As vital as they are, hospitals are not exactly pleasant places to be and even less “fun” to work at. It can be prettyilluminatingto hear from the professionals who have worked in one sharing the various things they’ve seen and done in the pursuit of saving human lives.Someone asked“Nurses: What’s your worst work-related story?” and folks in the medical field shared their experiences. So get comfortable as you read through, prepare to see some true horror stories, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your thoughts and personal stories below.This post may includeaffiliate links.
As vital as they are, hospitals are not exactly pleasant places to be and even less “fun” to work at. It can be prettyilluminatingto hear from the professionals who have worked in one sharing the various things they’ve seen and done in the pursuit of saving human lives.Someone asked“Nurses: What’s your worst work-related story?” and folks in the medical field shared their experiences. So get comfortable as you read through, prepare to see some true horror stories, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your thoughts and personal stories below.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Lab guy here. Responded to assist in the ER when a 5–6-year-old boy was pulled from the irrigation canal he was swimming in during our first heat wave of the summer. Was unobserved and suspected of being under for a total of 7–9 minutes, completely blue and unresponsive to stimuli.We worked on that kid for about 4 hours and finally got a weak pulse. I kept him on the monitor for the remainder of my shift, and he also got fluids, warming blankets, and oxygen. I left for the night before I knew the final disposition. He came in 2 weeks later with his family, running up and down the hallway, everyone getting big hugs and gratitude for helping to save his life. I am thankful I got to be part of that miracle. I’m pretty secluded back in my department and away from direct patient care, so I know it’s serious if I get called down to assist.
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Lady with sores and foul smelling discharge coming from her vagina. We spent days trying to figure out what had happened, labs sent, no infections, swabs clear.. it was an enigma.Until I caught her douching her vagina with bleach. She thought that’s how you kept it clean.Sex education is important guys!
Had a nice older gentleman patient who was tachycardic, but all his labs were normal. He seemed like he took fairly good care of himself, was a little disheveled but he dressed nice and had nice shoes. We initially couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he had a peculiar odor to him that seasoned nurses would get suspicious of. I asked him if he had any infections on his body that he knew of, and he said “no”, but I wanted to do a thorough check, so we took off all his clothes, and he was fine, until I got down to his feet.He was wearing an old pair of socks, and as I peeled them down, literally the skin around his foot came off with the sock. I was essentially degloving his foot. It was so vile, I couldn’t even get down more than a couple inches. It was raw flesh under those socks. The wound odor was so strong, I knew then that his feet were the source. He probably hadn’t changed his socks in several months. He ended up being admitted and given lots of antibiotics and wound care.The memory of pulling down his socks will haunt me forever.
So, so many to choose from. I’m gonna go with the homeless guy that came to our hospital with an abdominal abscess (basically a hole in his abdomen). We were trying to clean his wound and assess the damage, and when we reached inside his wound, we started finding money. He nonchalantly stated that he kept his money tucked in there, to protect it from being stolen.
My father worked in ER at the beginning of his nursing career, and he said one of the hardest things he had experienced was a young man who shot himself in the face, but he was still alive.All that was left was the back of his neck/bottom part of his skull. The man died a short time later, but could you imagine seeing something like that?God bless nurses, they truly deal with so much.
We had a guy come into the ER from a nursing home. According to report, he asked the staff for a glass of water. When he didn’t receive it quickly enough, his rational response was to start eating his fingers. By the time he got to us he had eaten all 10 of his fingertips away. Bone was definitely visible. There was still flesh stuck in his teeth and on his sheets. That’s a sight I won’t forget anytime soon.
