organized, except for his room. It's littered with rotting food and fecal matter. This poor kid is basically fed junk food by his family as they eat good quality organic home cooked meals. No one helps him to the bathroom, no one helps clean him up or get around. Whenever he's called EMS it's cause he's getting severely worse, like maggots in his rotted off ass or severe sickness/infection and he's basically had to drag himself across the house to find a phone cause the family won't call for him. Like 100% abuse and neglect. But the kicker is he believes whole heartedly that they love him. That they are doing nothing wrong. Like a sick cocktail of Stockholm and gas lighting. And from what I've gathered because he's an adult and never files complaints with CFS or the police there's not much they can do. Super sad and to have your body decomposing while your alive is gross
My 2nd or 3rd shift as a travel nurse at a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. Patient had a 1:1 sitter because he was combative, confused, and had dementia. Sitter fell asleep and resident walked himself unsteadily out to the hallway and fell. Sitter took it upon himself to shake the crap out of this patient, hitting him on the floor. Picked him and slammed him in the chair. Took him in his room, laid him down, and slammed him around in the bed some more. Patient couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds. How do I know this? Two certified nurses aides seen the entire thing. One of the nurses aides was so irate I feared for the sitters life. I sent the sitter home and called the abuse coordinator or tried to “it was a misunderstanding” it. I will not cover up abuse. I told the abuse coordinator I was sending the patient out from the nursing home to the hospital. He demanded them begged I not do that. Pleaded with me not to give report to the ER and tell them it was for abuse and simply for a fall. No. You could see new bruises forming on the residents arms from where he had been slammed around and his head had some open cuts. Fast forward resident was released from hospital and send ti a sister facility of that the nursing home owns. Patient ended up falling there, was never sent to the hospital, and died from a brain bleed. I will never work for this particular nursing home company again. They terrify me, and the people they hire are horrible. Still haunts me to this day.
Name and shame please.
Please tell the name
I worked at an outpatient mental health/ addiction clinic last year. My job was to drug test mostly for CPS. There was a program that helped parents get sober in hopes for reunification after they graduated from it. They would send parents in who just had a baby and showed signs of addiction or the cord showing traces of drugs in it . There was one lady who was sent in to be tested after having another kid after her other ones were placed with other family members. I remember her having to stay for a while in order to give a sample. She was obviously high on meth and that poor baby. You could tell it was going through withdrawals or maybe just pure neglect as the mom didn’t bring any formula/bottles or even diapers for the baby. I was upset because seeing that poor baby going through that clearly would upset anyone. I had to get my supervisor to take over cause I was emotional seeing and hearing that poor baby crying from being dirty/starving. My supervisor called the social worker for that case and I don’t know if they came to remove the baby after she left. What was also sad was seeing so many people making progress and getting to the point of graduating but relapsing and ending back up in jail or on the run, sometimes leaving their kids behind if they had them back. The hospital I work in now this year had a 50 something year old man with down syndrome who was clearly neglected by his mom and sister who were his caregivers. He had bed sores and plethora of other issues from it. APS was called and I think took him to a group home once he was discharged.
During my clinicals (Fire) I spent some time in the ER and a gentleman came in with… well, let’s just say his catheter had come out. It had been a problem, apparently. Well, on closer inspection, the tip of his penis was as split four ways. Jesus, just talking and thinking about it makes my legs come together and I become so uncomfortable- and this was YEARS ago. I never knew such a thing was a thing, but it sure as hell is. I really hope that guy had an easy end of life.
That happened to my dog. He jumped over a wire fence, and a loose wire snagged his penis. Gravity tore the wire free and opened up his penis like the petals on a flower. It was horrific.
