Nobody is perfect, even doctors. Here are some of the vital mistakes that doctors have made and the reaction that came with.
“I can’t read. Never could…”
“Once as a tired medical resident I was called to the ER to admit someone at like 3am. This bonehead had gall bladder removal a week ago and now had a surgical-site wound infection. I asked if they’d taken their post-op antibiotics they were prescribed, and they weren’t sure. I was getting more and more frustrated with this dumba** preventing my sleep when I decided to use a ‘pregnant pause’ interview technique, and just shut up. This usually results in either awkward silence and the patient saying ‘uhh WTF doc’ or awkward silence followed by some useful deep revelation. In this case the guy hung his head low, looked at his feet through unfocused eyes, started to sniffle while his halting voice cracked ‘I can’t read. Never could. Didn’t know the instructions they wrote down for me and didn’t know I had medicine to buy. I didn’t ask them because I was embarrassed.’ Illiteracy haunts rural and urban places in most countries. Those folks aren’t reading this, and they depend on our patience and understanding, and acceptance, to detect and bridge that vast communication gap. That’s what stuck with me.”
“Every patient gets a blood sugar check now…”
“When I was a new paramedic, we were called to a house for an unknown problem. We arrived and found our patient unresponsive but breathing on a bed. A friend of his found him after he hadn’t returned his phone calls- they were going out to do something that day, and he found it weird that the guy hadn’t called him yet, so he had gone to his house to investigate. The patient didn’t have any pill bottles laying around, and his friend didn’t know anything about the patient’s medical history. So, I loaded him up into the ambulance and started transporting to the hospital. Started an IV, did an ECG, drew blood work, the whole work up. Get him to the hospital, and the first thing the nurse asked was ‘What was his blood sugar level?’ Oops. Forgot to check it. Turns out, it was incredibly low- which is completely treatable, and probably wouldn’t have required transporting him to the hospital if corrected on scene. Every patient gets a blood sugar check now.”
“Instead of passing peacefully, his wife had to…”
“I work in Palliative Care, and in the fall I sent a patient home to see if he could die there instead of in hospital. We weren’t very hopeful, but thought it would be worth a try. To no one’s great surprise (even his and his wife’s), he ended up coming back a couple of days later for whatever reason. I re-admitted him, since I knew him. I knew he wanted to be a DNR (do not resuscitate). I wrote it on my note. But I didn’t re-fill out the hospital paperwork. The next day, I got to work to discover he’d been coded and was on a ventilator in the ICU. Instead of passing peacefully, his wife had to make the decision to turn off life support. My entire job at the end of life is to ensure as good a death as I can. And in one simple omission, I f—ed that up royally.”
“Instead I let my fear of not knowing if I would be showing…”
“I was on my first clinical rotation in a rural Emergency Room, and a woman came in with a miscarriage, her second one. While we were talking she mentioned she was new to town, didn’t know anyone, and her husband was away for the weekend. When we told her the diagnosis, her eyes became teary, and then we left to make arrangements. The doc didn’t say he was sorry for her loss or comfort her in anyway, which I instinctively wanted to do. When I went back in her room to give her appointment time, she was in pieces. It really gets me. The five seconds it would have taken me to say those words, put a hand on her shoulder, call someone, or just offer some tissues, ugh anything but I didn’t do it. Instead I let my fear of not knowing if I would be showing too much emotion or slowing down the doc, stop me from being human. The silver lining is now I do what my gut tells me. I’ve soothed babies from exhausted parents, picked up crying family members off the floor, and even discussed comic book heroes with kids getting stitches because that’s the kind of person I am, and doctor I want to become.”
“This patient had to have a bigger, potentially unnecessary, piece of…”
“I’m a lab tech and used to work in Histology when I was new. I got a skin biopsy specimen and that day I was embedding, basically putting the fixed tissue into wax so it could be mounted on a cutting block to slice 3 micrometer sections for staining. It’s very important what side you place ‘down’, based on how it was cut out of the body. Well I messed up and placed it sideways instead of down. The person cutting the tissue couldn’t tell and ended up cutting through the tissue. This was a problem because the patient had skin cancer and they were looking at how far it had spread. Since it was cut too deep they couldn’t see the edges anymore. This means the doctor had to cut a bigger piece of skin off to be sure they got it all. That’s when I found out it was a skin biopsy from the patient’s nose. This patient had to have a bigger, potentially unnecessary, piece of skin from his face cut off because of me. I was horrified and learned my lesson that day on how important it is to be certain of embedding technique.”