Doc not nurse.Probably resuscitation efforts on a 20 year old who died of diabetes. All I could think about was that he had clearly just got a haircut for the new term at uni as I broke all his ribs.The other was another diabetic chap (64years old) who’d already lost one leg and had been putting off amputation of the other. He came in profoundly unwell with a white cold dead foot. I spent 10 hours overnight trying to stabilise him for transfer to a hospital where they could amputate it. I couldn’t, he was too unwell. I asked him multiple times to let me call a friend (no family) for him, but he declined. Intensive care declined to take him. In the morning we told him we weren’t going to be able to do anything for him, and he kept saying “so then what next?”. The conversation was excruciating. He wasn’t getting it. Eventually the consultant said “you’re going to slip away”, the patient said “I’m going to die?!” And the fear in his eyes made me want to vomit. He then quietly asked me to call his friend. He died 5 hours later.Happy story: 98 yo man comes in with terrible heart rhythm (VT) and dropping blood pressure. Had a DNAR and daughter said he wouldn’t want to have cardioversion (electric shock paddles thing you’ll have seen on tv). He’s conscious and awake. I am giving him a medicine that might work, might not. I ask him what he needs, and he looks at me with a single tear coming from his eye and says “I know I’m dying” in that case, I say, what do you need? He wanted a sip of beer. This is at 4 am. We managed to get him his beverage. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and his heart went back into sinus rhythm and he was saved.
A Royal Marine, not long back from Belize, came into Casualty at the hospital I work at. He had a ‘cyst’ swollen on the back of his neck. The guy was in agony. 3 local anaesthetic injections later, the doc attempted to lance the thing and it moved. He peeled off the top layer of skin to reveal a massive larvae wriggling underneath. About the size of a 50p. It popped out without any problems and was huge when it was unravelled. The hole in the marines neck was clean, amazingly. Great example of a host.
Posting one more that I just remembered: 20 year old patient in for a motorcycle accident sans helmet. Kid “survived” but was never going to be NOT a vegetable living off of 15 different tubes ever again; he literally lost too much brain tissue. That kinda stuff is par for the course in a level 1trauma center. What was hard was watching his parents stay in his room in shifts, documenting every little twitch and spasm and reporting it to us as a sign that he was “waking up”, only to have to be gently told (after assessing of course) that it’s just spasms with no conscious thought. They would also happily keep telling us about the welcome home party they had planned for him, and making jokes that they’re never letting him buy a bike again. One day they started visiting less and less, and eventually stopped coming at all. Finally, they made him a dnr. He was their only child.
When I was a junior neurosurgery resident, I was called to the ED for a 30-ish-year-old male who ran his motorcycle head-first into a telephone pole while intoxicated. No helmet.His face was smashed beyond recognition. (I have no idea how the medics got him intubated in the field.) But when I saw him in the trauma bay, he had a frontal open skull fracture down to his orbit. We took him to the OR right away to decompress him. After 2 cranial operations and 3 months in the hospital, he went home.
I was friends with a guy who was an ER nurse in a neighborhood with a lot of gang violence. One night, they get a gang member who was shot and in pretty bad shape, but still alive.My friend left the room to go grab something, and when he came back, there was a guy dressed in a clown suit with a shotgun up his sleeve. As he raises his arm to shoot the gang member, security tackled the guy and arrested him.
Not me, but my grandmother used to work at the ER back in the sixties. She saw some horrible stuff, but the worst she’s told me about was about a car mechanic. This was back when, instead of lifting the car up to weld the bottom of it, you just parked it over a ‘hole in the ground.‘He’d been welding when the gas tube exploded. Since he’s in a small hole with nowhere for the flames to go, they completely engulf him. The only reason for them bringing him to the ER was to have a doctor legally pronounce him dead. My grandmother saw his remains. He had been crouching down, shielding his face with his arms when it exploded. She could see his watch; it had melted into his flesh. Otherwise, it was all just like a coal statue of a man.
Had a patient who was self treating severe breast cancer. Her whole breasts had turned into pretty much septic ulcers/abscesses. She called for a nurse (lucky me) and said she thought she’d spilled something in her bed at lunchtime, it was a bit damp. When I looked I saw that one of her sores, probably the size of a grapefruit was oozing yellow goo and liquid. I gloved up to start cleaning her up and as I gently tried to reposition her breast with the abscess on it, it burst. Not sure where the pressure came from because I made sure I didn’t squeeze it so that exact thing didn’t happen, but it ended up all over my arms and neck.Definitely the hardest I’ve ever tried to not show a reaction in front of a patient.
