Doctors see a lot of disgusting, dark stuff in their line of work. The things these doctors saw, though, would haunt them for years.
(Content has been edited for clarity).
Maybe It’s Time To Find A Different Profession
LifetimeStock/Shutterstock
“I have two stories (med student here):
A morbidly obese (that’s an actual medical term) woman comes to the clinic complaining of a foul odor that she’s noticed. And yeah, the attending doctor and I noticed it as well – a smell somewhere between rancid milk mixed with rotting fish and a disemboweled skunk swimming in garbage. We do the usual workup: take a good history, do a thorough physical (as best we can given she is huge and has folds and folds of fat and skin draped all over her) including a rectal/genital exam just in case there was some funky ‘down there’ growth, and run some simple labs. As me and the attending are discussing how we have no clue what is going on, the nurse comes out holding a green, soggy mush in her gloved hands and waves it in front of our faces (I nearly puked right there). It turns out the woman was using pieces of bread to soak up the sweat by putting them in between her fat folds. Apparently, she forgot about one of the parts, which then stayed there to marinate in her juices for weeks (as estimated by the patient). I was sent in to see if there were any more hidden pieces; luckily there wasn’t, but having to lift up and search every fat fold was as embarrassing for her as it was disgusting for me.
A guy was wasted, fighting with his girlfriend, and decided to light up some M-80s and throw them at her. Well, he waited too long after lighting one and ended up blowing off his hand. He was brought to the ED, completely wasted and having lost a lot of blood. We stabilized him and took him to the OR. While the hand surgeons were cleaning off his stump of a hand, the surgery resident and I were fixing all his chest wounds. One of the hand surgeons said, ‘Wow this is a mess. Did anyone at the scene find his thumb?’ No one knew. We continued examining, cleaning and suturing his wounds, and lo and behold, buried in a deep wound in his upper abdomen was two-thirds of the guy’s thumb. If he hadn’t been so fat, his thumb would’ve likely entered his peritoneum.”
“My Boots Have Never Been The Same Since”
“Autopsy tech/death investigator.
A morbidly obese man had died in a cheap motel room with the heat cranked up and wasn’t found for several days.
By the time we got him to the morgue, he was bloated from decomposing and was purple and green all over. There was lots of skin slip.
Our forensic pathologist went to make the initial Y incision, and the force of the escaping gas blew gore all over us and the ceiling while making a sound like a wet balloon with the air being pinched out. We all paused for a moment as the worst stank I have ever smelled enveloped the room like something that had crawled out of Satan’s butthole.
Then we burst out laughing because it was all we really could do.
It didn’t help that he was leaking liquefied fat all over the floor, that crap is SLIPPERY! My boots have never been the same since.”
Everyone Was Scarred Forever By This Movie-Like Terror Scene
“As a paramedic, I responded to a call of ‘traffic accident, baby ejected.’ We prepared for the worst we could imagine. I arrived in about eight minutes; a trooper was 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. I lifted the sheet to check vitals/pronounce death, and it was not a baby.