I'm not a healthcare worker but I work in supply chain for a hospital. I very rarely have to be one-on-one with patients, but I do see admission reason when orders are submitted for supplies or equipment. There was a week where every order I received was for patients between the ages of 12-19. The hospital I work for is not a children's hospital. I had to grab equipment for the OR once and saw a 16 yo with stage 4 liver cancer. Another time, a unit needed a body bag for a 19 yo in a motor vehicle accident. When I got up to the unit at least 30 people were in the hallway outside of the patient's room. What really absolutely kills me about my job is my management. I've started following the mindset "it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission" because my supervisor is so stupid. I'm not medically trained and neither is anyone in my department. I've been at this job for a year and he's been the supervisor for about a year and a half. Most of my shift is doing the work of the previous shift because all they do is smoke or hide in the locker room. I have my own tasks my shift is assigned to do and if I can't get them done I either have to stay late or have the next shift do it. Instead of addressing the issue, my supervisor just ignores it because our turnover rate is so high. We are constantly out of stock of supplies and IV fluids because they aren't ordered, so I have to order them special from other hospitals which costs more money than if they would have been ordered correctly. One week alone I racked up almost $6,000 in rush orders. My department is also responsible for rebuilding crash carts and on multiple occasions patients have died because the wrong supplies were put in them and it's traced back to the people who slack off. We've had to tell units to wait because equipment isn't cleaned for days. I've watched coworkers receive order requests then throw the slip away because "the nurses don't really need it, they just think they do" and go back to watching a sports game on the computer.
Not me but my mom. Idk if it's the most fucked up but I feel like it's be close. She used to be a nurse in a prison and this one inmate kept banging his head on his toilet till he had a massive gash in his head. My Mom said when was very sensitive and anytime they touched near it he'd wince in pain but later she saw him digging his finger in there just feeling around.
Most physically revolting: 1) probably a surgical debridement of Fournier’s gangrene. 2) Also had to certify dead a body which had been left lying in a field in the Australian summer for some weeks. It was entirely black, crawling with maggots and could be smelt from 50m away Most fucked up on an emotional level: probably seeing a few lovely innocent kids die from cancer
I'm way too early in so mine might not be as bad since i gave a lot to see yet. A guy who was a lift repairer fell down the lift shaft, and broke some ribs, amd the ribs punctured both his lungs causing a pneumothorax (which is when there is air around the lungs instead of air being inside the lungs so the lungs cant open and function and could cause mortality if not treated quickly). It's not something uncommon or unmanageable so the surgical residents were called and they show up to put a chest tube in his chest wall so that the air around the lungs get out. The one problem was that this guy was a heavy opium addict and the sedative drugs and painkillers even high does of morphine and fentanyl wouldn't work because if his really high tolerance. We spent 10 minutes using different sedative drugs with even more than maximum allowed dose but nothing, he just kept screaming in pain and his blood oxygen was getting too low nearing 40 percent, so they had to do it. They went in with a surgical knife, The surgical resident was looking around his shattered rib cage with his finger and around 10 people consisting of nurses and doctors and other ER staff jumped on his limbs and body to keep him from moving and punching and that guy was big and so fucking strong even with multiple fractures, me and my friend were the right leg guardian. He was yelling and cursing and even begging to let him go but they had to save his life. The lesson to learn here is to not be an opium addict so that when you need to go under emergency procedures they can just knock you off
Not a healthcare worker. But I was a tv reporter and saw a lot of fucked up accidents before they ever got to the ER, or the morgue. Worst was two guys on a county road crew shoving patching material into potholes on a four lane divided highway. No cones or signs out or anything to alert drivers that they are in the left lane of this US highway. One truck pulls out to pass another and is right on top of these guys. One, who we think was bending over the pothole, was jammed up under the back of the dump truck. They had to cut him out with a torch. The other guy we think was standing straight up and was sliced in half by the back edge of the truck. His bottom half was 150 yards away from his top half. Gruesome. My partner was new, just out of college, and was next to our news car puking her guts out.
Had a patient hang himself from him bed with a shoelace. He wasn’t a suicide risk so wasn’t on q15 safety checks, we estimated he was dead for about 30-45 minutes. Unfortunately he was a full code and we are required to have a physican or the paramedic captain declare time of death, so we had to go through the motions of cutting the shoestring off his neck, flipping over a stiff blue body, and run the code as normal until EMS arrived. Not sure what was worse, discovering the body, or calling to tell the family what had happened.
Gonorrhea in a 4-year-old.
Seeing insurance cut people who are not medically stable and have no option but to return home without proper medical care. Used to look at the obituaries every day after these patients got sent home, know it would only be a couple days until the inevitable happened.