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Anything involving maggots. Unless we put them there on purpose.Had a drive and dump that got admitted…lady of the night based on clothing choices…had roaches (just 3, but any is too many) crawling out of her nether region. God love my tech, she just stomped on them and made fun of me.Got my arm stuck between a patients butt cheeks while inserting a fecal management system for c-diff management. I weighed in at about 115 at the time…he was 400+. He clenched and was screaming at me to get out of his a*s. Happened years ago and still gets brought up.Had a patient who had a sacral decub that was HUGE. My head would have fit in the hole, no hyperbole. The dressing change was like trying to pull a deep dish extra cheese pizza off someone’s caved in lower back, she had so much slough. She lived through that for months. Plus she was demented, deaf, blind, on dialysis, had AKAs to her hips, and had bilat amputations to her elbows. Constantly begged Jesus to let her die. Her daughter had POA and just wouldn’t change the code status.
Not a Nurse but I work in the Emergency DepartmentPt came in and said he hadn’t pooped for a week. The doc prescribes some stool softeners and decides to send him home. Without ensuring that he had a bowel movement before he left.Pt comes back in 6 hours later and is having severe abdominal pains and is brought in one more time. Pt is put on a bed and scheduled for some type of scan. All the sudden starts feeling nauseated.Pt then starts literally throwing up his feces. He was obstructed. The nurse and attending run into the room. Nurse pushing on the stomach and attending holding his back trying to get the rest out.Pt aspirated and had a heart attack.The stiest way to go.Edit: it wasn’t a small amount of feces. The room was s*t lake. On the walls and ceiling.
I’m not a nurse, I’m xray, but I’ve seen a lot of crazy hospital s**t.There was an elderly patient dying of a septic bowel. You could smell their festering insides rotting away throughout ER and almost all the way to xray. Unfortunately, due to overcrowding there was no private rooms available to contain their last moments, so we had to smell them for hours. I never wanted to know what rotting necrotic fecal matter smelled like, but now I do.I was asked to do a portable chest xray in ER. A lady was found down at the scene of a car accident, apparently she was thrown from the vehicle. When she landed she must have landed on something sharp, and it gouged open her armpit. I’m standing over her torso, trying to line up up my xray machine and all I can see is these big globs of adipose (fat) tissue hanging off her armpit, there was even grass and dirt in there.Come years back I was working Xmas eve. Had a patient come in with his wife, not very old (50s), complaining of minor chest pain. He was placed in the bed area reserved for patients who are not that serious but having a bed would make them more comfortable. He had no problems coming over (in a wheelchair) for a chest xray. We chatted about xmas plans. Seemed in good spirits, just slightly concerned. Few hours (around 2am) later he takes a sudden severe turn for the worse, they immediately move him in a trauma bay, start chest compressions and shocking him. His wife was asked to wait outside while this was going on. Despite their best efforts, the ER staff were unable to bring him back. The ER dr had a cry before she collected herself enough to tell the wife. This hospital is in rural area and while the ER team was trying their best, myself and the unit clerk were trying to find any sort of person to provide support for the wife. But she had no family in the area, and none of the religious groups in the area were answering their phones. I just kept thinking of this poor woman, and how they prolly had xmas gifts for each other under some tree, and instead he passed away in the wee hours of Christmas morning, leaving her all alone. :(.
This one is a sad story. My cousin is a nurse. She loves her job and I asked her this question expecting to hear a different kind of story but she said this one time troubled and disturbed her the most. My cousin is a tough chick n isn’t an emotional type but the whole situation effected her for a few days after.A single parent father and 15 year old daughter were having a really heated argument. In the middle of them arguing he starts to have a heart attack. The ambulance takes him to the hospital and he ends up losing his life:( When the daughter arrived, My cousin had to tell the daughter her father didn’t make it.the girl then runs over to him and just collapses on the floor screaming and bawling her eyes out bc her father is now gone forever and shes the reason he died.
Hopeless romanticmy mother in law is a nurse and every year around christmas there is a man who comes in with a candle stuck up his bum that progressively gets bigger. last year she compared the candle to the size of a pickle jarEdit: my old lady told me the guy can no longer candle himself do to a perfiated or permeated r****m, (can’t remember the word she used).