“This one stuck with me since I felt I was directly responsible for it despite…”
“I was being cross trained into Computed Tomography recently and was thrown into my first night shift by myself after a quick month of training. I had a script I spoke every time I would hook someone up to our power injector for a contrast study. The injector I used in Cath lab is a HELL of alot bigger and scarier than this little thing, but they are still dangerous as hell. I also don’t worry about blowing IVs in cath lab since we normally go through a much tougher femoral or radial artery. We do two test injections of saline, one by hand and one my the injector to make sure the IV is patent and will tolerate the injection. 99% of the time this works and everyone is hunky dory; if it blows now the body will simply absorb the saline and you might get a bruise so no big deal. This time however the IV blew RIGHT at the beginning of the Contrast injection (Your body CAN’T absorb contrast in this fashion) and the little pressure waveform on the injector remained ‘normal’ looking. She didn’t once cry out or scream as I injected 100cc of Iodinated contrast agent into her forearm and I only noticed something was off when I started my scan and saw ZERO contrast in her torso. I aborted the scan thinking the IV blew outside of the patient, walked into her quietly sobbing inside of the machine with an angry swollen arm about the diameter of a grapefruit. I pulled her out, wrapped a hot water soaked compress around her arm, held it over her head and rushed her back to the ER. I found out later she had to go to surgery for it and has long term nerve damage from the compartment syndrome she suffered. I’ve had people die on my table, I’ve been on a code team for my entire term in Cath and see death and mutilation every day at my Level 1 Trauma hospital as the night tech. This one stuck with me since I felt I was directly responsible for it despite being cleared. It caused me to change my WHOLE approach when doing my contrast studies. I tell people to SCREAM bloody murder if their arm does more than burn now when I inject. Insult me, throw a shoe at my window, hit the big red EMERG button on the wall, anything so I don’t disfigure someone again when my safeties fail and mymachine lies to me.”
“I still wonder if I had paid attention to his comments and…”
“16 years ago when I was a medic in the military. This one Marine who came in for Physical Therapy seemed overly depressed (more so than usual). He had bad nerve damage (amongst other injuries) where he could touch his leg and it felt like someone was touching him in the back. I was more focused on the therapy that day and was excited he was making progress. He didn’t seem happy about the progress and made a comment about how it won’t matter. I also recalled when he left I said I would see him next week and he didn’t say anything and just left. He hung himself over the weekend. I still wonder if I had paid attention to his comments and not had dismissed them as him having a bad day maybe he’d still be alive? Then again mental health issues were still seen as a defect when I was in so would he even have accepted mental health treatment? Sorry for rambling but I now pay attention to friends mood swings and signs of depression. Just wish I had done the same 16 years ago though.”
“I will never say sounds good again…”
“I am a nuclear medicine technologist working in a PET department. I deal mostly with cancer patients. Prior to exams, I’ll ask the patients why they are having the test done and for any other vital information. One day, a female patient told me she found a lump, had a mammogram, a biopsy, and it turned out to be stage four invasive ductal breast cancer. Having confirmed the information I had on my sheet with the patient, I made the mistake of saying, ‘Sounds good.’ To which she replied, ‘No, it’s actually pretty f**king terrible,’ and she broke down in tears. I will never say sounds good again when a patient tells me his orher diagnosis.”
“It still kills me every time I think about it…”
“While being a student I was left alone in a small hospital in the emergency department. I admitted an older man with upper abdominal pain on the right side. Didn’t seem serious at all after I talked to him, so I scheduled an ultrasound and called a surgeon to check the patient. Who agreed with my initial diagnosis. Everything was going fine until about 30 minutes later the patient suddenly died. We tried bringing him back but it had no effect. This happened a long time ago, but it still kills me every time I think about it. I’ll never trust a simple upper abdominal pain again.”
“It did make me think twice before opening my mouth again…”
“I once said ‘Wow that’s really cool’ after listening to his LVAD for the first time. That’s a left ventricular assist device for heart failure that continuously circulates in a parallel circuit to the left ventricle to keep the patient alive. He joked ‘It’s really cool if it’s not inside you’ and I said ‘Oh right, I meant the sound and the technology but yes I’m sorry about that.’ He was a jokester, very happy, but it did make me think twice before opening my mouth again in certain situations. It was a damn cool piece of technology, but the patients interpretation of your words is paramount.”
