A lot of bad cases come through the emergency room doors. A lot of lives are on the line and it can be a pretty serious place to work. Sometimes though you get cases that come in that can be so strange that they become memories you can't forget. The medical professionals in the following stories share the most bizarre cases they've ever had.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
The Nurse Needed A Week Off After
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“We had a 55-year-old lady come in, completely out of her mind on bath salts. We had her in a private room, stripped of all furniture (for her safety), as she jogged backward while holding her arms over her head rolling her fists in circles (the motion an NFL referee uses for a false start). She did this for TEN HOURS straight, only stopping once to spray liquid diarrhea on the wall. Oh yeah, she was naked.
A poor CNA was assigned as a one-on-one caregiver for her, and the poor guy had to keep up with her the whole time to ensure she didn’t fall over.
She was still going when I left after my shift. The next day, I asked what happened to her. I was told she did it for another four hours or so, before lying down and sleeping for an hour. She then woke up and was normal, wondering why she was nude in the ER. She was discharged within the hour.”
People Can Be So Creative
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“I’ve been an ER tech for four years now at a large hospital, so I’ve seen some gruesome injuries: de-gloved limbs, amputations, brain matter coming out of the nasal cavity, clamshell cracked chests to try to treat internal bleeding, etc. Some of my favorite stories though are the patients who insert foreign objects into their rectums. The explanations they come up with to explain how the objects got there are always creative. ‘I was gardening and fell, and the cucumber went up my butt,’ and, ‘I slipped in the shower and fell, and the shampoo bottle went up my butt.’ Then there was the guy who came in and was completely honest about putting lemons up his butt but said it was only three. X-Ray showed seven lemons wedged all the way up and around in his colon.
We’ve also retrieved objects from patients’ lady bits as well (i.e. a light up bouncy ball, a clean urine sample they were planning on using for their next pee test and then forgot about, two bags of illegal substances and one bag of razor blades, the woman who was apparently using her area as a wallet for her money and tissues). Then there was the girl who superglued herself shut. Good times.”
The Type Of People Who Shouldn’t Have Children
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“A 2-year-old baby that the ‘boyfriend’ forgot in the hot tub for 15 minutes. The baby was screaming, but the boyfriend was too busy talking on the phone. Meanwhile, the mother was in the kitchen cooking dinner. The result? Third-degree burns that were covering the baby. I can still see those huge bubbles in front of me. I can’t imagine what the pain must have been. Scarred for life.”
“Crumbling” Is Something You Never Want To Here In A Hospital
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“An agoraphobic man came in and hadn’t taken his socks off in two years. Feet were gangrenous. X-ray showed little bone left. I removed his socks and what little of his feet were left crumbled into my hands. They were very dry, think Hard clay mixed with sand and bits of stone and old dried parchment. Apparently, there was no showering within that time. I explained to him the circumstances with the doc and what I’d be doing. We shielded his view of the feet while I debrided them and the doc explained the state of his feet after the procedure and the plan from there on. He didn’t talk much.”
He Was Just Trying To Do The Right Thing
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“I assisted with a dressing change on a nonverbal cancer patient with dementia when I was a CNA. Her family had chosen not to put her through surgeries and chemotherapy that she couldn’t understand anyway and just asked that she be treated for pain only.
So the nurse was unwrapping her bandages, and there was a decent amount of fluid seeping through the gauze, but I wasn’t worried. He peeled the pad back, and we both took a deep breath and stared (neither of us had dealt with this wound before).
She had no left chest area. Basically from armpit to sternum was exposed ribcage and hardened black tissue. It looked burnt.
The dressing change was painful for her; she was crying and screaming (no words, just sounds) during the process. It was awful.
Afterward, the nurse left the room, and I stayed to clean up all the old dressing and packages and put a new gown on the woman.
She was still crying and terrified, so I pulled a chair up next to her bed, stroked her hair, and sang her a song while she fell asleep. It took three extra minutes in that room to comfort a dying woman. A coworker ‘caught’ me and complained that I wasn’t covering my hall. I got written up.”
Answers You Just Can’t Forget
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“We had a lady come in once, and the nurse was going over the basic questions; everything was normal. Then he asked, ‘Are you on your period?’
She replied, ‘No.’ Noticing the string, he then asked why she was using a tampon. She with no emotion said, ‘Oh, my son must of put it in.’ There are few sentences I’ve heard in my life more wrong than that.
We also had a 918-pound man who tried to hit on the on-call nurse as I took him to nuclear medicine. The line? ‘I’m coming into some money soon!’
Had another guy ‘fall on a paint roller’ which got lodged in his rectal cavity.
We had a psych ward with double magnet locked doors. One night I was taking a patient up, and a patient had gotten in the area between the doors. I opened the door to go in; she jumped on me – she was naked – and started biting my head (not hard) and hitting me. She then jumped off and started running down the hallway yelling about purple butterflies and raccoons.”