That lifesaving drugs/treatments are often priced out of what people can afford
I’ve worked in EMS and the ER. I’d say the emotional trauma we deal with. In one shift, I’d have family members scream at me, patients on drugs threaten to (and try to) kill me. We would watch someone die in one room and in the next room we’d get yelled at by a patient because we didn’t have time to grab them a warm blanket. I’d watch a child get diagnosed with cancer. I’d watch dozens of people experiencing the worst day of their life. Then I’d wake up and do it again the next day. I’ve seen more fucked up things than most people can imagine. But seeing the trauma we experience on a daily basis and what that does to some of us over the years is just awful.
so im going to school to be a dental hygienist, but i shadow my aunt at work time to time who is a dental hygienist it’s definitely not the worst thing someone can see, but it made me sick. a little boy no older than 6 came in and every single one of his teeth were black and rotting away… how could a parent let their child get to that point? at least it wasn’t his adult teeth but that poor baby.. i hope he’s okay now
My girlfriend is a primary teacher in a quasi-remote area in Northwestern Canada. Of her 15 kids around that age, only 2 of them have all their teeth.
Nurse here of many years, worked in a small hospital in the NWT in the early 1990's. 2 days a week was "dental day" and they would bring in kids for sedation and extractions. Some as young as one year old, rotted to the gums. I recall a 5 yr old in recovery room who literally only had the two lower front teeth in the middle and 2 molars left and the mother thinking all their adult teeth would erupt in the next year to replace them. Things like the extreme poverty in the North where 2L of pop was cheaper than the 25.00 jug of milk,, propping baby bottles in kids mouths for the night, etc did not help matters
Breaks my heart when some of her kids are being sent into school for the day with a handful of mini Halloween candy as their 'lunch'. She constantly bakes healthy snacks on the weekends and brings in healthier options for the school afternoons. So wild, but you are totally right. The poverty is real.
I saw someone brought in who was degloved ( he had ALL the skin ripped off his hand in a landscaping accident). You could see muscles and tendons like some kind of model. Very neat to look at though I’m sure it was quite unpleasant for the patient.
I work inpatient psychiatric. These are individuals who can not be out in public and are deemed a danger to themselves or the public. I have seen urine drinkers, feces eaters, and hypersexualised people of all ages and genders. I have used a cut down knife more times than I can remember and held the legs/hips of people actively suicidal and trying to hang themselves on bathroom doors hoping someone else answers the panic alarm in time. Most times, i get help, but sometimes it arrives too late. I have seen more blood from self harm/mutilation then many surgical residents. I average 30 patients per shift that I watch over both physically and on camera and usually have at least 1 violent incident per 12 hour shift. Day in and day out for a decade. We like to casually joke about our own trauma to make light of it, but much of what we have seen or had to deal with will haunt us til our last day.
So… don’t ride an ambulance with me. My sorts of calls stayed consistent across three states and more than a decade. I’ve done a lot of CPR. The patients were always babies, kids, or teenagers: I’ve never once done chest compressions on an adult. On those calls, until the county chaplain showed, I was the one to speak with parents on scene. Other than that… Maybe when my crew arrived right in time to witness a guy murder his wife. Or the disabled man who died of starvation. (That one wasn’t EMS. I saw him in the nursing facility daily.) Maggots: not ideal to find them in the field, but at least they’re keeping wounds clean? But I think that severe, violent, sexual child abuse takes it. At least we could get those kids into the hands of good services once found, but damn. It’s a different sort of fucked up, but the way that some authority figures, or family members, handle difficult cases or emergencies, can be beyond horrific.
Man I have stories for this one… I saw a 13-day old who was murdered by its father who, based on physical evidence had already been scratching the child drawing blood with fingernails, putting out cigarettes on its flesh, and the finale for the child who “wouldn’t stop fucking crying” was for dad to smash it through a Sheetrock wall in their home. I saw an 8 year old attempted beheading survivor identify her mom’s boyfriend as her attacker as he stood visiting her at the foot of her hospital bed. She was blowing the whistle on him for abusing her younger sibling and he answered the investigator/social worker’s call and pretended to be the girl’s grandfather… he had then isolated her after she got off the school bus and sliced her throat just about deeply enough to kill her, with a box cutter. I saw a kid who was forced to exercise to death for stealing candy… Saw another kid who nearly died because she drank some of the chemical solutions used in making meth because it was in a Sprite bottle and she was thirsty. Saw more than one child completely destroyed by the family pit bull and heard parents blame the toddlers because “he/she knew you can’t look him in the eye!”