“I almost gave the guy a heart attack…”
“I do HIV testing and once I showed up to work super tired because I couldn’t sleep the night before. This guy comes in for a test, we go through the pre-counseling and then I tell him to step out for a few minutes while the results come up. Once he comes back to get his results, I tell him to take a sit and the first thing that came out of my mouth was ‘Your results are positive’ and then I saw the look on his face and that’s when I realized I f*cked up. I then said ‘Oh no no no, I meant to say negative.’ I almost gave the guy a heart attack :/”
“Found out later he still tried to sue. Ah well…”
“I’ll never forget my first mistake as an EMT. Patient was in the back of the ambulance in a gurney, he required oxygen via cannula. Normally the gurney O2 tank is is much smaller than the house tank on the ambulance so we generally switch over the gurney to the ambulance tank. So basically there is now a small hose attached to the wall of the ambulance that feeds the patient delicious oxygen to his nose. This being my first time I forgot to switch back the hose to the gurney and upon removing the gurney from the back I essentially choked the sh*t out of his face when the hose tightened. Poor guy, he thought he did something wrong. I explained to him what happened and then he laughed about it. Found out later he still tried to sue. Ah well.”
“He looked at me and said ‘That’s piss’…”
“RN here: I was taking care of a man with liver failure who was not a candidate for a transplant. He ‘waxed and waned’ meaning he vacillated between complete brain function and confusion. I brought him his pills and made some small talk. We chatted a little bit before I handed him a cup to drink from on his bedside table. He tossed the pills in his mouth and took a gulp from the cup. He looked at me and said ‘That’s piss’ in a really matter of fact way. I checked the cup. It was. While he was confused he must have gone in the cup instead of his urinal and then forgotten about it. Now I always check before handing people cups from their bedside tables.”
“A few months later somebody made the exact same mistake but…”
“Pharmacy technician here. I once was much too stressed and I was rushing. Instead of prednisone 5mg, I used prednisone 50mg. The pharmacist checked it and didn’t catch it, but I realized when I was putting my stock bottles away. Luckily it hadn’t gone out yet so I fixed the mistake and vowed to be 100% dedicated to one task at a time. A few months later somebody made the exact same mistake but did not catch it, and the patient ended up in the hospital for a few months.”
“I’ll never forget that call…”
“I was a medic in Israel and most of the time I was on a special ambulance for extreme emergencies or dangerous runs. After an overnight shift with that one I overheard that one of the morning shift medics didn’t show up for a regular ambulance so I offered to take his spot. Well I didn’t realize at that moment that the driver and other medic were both very orthodox religious but when I did I said whatever and went with them. On the ambulance there’s a hierarchy and in this one I was on the bottom rung mostly because I was only 18. We get a call for an unconscious woman at a bus stop. We get there and it’s a visibly homeless woman who’s not breathing, has a very weak pulse, and a locked jaw. In this case you’re supposed to break the jaw to open the airway but the other two refused to because they were men and she a woman and they physically stopped me from intervening beyond trying to tilt her head back. We watched her die and called the coroner and took off immediately after they arrived. I stopped working with them immediately after and went home. The next day I filled a complaint but it wasn’t taken seriously other than I wasn’t allowed to be on their ambulance again. I’ll never forget that call.”
“That really destroyed me…”
“I was in a cancer clinic, doing follow-ups. I’d just f**ked up a drug choice (I was under supervision, so it was fine), and wanted to try and ask something smart to the oncologist. So we’re in a consultation with a woman who’d had a mastectomy, and I asked the probability of recurrence of the cancer. F**k, that was stupid. Because the oncologist then had to answer, and probably be very conservative, and scare the sh*t out of the patient. That really destroyed me. I felt like a total a**hole.”
“The pad ended up partially coming off right as the high-voltage RF was…”
“Med student here. A few years ago, when I was working as a medical assistant in an interventional pain management clinic, I was asked by the doctor to place a grounding pad (a sticky pad like they use for EKGs) on the patient’s leg during a radiofrequency (RF) nerve ablation procedure. The patient had some lotion or something on her leg that was keeping the pad from sticking properly, but it seemed to be mostly well attached and I didn’t want to hold up the procedure to get another pad or clean off the patient’s leg. The pad ended up partially coming off right as the high-voltage RF was being applied, causing a small burn on her leg. There was no lasting damage done and the patient was very understanding, but I still felt horrible. It was the first time I had caused harm to a patient, and it could easily have been avoided had I just spoken up. Now I never hesitate to say something if I have even a slight feeling that something is off. Nothing is more important than a patient’s well-being.”