15 Of The Craziest Things ER Workers Have Ever Seen!

ER Doctors and nurses are on the frontline of some of the grossest things you can imagine. 15 of the grossest of the gross are here, but seriously, they are nasty!

Get To The Point

“There was the patient who arrived unconscious after a fight with another vagrant. We struggled to fathom why until we realized that what appeared to be his pupil, was actually the end of a ballpoint pen. It had been inserted through his eye and was embedded firmly inside his brain” Source

Wild

“The most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen was a woman who was quite literally ripped apart by wild dogs. Disturbing because you’d think that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the United States in the modern era and yet, it did. She lived in a rural area (but not that far from a major city!), there were wild dogs about and her little lap dog had gotten outside one evening. She heard it barking and went out to see what was going on. It was fighting with some other dogs and she tried to rescue it but ended up getting torn apart. I’m still not sure why the paramedics brought her to the ER but we pronounced her dead on arrival” Source

Farmers Are Hardcore

“The farmer who walked in with his own arm held in his hand (amputated in some sort of baling machinery)” Source

Funky Dollar Bills

“A regular attender who keeps her cash in her genital area, this tends to cause general revulsion as she ‘dispenses’ it into her hand in the waiting room so that she can use the vending machine (top tip: never, ever put the money from a vending machine in your mouth!)”Source

Hard To Imagine, Let Alone Actually See

“A bad one I saw that caused a little dry heaving was a man who had rented a stump grinder and had slipped while using it, catching his leg and then abdomen with the blade. His lower stomach/upper thigh looked like hamburger – it was truly ground meat. He was also DOA” Source

WOW! This Is One Crazy Story!