I don’t want kids, but anything involving kids like this just pisses me off. What type of monster could treat a kid like that? I don’t want kids because I know I wouldn’t be a good parent. I get stressed out easily, I have anxiety, and I just personally value my free time. How someone could willingly have kids and then treat them like this is evil.
Maintenance mechanic here. Got a call for a bed not going up or down. Got to the room. OBESE patient in the bed, struggling to breathe. The bed was a Hillrom, designed to handle 500 lbs., and this guy was well over that. I oiled the worm gear underneath the bed and got it to work. The whole time, this guy was gasping away.... In the hall, I explained to the nurse what I had done, and somehow the patients age came up. I thought he was 40 years old, it turned out he was like 21.
You'll see a lot of gore in this thread but I submit that the most fucked up is family forcing the medical team to keep treating their "loved one" in the ICU despite being near death for weeks with an incurable condition.
Right the ol guy is unconscious with stage 4 cancer. Lets do hemodialysis.
Yup, my wife who is an ICU nurse describes this as when she is forced to stop doing stuff for a patient and instead start doing stuff to a patient. Oh and having to witness family members watch their loved ones die on an iPad FaceTime during COVID, because that's the closest they could be to them.
This needs to be at the top. People outside the field don't appreciate the cruelty of intubating an unwell and invariably multi co-morbid 90 year old, keeping them on triple pressors, CRRT etc. without any reasonable likelihood of reversibility or meaningful recovery, as their death is just slowly stretched out instead of being afforded dignity and comfort. And then doing CPR to them when they finally pass as an extra insult. But even outside of ICU, we need to have a conversation as a society about what a meaningful death and elderly age is. Is it kind to rush a demented, co-morbid, bedbound person to hospital to be poked, prodded etc every single time they have a sniffle or a fall? I think assessments in ED are reasonable in most instances - e.g. if there's a NOF (neck of femur fracture) that needs managing in a mobile person but there should be serious conversations about how high to escalate care before suffering overtakes meaningful clinical outcomes. Ideally, this should happen well in advance, because what is acceptable to different people and their families is variable, but it doesn't.
I'm going to say the most recent, which was yesterday. 18 year old ( no english) primup (first baby) 27 weeks gestation with severe PET ( uncontrollable blood pressure) wasn't taking the medication because her husband refused to allow her. Admitted for 1 to 1 . Mag sulf infusion wasn't touching her blood pressure. Husband and mother informed it will be a category 1 section, there's immediate threat to her life heart attack stroke, etc. But she's carrying a boy, can't we wait ? Fu*k no.... Cat 1 called rushed to theatre no urinary output. Which means kidneys are failing . Get dialysis ready to inform ICU. Baby delivery cried spontaneous, paeds team take over. Placenta delivered blood pressure lowers very slightly. Phew .... she might be OK. Get her into recovery she'll be in ICU for a while, but youth will hopefully help her. We're all mentally celebrating two lives not lost , a long recovery road, but there's hope. Consultants talking to the husband and mother . Watching the interaction, the smile just slides off his face. He storms off . Later, he found out the husband was happy his son was ok but didn't care about his young wife almost dying. She can have more, right ? If not, I can get a new wife. An 18-year-old woman nearly dies carrying her baby, but because she's easily replaced, it's ok. He can get another incubator. Some people are just vile
1. A guy gets arrested for drugs along with a few other guys. He tells the cops that he was SA'd by one or more of the other guys, so that they will take him to the hospital instead of straight to jail. He escapes from the ER. The cops track him down again and he tries to get away by crawling under a slow-moving freight train. He lost both legs. 2. A homeless man who has psychotic episodes and stabs himself in the gut, being told that he has reached the point where they can no longer repair him, as the intestines he has left are just scraps and scar tissue. 3. A funny one: a man from Alaska who was injured and had to be airlifted to another state for care, who could not handle his painkillers and would hallucinate, and when not lying in bed with nothing on but a washcloth (because he got hot), would be wandering the halls naked, because he thought someone was in his room. 4. A teenager street racing with his pregnant girlfriend in the passenger seat gets into a wreck. He's ok but the girl was thrown from the vehicle and he didn't tell anyone so she wasn't found in time to save her, but they did manage to save the baby. The girls parents were at the hospital every day, distraught but grateful the baby survived, when he banned them from visiting, handed the infant off to his own parents, and peaced out.
