Someone asked“Anyone who works in hospitals: What’s the most insane thing you’ve seen?” and people shared their stories. So get comfortable as you read through, be warned, some of these are gruesome, upvote the most interesting and be sure to comment your own thoughts and experiences below.
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Define insane. Critical care doctor here. Insane? A late 20s year old woman of about 35kg/120cm size (thats 77lbs/4ft) with multiple congenital abnormalities resulting in an inability to eat, talk, read, or understand who had been that way since birth. She required total care for EVERY bodily function, and had for her entire life. She was in and out of the hospital monthly due to what was essentially unfixable body failure. Each time we had to jam tubes in her, put her on various forms of life support, and repeatedly subject her to painful procedures while knowing all along that we could not, and would not ever FIX her in any kind of meaningful way. She was neurologically “gone”, yet her mother insisted she responded to her and expressed her feelings, insisting that we “do everything”. Ultimately, we had to put this poor soul through the pointlessness of prolonged CPR before she finally died.THAT was insane. And cruel.
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A big thing for me was during Covid when the morgues were being overfilled, we had two staff members essentially on full time duty rotating corpses in and out of the fridges we were using because there wasn’t enough space to keep everyone stored.You’d stack two corpses on top of each other (provided they were small enough), and every thirty minutes you’d swap a gourney out of the fridge.It’s one of those things that still pisses me off about Covid deniers. That was during full lockdowns. The idea that people still think the situation was being exaggerated is absurd to me.
What nurses are expected to accomplish in a 12 hour shift. It’s complete BS how the nursing staff is pilled on, what use to take twice the nurses to accomplish. Welcome to America, where nobody cares as long as insurance companies are making money!
Therapeutic leech decided to make a run for freedom and somehow escaped the ICU room and made it across the hall before the nurse realized. Left a trail of blood all the way from the bedside out into and across the hallway.Most disturbing though was probably a woman in the trauma ICU after sustaining a traumatic brain injury when a tree fell onto her car while she was driving. The tree killed her teenage son who was the passenger in her car. The TBI had severely impaired her short term memory which meant she kept waking up on the icu, panicking, asking how her son was doing and demanding to see him. So several times a day this woman would learn anew that her son was dead. We had to ask the hospital ethics department if we should keep telling her he was dead (she was very insistent on seeing him if she was told he was alive) and force her to re-live that pain over and over OR lie to her repeatedly. It was horrendous.
20 year old put his sport bike into guard rails at high speed. Arrived alive and ultimately survived with left arm, left leg, and right leg completely severed from his body. Just formalized all three amputations in surgery for hemostasis and skin coverage.Runner up was a girl in her 30s with a locking blade knife through stabbed through the left temple all the way to the hilt with the blade crossing through her sinuses to the other side of her face. She was completely fine and we removed the knife with no significant problems resulting.
I’m a hospice volunteer and I visit a patient in a facility that is mostly old people on Medicare. The other day the census was 85. There were 10 employees total, only 5 of them were nurses. It is like a vision of hell.
3 year old twins came into the peds ER both dead on arrival from a vehicle roll over accident.Their parents were care flighted to another hospital in critical condition. It was the twin’s birthday and the parents were taking them out to their birthday party. I still tear up thinking about that case… I never learned what happened to the parents.
Guy went into his neighbors garage and used a saw to cut his own leg off. He was with us for a couple weeks. I asked him “why would you do that?” soon after admission. He simply stated, you can cut your hair or nails why can’t I cut my leg off? Welp can’t argue with that logic. It wasn’t until (a few weeks later) he was working with therapy and trying to manage transfers and daily living tasks, that he came to the realization, “yeah maybe I shouldn’t have done that”.
The bills from my workplace charge people $4.5-5k for a CT scan that takes 10 minutes and costs the hospital like $100 max in costs, the radiologists bill separately and only like a couple hundred. The CT scanners paid for themselves many many years ago as they scan several dozens daily and rarely ever break. .
I was 11-7pm Critical Care Supervisor in a 400 bed Community Hospital in Texas. Around 1981 or so. We had a rush admission from the Oncology floor. A middle aged lady with Ovarian cancer and metastases started to vaginal hemorrhage. The ER physician on call for codes ordered her transferred while I tried to get a hold of her Surgeon. He wouldn’t return calls or attend the patient. I got orders from the ER Doc for heavy pain medication and called the Chief of Surgery who was there in 30 mins. The RN’s and Aides were carrying basins of blood out of the room. Thankfully she passed relatively peacefully. The Surgeon was throw off the staff when more neglect and poor treatment was revealed.
Some are there for months, and not one person came to visit.