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Too many to choose from, so I’ll just go with a recent one. Was doing wound care on a diabetic man who took 0 care of himself. It was a foot ulcer with necrotic tissue and gangrene, awesome. As I was pulling the old dressing off, i felt a subtle crunch. I looked and saw that yep, the dressing pulled one of the mans necrotic toes completely off with it. The hell of it is? He just sighed and said “not again”. Turns out just a few months ago, his OTHER foor was at that level of ulceration, and one of THOSE toes came off when he went to put shoes on…how he failed to notice the smell and severity (although tbh he was morbidly obese and couldn’t even see his feet) is a mystery.
I’ll go with the frequent flier with unidentifiable green goop oozing out of cauliflower like sores on her legs. The goop wasn’t anything that showed up on culture and often resulted in maggots burrowing in her legs. It also smelled awful. And she was really mean. She was about a one a monther for various reasons and ended up being found dead at home.Runner up is the 516lb lady I managed to cath with the assistance of 3 med students. Found some food decaying in one of her folds. I think it was a Little Debbie.
Easily any patient that has DIC. I swear its a condition from hell itself. basically the blood clots abnormally, and clots will form throughout the small vessels, causing hypoperfusion to all the organs. The kicker is while blood is clotting throughout the small vessels, its not clotting in places that are needed like the orifices (mouth, eyes, nose, genitals) around any external devices like IVs, chest tubes etc, or any open wounds. So the patient is bleeding out externally while going into multi organ failure internally because none of their organs are getting blood flow. all the patients I’ve had with this condition barely lasted 48 hrs. the last patient I took care of like this couldnt go more than 30 mins without some fluid resuscitation (even with vasopressors) or his blood pressure would drop to like, I st you not 50/30. It was a f***g nightmare.
To be honest, the real “worst” stories most nurses don’t like to talk about. But here is a pretty awful case that is definitely up there in the category of “unfortunate souls”.This poor lady we had who was constantly coming in with sepsis (blood infection). She had abdominal surgery and developed a fistula, which is basically a hole where there shouldn’t be one. Basically, the first one that happened was because her intestines stuck together and a hole formed through the walls of them. Every time the tried to fix them, she developed more. She had holes throughout her intestines, so she had a colostomy bag, but she also had developed numerous fistulas all over her abdomen from where her intestines had stuck to the inside wall of her abdomen and formed holes all the way through her skin. So she basically had a bunch of holes all over her abdomen that just leaked stool everywhere. We had an extensive abdominal dressing regimen, where we actually put colostomy bags over a lot of the holes. The whole deal took 2 nurses about an hour to an hour and a half, and no one wanted her twice because she was really needy, whiny, and mean, plus she was on MRSA precautions, so you had to grown up every time you went into her room. We changed her dressing 2-3 times per shift because no matter how well you did it, stool would leak onto her fragile skin and erode it further. It was awful, and even though she was a really difficult patient, we obviously felt bad for her.Edit to answer a few questions: she was in her 50s, she is now deceased. The cause was actually unknown. She did not have hernia mesh and she did not crohn’s disease. I don’t remember the original surgery as this was almost 3 years ago now, but I do remember the doctors had no idea why every time they attempted to fix the fistulas they got worse and she formed more. It was very sad. She probably would not have chosen euthanasia, as she was very afraid of death and still very much in the denial stage up until the end.
I saw a guy sneeze out his intestines.He had a massive basketball sized hernia that had spread his skin so tight that all it took was a sneeze to split the skin and get everything that was supposed to inside outside.
Homeless guy that hadn’t taken his boots off for a couple weeks because of the snow. Came in due to nausea and vomiting, but LOOKED good, just homeless guy weird. Start getting him changed into a gown for imaging and go to take off his boots, and what do you know? The skin came off like socks. Sick because of trench foot and gangrene. He lost some toes.
I was a new nurse during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. We were sad for the patients and terrified we would be infected and die, as not a lot was known, and there was a lot of misinformation — especially here in the South. Any accidental stick with a patient needle was enough for an all-out panic.
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