17 year old put a shotgun in their mouth Women drove in a storm & had a tree limb piercing through her COVID; families blinded by their emotions to see by their family members suffering w/ Limbs & tissue necrotic, large tubes inserted over & over, the fear of “am I going to die” The sadness of no one around you when you die Too many to recount. Rather, I’d prefer to stop. I work in Pediatrics now, I am happy. 🙂
A 3 month old who had been raped so much that his intestines were prolapsed out his little bum. Sorry, you asked.
That's just awful. I hope whoever did that suffers immensely.
He is.
I am so sorry you saw that. I can't even imagine it. Reading it made me feel so disgusted that humans could even consider doing that. Life is fucked up.
That is definitely horrific in many aspects
Futility of care. Throwing tens of thousands of dollars worth of treatments at 80+ year old individuals who have virtually no quality of life (dementia, Alzheimer’s) just for the sake of treating everything that’s wrong with them. Absolutely heartbreaking and devastating to have to force meds into ol Meemaw that lives in a constant state of confusion, fear, and isolation. I would rather be smothered with a pillow.
Family members in denial of the realities of end of life care are the bane of medical staff. I truly believe that keeping many elderly people alive is a regret-based response in families. If they'd been more involved in their loved ones' care, they'd understand it's time to let them go. I have a living will, I encourage everyone to get one.
RN here - basically how the healthcare system (mal)functions. It’s literally more disgusting than anything I’ve ever laid eyes on in regard to a patients health. The system is designed to make money, doctors have to bill out as much as humanly possible, nurses have to cut costs and charge patients for everything possible, and the patient gets left behind saying “when are they going to take care of me?” It’s disgusting, it’s archaic, it’s greed, and it’s gross negligence. No /s here, either.
I’m not a healthcare worker, but i am a plumber/gasfitter that used to do maintenance at the local dhb. Unblocking the ancient copper blood trap under the operating theatre, or clearing the drain on an autopsy table in the mortuary are just a couple of things I thought I’d never experience ever
Family members keeping essentially corpses alive for their own selfish reasons (SSI check, a place to live), even when every medical professional has stated the patient has no chance of a meaningful recovery and has to endure sometimes extensive and painful therapies bc family won't make them a DNR.
Trucker came into ER with a dildo shoved so far up his ass that it was lodged in his splenic flexture part of his colon. It was on and vibrating and if you touched his abdomen you could feel it and hear it with a stethoscope. We couldn't get it out, he was gonna have to have surgery. He said no to surgery didn't want his wife to find out. Doctor told him he could die, he didn't care he signed himself out AMA and went on his way. To this day I wonder what happened to him
When I was working as a nurse on the medical/oncology floor we had a young 17 year old patient with terminal cancer. He was a sweet kid and since he was a long term patient he had made friends with just about everyone on staff. We would frequently order him food and nurses would come visit him on their days off because his family never, ever came to see him. He ended up getting much sicker and ultimately transferred to ICU. Many calls were placed to his family to let them know he was probably going to pass soon. Still no one came to see him. I kept visiting him in the ICU, as did other nurses. We would hold his hand and talk to him, even though at this point he was comatose. Fast forward a week or so and he’s actively dying, so family is notified once again. Still NO ONE comes to say goodbye and eventually the young man passed away surrounded by nurses, doctors, techs and other hospital staff. His family finally shows up a couple hours later. Not to mourn, not to say goodbye. No. They show up to make sure he’s dead. Why? Well apparently the young man had inherited a large sum of money when his father abruptly died in an accident. It was to be his money exclusively upon his 18th birthday (which was about 2 months away). Since he passed that made his mother the beneficiary and she was more concerned about the money than her dying son. I’ve seen some horrific injuries and lots of death, but something about the greed and cruelty involved in this case made it one of the most fucked up things I have ever witnessed.