One of funniest was patient on Halcion sleeper (now off the market) thought he was a bear and roamed the halls naked, growling and pooping his bowel prep. He was “captured” in a female patient’s closet. He suffered no injuries and didn’t remember a thing. One of many stories from the night shift.
Tie between >1000 bee stingers in a person, a whole cucumber in the abdominal cavity of a CT scan, a patient who ripped his eyeball from the socket, and 3 liters of pus drained from a lung cavity. Not the same patient, but still..
Lady came to the emergency department after super gluing her eyes shut. Apparently mistook the glue for lubricaticing eyedrops.
I’ve got a plethora to choose from but either labial necrotizing fasciitis on a 600+ pound woman, or tracheostomy maggotsWe also had a recurrent patient who’d get 1L glass bottles of Fanta stuck in his a*s. And since I know someone will ask, they were always grape.
Went there with a loved one on psych hold, so they had “subtle” security on us all the time.Until, that is, they guy came in who they had to pull out of a tree because he thought he was a monkey and was throwing his own s**t at the police. Suddenly security had bigger problems.
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Not the most insane, but certain very shocking.A young man (less than 25) tried to off himself with a shotgun blast under his chin after his GF died of cancer.He did not succeed. But what he lost was, his jaw, his nose, his eyes and part of his frontal lobe.I’m a physical therapist and was sent in to evaluate his discharge disposition.All his notes said was GSW to head. It did not specify the damages.He had no face, it was just raw meat and exposed bone. They couldn’t really dress it because it would get in the way of his breathing. He had something like 14 reconstruction surgeries planned.He lost his PoA and his mom pushed for all of his rehab and care.
Don’t work in a hospital, but i was an EMT. Saw a girl and her boyfriend wreck a motorcycle on the highway, no helmets. Her arm was completely twisted on her back. We had to break it again to move it back in position. I felt so bad for her. She got plenty of d***s in the helicopter ride though so she wasn’t in pain for long thankfully.
My old roommate was an ER trauma nurse and had a patient who was in a motorcycle accident (was not going to survive) that basically ripped his skin/ribcage completely off. One of the nurses took a video of the heart beating in his chest still & I will never unsee that.
I dont work in a hospital, but I have the utmost respect for an ER nurse on duty when I had to take a classmate to the ER in college.It’s 11pm on a Thursday and it’s quiet. The phone rings and the nurse answers. I only heard her side of the conversation:N: Hospital ERN: I’m sorry, what about tennis balls?N: a tennis ball machine? What about the machine?N: well how close to it were you when the ball came out?N: and it hit you in the face?N: yes, you should have a doctor look at that. Do you need an ambulance?N: well are any of your friends sober? You should not be driving after drinking and with a potential head injuryN: no, putting your beer in the cup holder isn’t going to be enough. You either need to tell me where you are so I can send an ambulance or you need a sober person to driveN: I’m sure you are very good at driving left handed, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to drive with a beer in your right handN: ok sir. If you still need help please call 911At this point the caller hangs up, the nurse calmly puts down the phone, checks that there aren’t too many people around, and cracks up laughing. Apparently the guy thought the tennis ball launcher was broken so he went up and looked down to launching mechanism, and a ball was launched directly into his eye. Definitely not a sober situation. By the time my classmate was admitted and moved upstairs, there was a pool going on when/if the guy would show up. I still wonder about that guy sometimes.
I have taken care of more than one person over the age of 90 years old who tried to end their own life due to inability to cope with pain anymore. Extremely sad, but also understandable.Lowest Hgb I ever saw was 3.5 (normal was above 12 at least). Person was walking / talking.And absolutely floors me every time I see it, but fungating breast wounds. One that smelled so necrotic, that you could smell it down the hall and several rooms away. I was able to put most of my index finger in the breast wound and the patient could not feel anything.
My sister is a nurse and she told me one of the worst things she saw was a woman who came in with an extreme case of a**l warts. Like so massive that my sister couldn’t even talk about it. I didn’t ask for elaboration.
Blood draw from behind the knee in a long term IV d**g user. There just weren’t any other accessible veins left.
A patient came in because his toe “looked funny”. As a diabetic, my alarm bells were going off so I had him take his show and sock off. He looked down at his 4 toes and exclaimed, “Where did it go?!?”Moral of the story: patient takes their own clothes off.
Violence towards staff.
One of my friends works in the state hospital where I live. There’s a guy in there that suffocated his great grandmother to death for throwing out his cigarettes. They used to keep them in a private hospital but he was too hard to handle so they threw him out.
A patient who was a 1:1 but acting ok suddenly ran out of his room and punched the back of a new NP’s head, knocking her to the ground. She was young and in training and her whole career was ruined due to the health complications from it.Another is an IV d**g user taking off with an IV port…When we noticed he was missing, security saw footage of him walking off the campus 20 mins prior.
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