“I was taking call one night, and woke up at two in the morning for a “general surgery” call. Pretty vague, but at the time, I lived in a town that had large populations of young military guys and avid meth users, so late-night emergencies were common. Got to the hospital, where a few more details awaited me — “Perirectal abscess.” For the uninitiated, this means that somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the a–hole, there was a pocket of pus that needed draining. Needless to say our entire crew was less than thrilled. I went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed me the chart was “Have fun with this one.” Amongst healthcare professionals, vague statements like that are a bad sign. My patient was a 314 lbs Native American woman who barely fit on the stretcher I was transporting her on. She was rolling frantically side to side and moaning in pain, pulling at her clothes and muttering Hail Mary’s. I could barely get her name out of her after a few minutes of questioning, so after I confirmed her identity and what we were working on, I figured it was best just to get her to the anesthesiologist so we could knock her out and get this circus started. She continued her theatrics the entire ten-minute ride to the O.R., nearly falling off the surgical table as we were trying to put her under anesthetic. We see patients like this a lot, though, chronic drug abusers who don’t handle pain well and who have used so many drugs that even increased levels of pain medication don’t touch simply because of high tolerance levels.
It should be noted, tonight’s surgical team was not exactly wet behind the ears. I’d been working in healthcare for several years already, mostly psych and medical settings. I’ve watched an 88-year-old man tear a 1″-diameter catheter balloon out of his penis while screaming “You’ll never make me talk!”. I’ve been attacked by an HIV-positive neo-Nazi. I’ve seen some s—. The other nurse had been in the OR as a trauma specialist for over ten years; the anesthesiologist had done residency at a Level 1 trauma center, or as we call them, “Knife and Gun Clubs”. The surgeon was ex-Army, and averaged about eight words and two facial expressions a week. None of us expected what was about to happen next. We got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and I began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed, a little bit of pus was seeping through, but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she’d been injecting IV drugs through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad drugs, but overall, it didn’t seem to warrant her repeated cries of “Oh Jesus, kill me now.” The surgeon steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, all hell broke loose. Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern full of pus, rotten tissue, and fecal matter that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision like we were recreating the funeral scene from Jane Austen’s “Mafia!”. We all wear waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works — all of which were as helpful was rain boots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, I was still finding bits of rotten flesh pasted against the back wall. As the surgeon continued to advance his blade, the torrent just continued. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until, within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse’s shoes. I was nearly twelve feet away, jaw dropped open within my surgical mask, watching the second nurse dry-heaving and the surgeon standing on tip-toes to keep this stuff from soaking his socks any further. The smell hit them first. “Oh god, I just threw up in my mask!” The other nurse was out, she tore off her mask and sprinted out of the room, shoulders still heaving. Then it hit me, mouth still wide open, not able to believe the volume of fluid this woman’s body contained. It was like getting a great big bite of the despair and apathy that permeated this woman’s life. I couldn’t f’ing breath, my lungs simply refused to pull anymore of that stuff in. The anesthesiologist went down next, an ex-NCAA D1 tailback, his six-foot-two frame shaking as he threw open the door to the OR suite in an attempt to get more air in, letting me glimpse the second nurse still throwing up in the sinks outside the door. Another geyser of pus splashed across the front of the surgeon. The YouTube clip of “David at the dentist” keeps playing in my head — “Is this real life?” In all operating rooms, everywhere in the world, regardless of socialized or privatized, secular or religious, big or small, there is one thing the same: Somewhere, there is a bottle of peppermint concentrate. Everyone in the department knows where it is, everyone knows what it is for, and everyone prays to their gods they never have to use it. In times like this, we rub it on the inside of our masks to keep the outside smells at bay long enough to finish the procedure and shower off. I sprinted to the our central supply, ripping open the drawer where this vial of ambrosia was kept, and was greeted by — an empty f’ing box. The bottle had been emptied and not replaced. Somewhere out there was a godless bastard who had used the last of the peppermint oil, and not replaced a single f’ing drop of it. To this day, if I figure out who it was, I’ll kill them with my bare hands, but not before cramming their head up the colon of every last meth user I can find, just so we’re even. I darted back into the room with the next best thing I can find — a vial of Mastisol, which is an adhesive rub we use sometimes for bandaging. It’s not as good as peppermint, but considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup, we were out of options. I started rubbing as much of the Mastisol as I could get on the inside of my mask, just glad to be smelling anything except whatever slimy demon spawn we’d just cut out of this woman. The anesthesiologist grabbed the vial next, dowsing the front of his mask in it so he could stand next to his machines long enough to make sure this woman didn’t die on the table. It wasn’t until later that we realized that Mastisol can give you a mild high from huffing it like this, but in retrospect, that’s probably what got us through. By this time, the smell had permeated out of our OR suite, and down the forty-foot hallway to the front desk, where the other nurse still sat, eyes bloodshot and watery, clenching her stomach desperately. Our suite looked like the underground river of ooze from Ghostbusters II, except dirty. Oh so dirty. I stepped back into the OR suite, not wanting to leave the surgeon by himself in case he genuinely needed help. It was like one of those overly-artistic representations of a zombie apocalypse you see on fan-forums. Here’s this one guy, in blue surgical garb, standing nearly ankle deep in lumps of dead tissue, fecal matter, and several liters of syrupy infection. He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman’s a– and there was no Yoda. He and I didn’t say a word for the next ten minutes as he scraped the inside of the abscess until all the dead tissue was out, the front of his gown a gruesome mixture of brown and red, his eyes squinted against the stinging vapors originating directly in front of him. I finished my required paperwork as quickly as I could, helped him stuff the recently-vacated opening full of gauze, taped this woman’s buttocks closed to hold the dressing for as long as possible, woke her up, and immediately shipped off to the recovery ward. Until then, I’d only heard of “alcohol showers.” Turns out 70% isopropyl alcohol is about the only thing that can even touch a scent like that once its soaked into your skin. It takes four or five bottles to get really clean, but it’s worth it. It’s probably the only scenario I can honestly endorse drinking a little of it, too. As we left the locker room, the surgeon and I looked at each other, and he said the only negative sentence I heard him utter in two and a half years of working together: “That was bad.” The next morning the entire department (a fairly large floor within the hospital) still smelled. The housekeepers told me later that it took them nearly an hour to suction up all of the fluid and debris left behind. The OR suite itself was closed off and quarantined for two more days just to let the smell finally clear out. I laugh now when I hear new recruits to healthcare talk about the worst thing they’ve seen. You ain’t seen s—, kid” Source