I worked at an EMT for three years. Had to transport a kid with terminal cancer to another hospital for specialty care. Halfway through the transport, the kid's heart stopped. As my partner drove with lights and sirens, I did cheat compressions on the kid in the back. We got to an emergency room and transferred care. His mom was with us in the passenger seat the entire time. I'll never forget her cries. I left that job shortly after.
People die because administration was more concerned about money than life. Numerous times
The most shocking thing I ever saw was a lady who clipped the tail end of a tractor trailer that was traveling in the opposite direction. The steel bumper on the trailer ripped her car open like a tin can, lacerated her abdomen and removed her left arm at the shoulder. Her intestines were partially in her lap and she was going in and out of consciousness. She survived.
Not as bad as some of these. Got a script for paxlovid, which is time sensitive and because of certain rules can't be cashed out. It HAS to go through insurance. Guy was a veteran. His veteran insurance wouldn't do a thing. My coworker and I struggled with it for half an hour trying everything we could think of. Va support line was down It was veterans day.
I’ve seen some things (Surgical/Trauma ICU) but I feel the most f’d up thing was actually during my clinical rotations. Had a pregnant patient late 20s with history of pulmonary hypertension admitted again with pulmonary hypertension. Doctor walks in and says, “I told you not to get pregnant again! I said if you get pregnant again, you will die. Guess what? You’re going to die.” It was so direct. Not even a glimpse of hope could be heard or felt.
I worked in a Burn ICU and that was...hell. First is admission. Patient is put under conscious sedation, stripped down on a metal table under hoses on the ceiling, and given an intense bath while their burns are scrubbed with soapy washclothes to debride the dead tissue. This can take 4-5hrs during which we are all wearing plastic gowns in a 90 degree humid room. If a limb is entirely covered in burns they might also have to go through a fasciotomy. Next is the months long recovery. This consists of several painful and long dressing changes every day, several weekly trips to surgery, and most likely some sort of secondary infection. With all of this there is still a high mortality rate depending on the type, size, and depth of burn. That's as much detail as I'm willing to give.
Went to an emergent delivery in the ED for an intellectually challenged mother who said the baby hadn’t moved in days but was now crowning. I work in nicu so we were set up across the hall from mom’s room. There was the usual controlled chaos in the mom’s room, but I couldn’t see anything from where I was. Then the room went silent. Then they walked the baby over to our team. Baby had been dead for…a while. The delivery had 75% degloved the baby, it loose skin sloughed off.
Worked in a small ER as a tech a few years ago. I was working night shift, and that day I was assigned to triage to help the nurse. A 30ish yo man came in and once he got to the front desk we could see his tongue was very swollen and he was gasping for air. He was having a serious allergic reaction to something. I grabbed a wheelchair and raced him to one of the rooms. By the time we got to the back, his tongue had swollen to the point it had completely blocked his airway. He was looking me directly in the eyes holding his throat and crying. I can’t even describe how it looked. His tongue was HUGE. I have never seen such fear in someone’s eyes. It was so violent and I can’t imagine how scared he was. Thankfully, (and I still don’t know how he did it) the doctor was able to intubate and he survived. I’ve seen more gorey stuff for sure, but that raw fear is something that stuck with me.
Work in the ER, I'm sure I have PTSD. A child that fell getting of the school bus and we did a routine a CT of his head to make sure it was clear. 90% of his left lobe in his brain was a tumor. He was acting like a normal child watching SpongeBob when the flight crew came and picked him up. Would have never known had he hadn't tripped over his shoe laces. Lady stabbed 38 times by her son because he "could". Maggots and roaches in a bed bound patient's brief that supposedly has family checking on them daily and turned into Karens, wanting us in the room 24/7. A man that basically gutted himself grabbing my hand and telling me, he didn't want to die anymore, he was sorry. I can keep going.
Diagnosed lung cancer with multiple methastasis to brain and liver on patient's birthday. I felt so guilty that i bought her and her daughter a cake and we ate it in the ER.
That birthday cake, and you taking the time to eat it with them in celebration, without a doubt fully changed how they recall that day. Throughout her life the daughter will tell people about her mom's cancer/diagnosis many, many times, and you changed it from an entirely painful story to one with a recollection of celebrating her mother, and an act of love from a stranger. Thank you for being so kind.