Not Something You Typically Hear Around The Playground
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“I had a woman who successfully committed suicide by trying to cut her head off with a chainsaw. She bled out in the ER before anyone had a chance to help her.
I also had a 9-year-old boy who was in the psych ward having an ‘acute episode.’ During the psych evaluation, this kid was telling us how he had plans to sneak into his mother’s room and use the telephone with the cord by her bed to strangle her until she died. He then went into very descriptive detail the sounds she would make, what her face would look like and how excited he was to see her die. He also had numerous plans to take his own life that were potentially feasible. It was life altering to hear such a small child have such vivid plans.”
Ouch
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“I’ve seen a couple of rough issues involving men’s privates. One was a pre-teen who enjoyed sticking elastic strings up his junk for reasons that were unclear, and accidentally lost one up there but was too afraid to tell anyone. He came in a week later peeing blood.
Another was a teenage boy who wore shorts with a zipper to bed and then got up to pee at night and got himself caught in his zipper. He was pretty mortified as two female doctors, and a female nurse helped glue his area back together.”
For The Love Of God Don’t Touch Anything That’s Attached To You!
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“This happens a lot, but confused patients like to rip their Foley (urinary) catheters out with the tip inflated. It’s about the size of a big grape, and come the entire way from the bladder down and out their privates/urethra. They then get up and walk over to you confused dripping blood everywhere to tell you that their junk hurts.
When I say happens a lot, if you’re on a team with a lot of elderly/demented/psychiatric patients, it’s about once a month event.”
These Are Wild!
These unbelievable stories are so shocking! Don’t worry, the unexpected tales don’t stop here. There’s more crazy stories like these on Storyblend.com!
That’ll Give You Nightmares For A While
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“Well, the grossest thing I’ve seen so far has been a diabetic homeless guy with necrotizing fasciitis and a ridiculously uncontrolled maggot infestation of his right leg. The man’s entire right lower extremity below the knee was black and smelled like a rotting animal carcass, with countless maggots burrowing around inside. You could hear them from the doorway to his room. After he went upstairs to the ICU, we had to close that room for multiple days and have it sprayed for bugs because there were thousands of flies in there.
The best part of the story is that he subsequently left the hospital AMA (against medical advice) presumably, to die within a day or two, after telling the critical care docs and the surgeons that he refused to lose his leg because he wanted to be whole in the afterlife. I hope that worked out for him as he planned.”
A Lot Happens In A Day
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“I took care of a lady who was high on something. The police found her in a shopping cart in the street. She was too high to even acknowledge the real world and was apparently doing it with someone in her hallucinations since she would spread eagle on the bed and scream, ‘Do me hard, daddy!’ at the top of her lungs.
I also had a confused man rip off his colostomy bag full of liquid poop and throw it in my direction like a live grenade.
We have a regular psych patient who is only cooperative and happy while singing ‘Shine Bright Like a Diamond.’ As a cruel joke on co-workers, we would walk by and start singing to him so he would finish the entire song, loudly of course, while his nurse gave you the ol’ ‘I’m going to kill you’ glare from beside the bed.
Every day is a new adventure.”
The Meds Make All The Difference
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“As a Psych Tech, before I became a Social Worker, I got called in during code situations in the ER pretty regularly as psych unit staff was the point in any ‘hands on’ situations. I work at a medium-sized hospital in between larger towns, so it stays pretty quiet. We have an inpatient psych unit, so we get all kinds brought in by police, or just strolling in. Here are a few of my favorites.
A guy who had walked over 40 miles (his starting point was confirmed later by family) hugging every walnut tree, because they are the nicest trees, and God told him to do so. It took him three days. He said they were the nicest trees because walnuts are delicious. He was arrested trying to bathe in a water feature in the downtown area.
A large woman who was convinced she was pregnant with six babies, not just any babies, but George Strait’s babies. She was furious that we would not give her an ultrasound so she could see if they looked like him. She would slow dance to country music then all of the sudden start headbanging. She also ate crayons.
We had another young kid coming off of some stuff. He had been mostly normal beyond saying he heard voices until he put his call light on while going to the bathroom. I opened the door up, and he was naked on the toilet balling like a baby because he pooped on a spider that was trying to crawl out of the bowl. Later, he was convinced the valet workers he could see from the window had stolen his ‘stardust.’ He was a perfectly normal kid a few days later.”
A Little Serenading
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“A lady was all messed up on stuff and was passed out on a gurney late one night in the ER. We had the lights dimmed, and all was quiet. Every so often she would awaken and sing at the top of her lungs, ‘Don’t cry for me Argentina!’
That was 20 years ago, and it still cracks me up.”
A Close Call
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“This happened around last New Years. We get a call for an incoming level one trauma, and the EMTs on the radio tell us it’s an impalement injury. Okay, that’s pretty unusual, but whatever. Fast forward ten minutes. EMS brings the patient in, accompanied by a crew of firefighters, and with no further ado, here’s the story:
A 20-year-old kid gets new skis for Christmas. A few days later and the streets are covered in several inches of fresh snow. So, the kid straps on his new skis, his dad hops in the car and is towing the kid along through the snowy streets at 30 mph. Big surprise, the Toyota loses traction and starts to skid. The skier, seeing what’s happening, doesn’t want to be anywhere near the car and bails. Of course, he’s flying and needs to stop, so he aims for a big pile of snow on the curb and slams into it.