Scary, Scary, Scary

“As a paramedic, responded to a call of “traffic accident, baby ejected “. We prepared for the worst we could imagine. Arrive in about 8 minutes, trooper on scene trying to clear the area of bystanders/ gawkers and preserve the scene. He had covered the “baby” with the yellow death-sheet troopers carry in their trunks. Lifted the sheet to check vitals/pronounce death, and it was not a baby, but the top half of the 19 year old girl that was driving the small pickup truck about 50 yards away. She was driving, and arguing with her 19 year old husband who was the passenger. They were doing about 55mph on a two lane road, and met an oncoming truck pulling a doublewide mobile home. She ran under the front corner of the mobile home, cutting her in half. Her bottom half remained in the drivers seat, while her unhurt husband watched as the truck the skidded another 50-60 yards, sideswiping a minivan, sending it into the ditch upside down. When the truck came to rest, her bottom half fell out onto the ground. We also found a trail of ribs from the cab to the bed, and down the pavement to the top half. It looked like a movie set. Her top and bottom looked unhurt, but from mid chest to about pelvis was strung along the road. The husband was absolutely freaking out about what he had just seen. He was babbling incoherently, running around swinging at people, just a mess. A witness who lived right in front of the scene started having chest pains, and had to be transported. We took the husband, and I called medical control and actually got orders to give him iv Valium, something paramedics normally can only give for Grand mal seizures. The driver of the big truck was fine, but was also very very distraught at what he had just witnessed. That was. 16 Years ago and I can still remember pulling up to that scene like it was yesterday” Source

Worse Than War

“I was working in the emergency room as a junior one night when an old lady came in following a truck versus pedestrian incident. Apparently she had got caught in the articulation part of the truck as it made a poorly timed turn and she had a traumatic amputation of both lower limbs. She came in with her two mangled legs in a bag. There was an assistant cleaning the trauma room as we descended who passed out. I remember desperately trying to clamp bleeders with vascular clamps (most of which I couldn’t find and clearly in this setting, futile). At the time I was just following the instructions of my resident. She lived about 5 minutes. I’m not sure how she lasted that long – the ambulance crew presumably did a good job applying pressure to her bloody stumps and tourniquets. Never forget it. I think at that point I saw the merits of pursuing a career in radiology” Source

Get This Guy Some Help!

“This happened some 15 years ago. My uncle Antonio was waiting to be attended at the ER for a minor emergency. He had to be there for a while, so he sat on one of the benches. An old man was sitting near him. He had a very prominent belly and was wearing a button-down pajama shirt.

After a while, the man starts moaning. He seems to be in pain. The room is crowded, so he doesn’t get much attention. My uncle peeks occasionally, but there’s not much that he can do. In time, the moans grow louder, then they become full-on howls.

Apparently looking for a less painful position, the man leans backwards on his bench, his swelled belly protruding forward. On his abdomen skin, surgical scars from old operations are visible.

Suddenly, there’s a noise, the skin ruptures at the belly like an old fabric and the man’s guts start spilling out. There’s a lot of confusion in the room as several staff members get to work, two of them running towards the man and trying to contain the spillage with their bare hands, while others go fetch a stretcher and whatnot. As soon as they can, they move the man to a different room, and that’s the end of my uncle’s account.

For what he could gather from observation and from talking to the people there, the man had had several interventions on his abdominal area, with scars over scars having weakened the man’s skin to the point where it ripped when stretched. There might have been other underlying problems which he didn’t know about, but this is what happened” Source

Paging Dr. Gere, Dr. Richard Gere

“There was the man with a (real) rodent inserted into his rectum. Apparently for sexual pleasure. I’m still pondering that one” Source

No!

“Responded to a call one time. Arrived to find a large naked man sitting on a chair in the garage. When I asked why he called he opened his legs where I saw that his scrotum was hugely swollen, mostly black and had maggots crawling all over it” Source

Not Chopsticks?

“There was the young couple who had tried to remove a ‘lost’ condom unsuccessfully with a pair of spoons (don’t ask!) They had failed, they told us, and were worried. In we went, the Dr and I, there was no condom – they had been trying to pull out the cervix with the spoons” Source

How Does This Even Happen?

“The last one was a gentleman who came in short of breath. An x-ray showed a lot of fluid in his chest and we decided to drain it to help him breathe. We got about 1/2gallon (~2L) of pus from his chest; it was like doing a delivery. I was quite literally soaked from about the waist down with foul-smelling, thick, yellow goo (we had been expecting simple fluid…). He died a few days later and we learned that he’d somehow ruptured his esophagus, leaking food & whatnot into his chest, which was the source of his infection” Source

Bad Brains

We responded to a shooting. A guy in an upstairs apartment had been shot in the head accidentally. His roommate was in the bedroom moving his gun when it went off. The bullet went through the wall and struck the patient in the forehead. We placed him on a backboard so we could take him down to the medical helicopter. While we were carrying him down the stairs, his brain -which had swollen very much- began oozing out of the bullet hole and on to me. I wanted to just drop the backboard and get that off me but obviously I couldn’t do that. By the time we got the patient loaded my shirt and pants were covered in bloody brains Source

Brutal

“A male patient with a window frame from a caravan which had pierced his throat and exited through the back of his neck” Source