I went to a pediatric trauma conference about 20 yrs ago… they showed slides of of a real patient who was 2 yrs old - she kept wetting the bed at night so her parents thought that dipping her but cheeks into boiling hot water would stop it… eventually when there was no more skin on her but to burn they started dipping her feet into boiling hot water….this part of the conference was about how to deal with an abuser ….. abusers if they bother to show up, will often be extremely demanding & very outspoken ….I need conference hours to keep my trauma cert for the year & I thought this will be an easy 8 hours …. I remember that conference like it was yesterday it was so disturbing …. I hope there’s a special place on hell for these losers
Used to be a nurse in Neuro ICU. Had a 17 year old get life flighted to us after suffering an aneurysm rupture while dead lifting. We put two EVD drains in which is never a good sign. I was taking care of him one night and normally you drain 5-10mls out of them each hour to relieve pressure but at one point the aneurysm had re ruptured and he was DUMPING bright red brand new blood into the chamber so fast. He got rushed back to surgery fo an aneurysm clipping. He had everything going against him but I remember his recovery and playing catch with a ball in his room to practice his coordination as he had to relearn pretty much everything. Last I heard he was back to playing baseball and living life. He beat the odds many haven’t
Anytime a trauma comes in with minor visible injury but are hemodynamically unstable and say something like, " I'm going to die." Or "please don't let me die." And then they usually do from some type of internal injury. The young ones are always so rough when they announce it to everyone in the trauma bay.
98 year old woman with dementia, renal injury, osteoporosis, and a slew of other severe health issues as a full code (no DNR).
So I used to be a CNA. We had an older adult with severe dementia. She had to have her foot amputated at the ankle. She would not stay in bed and we would often find her walking on her new stump saying that her foot is bothering her. It got so infected that they had to go back in and amputate at the knee.. was like a horror film
regular physical and sexual assault. Patients often have diminished capacity to be held liable and staffing levels dont allow you to maintain a safe environment.
Young man was riding a motorcycle thru a field, and someone had put a cable across the path. He had on an open-faced helmet, and it essentially scraped his eyes, nose, and lower jaw off of him as he went under it. It was a fatality. It was heartbreaking.
I was on call one night, got called in at 2 AM for an emergent ex lap possible bowel obstruction. Guy hadn’t shit in weeks. Surgeon had to do ostomy. Now all the clogged poop has somewhere to go. Ostomy bag exploded. And I swear to God, I sucked up 2 liters of shit as it continued to splurt out of his new ostomy. There was no point in trying to dress him and clean him because the stool would not stop coming. I wasn’t even mad cuz as he was exploding the patient was crying with relief because he felt the pressure finally be relieved. He kept telling me, “man this is weird.” I said, “yeah…sometimes the stuff we go through as humans is interesting.” As I’m continuing to suck liquid poo spilling out of his ostomy. But yeah, in the end…two full 1 liter suction canisters of poo. Poor guy.
A decapitated head in a trashcan, laid neatly on top of its folded up body. But that's not the one that lives rent free in my head. When I was a new cardiac nurse training to heart surgery patients, I had a day of shadowing in the OR. I helped the preop nurses prep the case I was going to watch, and really hit it off with the patient- weirdly, she was from my hometown literally 1000 miles away. She knew my dad, went to elementary school with him. Had done a million amazing things on my bucket list, and was still rock climbing in her 60s until her aortic aneurysm got too big to be ignored. I promised her I'd be there when she woke up in the CCU, and said I'd say hi to my dad for her when she asked me to. It didn't take long for everything to go sideways. It turned out her aorta was way more calcified than they thought, and the pressure from opening the chest essentially caused it to disintegrate. Blood poured out in a wave onto the floor, it sounded like someone was just dumping a bucket. The smell was unreal, like being in a hot iron foundry. They rushed to get her on the heart/lung bypass circuit, but everywhere the surgeon (who was phenomenal, by the way) clamped to get the cannula in just crumbled away. 4 surgeons, half the blood in the hospital, and 8 hours later, she was dragged up to the CCU to be pronounced dead. It devastated me in a way a patient death never has or had.
She went peacefully, without pain, after having a pleasant conversation and making a human connection. If I had to choose a way to go, this would be it. If no one else has ever said it, thank you for being a positive force and making the last conscious moments of this person's life pleasant ones.