It turns out, it’s not a pile of snow, it’s a pile of construction debris under a thin layer of powder. Oops.
The kid comes into the trauma bay with a five-foot-long piece of steel rebar entering his thigh, exiting at the groin, then re-entering his abdomen at the crest of the pelvis and exciting again about five inches up.
The kid is fully oriented and awake, and besides the rebar skewer, is uninjured. After the survey and imaging are complete, the trauma attending makes the decision to head straight up to the OR.
Three firefighters scrub into the OR, and they bring a special saw that can cut the steel without creating sparks and igniting the oxygen. The saw malfunctions immediately, and the trauma surgeons decide that rather than cut the metal, they’ll cut the patient. They ‘de-roof’ the rebar, essentially slicing the top off the skin tunnel, and lift the bar out.
This five-foot steel spike missed every bone, every major blood vessel, and every organ, not to mention missing his gentleman’s sausage. The kid spends two days in the hospital and walks out on his own.”
The Sane Patient With The Insane Story
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“A few years back, a lady came in concerned that she’d bumped her head, and it was just after Liam Neeson’s wife died in a skiing accident, so she was scared she’d have the same thing. She insisted that we had to get her taken care of in an hour before her husband got home. He’d told her already that she was overreacting and she didn’t need to get checked out. So, she had to trick him into driving the next town over to check on their college-age daughter (apparently the lady convinced her to help out with the trick), so she could sneak out to the emergency room.
At one point, as she was telling me all this, she threw in a few Spanish phrases. Real basic high school stuff, like ‘por favor’ and ‘grande.’ Peggy Hill-level of pronunciation, too. Then, she threw her head, gave a lilting laugh, and said, ‘Oh, you’ll have to forgive me. I speak fluent Spanish and sometimes when I’m excited I slip and start speaking it unintentionally.’
Now here’s the best part. The whole time I was getting her story, her medical history, vital signs, etc., she had a gas mask hanging around her neck. Like, a WWII kind of deal, really big and bulky full-face gas mask. So, finally, I asked her, what’s with the mask? And she said, ‘It’s because of the bats!’ Then I got the story of how her attic was infested with bats. She said it was against the law to kill them, so she put out mothballs all over the house to drive out the bats. Unfortunately, the smell was so strong she had to wear a gas mask. It was so bad she had to sleep at a friend’s house.
She was okay, though. Her husband came and took her home.”
You’ll Want To Be Sedated For The Rest Of This Sir
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“I had a dude in refractory v-fib that was conscious as long as the Lucas was running. He was fighting the machine, eyes tracking and would scream when we defibrillated him. After several shocks, we sedated and intubated him, but I think he got shocked as many as 12 times before we hit the cath lab. He looked terrified before we put him under.
We had another guy who overdosed on research chemicals or something who bashed his face through plate glass window. When we found him, he was naked, covered in blood and trying to peel his face off. He had a flap hanging like a mask over the right side of his face that he kept pulling on. We sedated him, and as we were loading him up, I stepped on something squishy. It was his ear.”
You Almost Got Me!
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“This patient would go around claiming he had pancreatic cancer and blood clots all over his body and that he had a rare genetic disorder that made him resistant to coumadin. He would come with stacks of medical records. The guy had me convinced. He had a chemo port surgically implanted in his chest. He did, however, trip my radar for crazy and I googled him. This brought up an article about how he scammed many hospitals and even convinced physicians to give him chemo.”
That’s No Way To Get Good Service
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“At a children’s hospital, a mother freaked out over something. Not quite sure what, but she was upset. So like most rational upset people, she took off all her clothes and was screaming at the top of her lungs about how the doctors were messed up. She was stomping around the ward. A stark naked screaming lady isn’t a thing sick kids should be seeing, so security came and took her into an isolation room. Whenever someone approached the observation window, she’d spread her legs, point down below, and go, ‘What do you think of this?’
She got taken to an adult psych unit. Not sure what happened to her or her kid.”
Everyone Learned Something Today!
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“I did most of the grunt work while nurses were administering medication and dealing with doctors. A guy gets stabbed in the heart; medics bring him in. ER doctor immediately ‘cracks his chest’ to get to his heart. Makes a huge incision between two ribs on his left side then puts rib spreaders between them and cranks. A couple of seconds later, there are his lungs (purple by the way) and his pumping heart spewing blood. He then cuts open the pericardial sac (thin sac around the heart), and a lot of congealed blood pours out – picture spoon chunks of red jello. So I help him get out all these chunks of jello (blood) out of the sac while he desperately tries to sew him up. He died, but a great anatomy lesson was had by all. Nurses said they’d worked 25 years and had never seen anything like that.”