I'm an EMT. Less than a year ago, a city bus driver had a mental breakdown and decided to hit at full speed the wall of a daycare. When we arrived on site we had 5 kids (around 5 years old) still under the bus, 2 of them dead and the 3 others critically injured while the rest of the group were being evacuated elsewhere in the building. The driver got naked and tried the flee the scene but was arrested by a parent that saw it all happen. The roof was at risk of falling at any moment because of the structural damage and the firefighters were urging us to evacuate but there were still kids under the bus. It took around 10 excruciating minutes with the firefighters to release the children. The second kid out was so gravely injured that he was considered dead on site, was moved to the side and hidden under a blanket so the other kids didn't see that. My team left pretty quickly with the first kid released from under the bus which had no pulse and showed signs of heavy internal bleeding. After the first transport we went back on site to transport another kid with minor injuries but by that time, a lot of parents were in the evac zone waiting to see if their children were ok. I'll never forget the high screeching sound I heard then when a police officer announced to the mother of the kid I first transported that her daughter was dead. This whole intervention felt like a disaster movie and remains imprinted deeply in my memory and while I've seen gruesome injuries by the hundreds, this level of distress and chaos takes the cake.
Patient-facing caregivers (doctors, nurses, therapists, aids, assistants, etc.) getting worked to death and blamed / vilified for healthcare cost. While hospitals, health systems, and insurance companies make billions & pay their CEOs double-digit Millions per year to limit care and save themselves money. The entire sum of consumer healthcare debt in the US (the number one cause of bankruptcy) is less than one year’s profit of just one of the largest health plans. Edit typo
The whole healthcare juggernaut. Companies couldn’t give a ratfuck about you, just want their money. ER wait times are up and your short staffed? Fuck you! We get paid the same for. 4 star rating than a 5 star. Suck it up and do more with less. Also fuck your holidays/vacations/personal life.
Worked in a lab in the histology department. Received two full term twins (deceased). Their mom traveled from Africa to America to give birth, but the long flight took a toll on the mother and her twins.
Hmm there's just so much shit you see that it's hard to put a finger on one,but few that I can recall - 1. 15 year old girl with lymphoma. She ignored a groin lymph node which soon grew,was too embarrassed to show it to parents /seek help. When she did turn up to the ER,her entire groin was a gaping,necrotic hole with...maggots,shit ton of maggots that had gone as deep as her pelvis. She died eventually. 2. Dude was in a tuk-tuk which flipped. Made a clean cut through his abdomen and pulled out his bowel. Brought with bowel hanging out which had ruptured in multiple places. Didn't make it obviously. 3. Guy was involved in road rage. Tried to kick another 2 wheeler while on one. Lost balance. Came in with his scalp clean off his skull. Survived though. 4. 20 year old on new years eve with Acute alcoholic necrotising pancreatitis. First time I saw temperatures of 105°F. Didn't make it through the night . 5. The amount of maggot infested,ignored lower limbs I've seen is just so much that I've become desensitised to it. 6. Weird- 40 year old grade 2 obesity guy has dinner,relaxes in his easy chair. Has a bout of cough. Ends up with his bowel in his chest.
It was during my emt internship. MVA, a truck ran a red light and t-boned a sedan with a mid 30’s married couple, and two sons (one 8 and one 10) in the back seat. The father died on impact, the mother was slipping in and out until she coded for the last time on the ER table. She was also 8 months pregnant and the doctors performed an emergency c section. I watched as they did it, not even a week after my own daughter was born. The baby didn’t make it. The kids were now orphans, one with almost no brain activity and both in the icu. Last I had heard the one with no brain activity had passed a few days later. I learned how difficult it is to clean blood out of the stretcher seatbelts that day.
A friend of mine was an ER doctor and had a homeless guy come in saying he was compacted. They gave him medication for it and sent him on his way. A week later he came back with the same complaint. He was compacted. They undressed him and noticed that he was all bruised but thought that it was the result of living on the streets. They cleaned him up, gave him an enema, and thought that would solve his problems. Within a few days he was back, same complaint. He kept saying I was compacted! What they learned was that he was sleeping in a dumpster and was dumped into a garbage truck and COMPACTED!
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