The truth is a funny thing and sometimes, it's stranger than fiction. That means that emergency services and their users often find themselves in very bizarre situations.
Here the users of Reddit share their tales from either side of the fence, both emergency service workers and their customers, that were simply too peculiar to be easily believed.
(Content edited for clarity.)
She Was Just A Proactive Business Woman
“Got a disturbance call and after we get there, we see one of the front windows of the house is open. Turns out a tweaker had let herself in. We get her out and calmed down (she swore we were the FBI and were going to haul her off to ‘those government pricks’). She proceeds to tell us that she actually owns a cleaning business and she broke in to clean the house so she could drum up business from the homeowners. Too bad she had cleaned out their jewelry too.”
Guard Dog
“Got in a vehicle pursuit, dude crashed into a fence and fled on foot into the woods. I didn’t chase because I thought there was a passenger in the vehicle… Turns out it was a dog, which was hilarious.
Well, a couple hours later, while I was dealing with the aftermath of that, someone called in saying their car was stolen. The story was, he was out looking for his dog, when two guys came up and robbed him of his keys, stole his car, and while they were stealing his car, his dog went and jumped in the car with them. According to him, this occurred right about the time I got in the pursuit with said car. Also, the caller was like a couple blocks away from where the pursuit ended.
I went over there and arrested him.”
The Frat House Whopper
“We were having a house party at my fraternity house that I’m head of for the night. Irish Guy comes in with a HUGE bag of weed. He hands it to a random guy so he can use both hands to roll something and turns his back to him.
Random books it out of the house with his bag. Irish then loses his temper when he finds his bag is gone. We end up throwing him out because he’s making a scene. Fast forward 30 min. Get the ‘cop knock’ at door. I answer.
I try to act cool because we are obviously drinking and probably have minors in the house, but he says, ‘Hey we don’t care about the party but this guy says someone here stole his wallet so we need to investigate.’ It’s Irish. His wallet you say? I take cop aside and tell him the truth. We walk back and the cop asks Irish for ID. Irish PULLS OUT HIS WALLET and shows his ID. Cop and Irish leave. I laugh out loud.”
At Least He Was Committed To The Lie
“I’m a Navy Corpsman.
A dude pissed hot on a random substance test and swore that some woman had slipped him something at a club. Told us how he went out the night before the test, had a drink and felt very woozy afterward.
He took it all the way. He filed a report saying that he may have been assaulted and everything.
Main problem was that he tested positive for weed. Secondary problem was that he was on overnight duty the night before he took his test.
My favorite part though. After he got his dismissal papers, he was walking around base with a giant smile on his face. I asked him what was up and he proudly proclaimed:
‘I’m getting a General under honorable conditions!’
Umm, OK. Be proud, I guess?
He explained, ‘I was afraid I’d get an OTH (Other than Honorable Discharge). This means I can still go to work for the DEA!’
Uhh, yeah, shippy. Good luck with that one.”
Don’t Put THAT In THERE
“Former OR nurse here, and I have heard some fantastic stories about how things happened – particularly the foreign body in rectum tales.
I think the best was an old guy, years ago. He looked like Santa Claus – big guy, white hair, white beard.
We had had a crazy night, multiple emergencies that took hours, and I ended up getting off late enough to get a late start the next day. Now Santa had been booked the night before, but it had been so busy that his op just hadn’t been done. Other cases had more priority than the old dude with something up his bottom.
So, I come back to work the next morning and Santa is my first patient – oh how lucky can I be?!
Santa had a really sad story. He had diarrhea, you see. It was really bad, so bad he’d gone in bed. His wife gave him such a hard time over it, that he figured the smart thing to do (!) was to plug things up in case it happened again.
So, obviously, the best thing to stick up your bottom to prevent this is a lowball glass. Base first. A wide, thick lowball glass. Uh yeah, perfect!
Apparently, Santa duly inserts said lowball glass then had an ‘Oh No’ moment – how was he going to get it out? Panic! Then, in a wave of pure inspiration, he had an idea! I’ll just wedge a plastic fishing float in it and pull the line. That’s got to work! Man, I’m a clever old man!
So he somehow managed to find, and then insert, a large plastic red and white float, got it wedged into the glass, pulled the line… and…
The line came off. Oops.
What to do now? Well, go to the hospital to get it all removed so that he can actually sit comfortably.
By the time Santa got into the OR, he was pretty uncomfortable. Our gas man gets him asleep, and we get him positioned in stirrups so we can ‘deliver’ his composite float-and-glass baby.
Normally foreign body removals are a fairly simple thing – once the patient is relaxed and positioned right and if we can get a hold of the item, it usually is a matter of minutes to get it out. Alas, not in this case…
The float came out easily enough – we bored into it with a big corkscrew type instrument and it just popped right out of the glass and out of Santa with no more fuss.
The glass was a little more recalcitrant – it didn’t want to budge at all. We tried to weasel it out with flat-tipped heavy forceps tipped with rubber when the glass broke! Just a wedge out of the rim, but still, damage done. The glass isn’t going to come out easily, and it’s too risky to keep trying to get it out the way it got in.
Next step – prep for major surgery. Oh yes, dear reader, it was time to create a new hole because the glass wouldn’t come out the old hole.
Santa received an abdominal incision from just above his belly button to just above his pelvic bone. He was still in stirrups – the thought was, if we could, we’d just manipulate his bowel first, hopefully, it would loosen up the glass and our Man Below could get it out of him.
Fail. The horrid glass was sure it was going to stay – it was now wedged into his pelvis – literally. The thing was more solid than a brick out-house.
Plan C. We open up his bowel and get it out that way.
Aside: before planned bowel surgery there’s usually some sort of preparation beforehand that empties out our field of surgery, so to speak. This is cleaner, safer and far more pleasant for the operating team. This was not planned bowel surgery…
The team opened up his bowel which was… unpleasant. Backed up the wazoo for 12+ hours due to his homemade plug, everything was unhappy and explodey and just nasty. But, intrepid souls as we surgical folk are, onward and downward!!
Three hours later – seriously, I kid you not – with two surgeons pushing from above and one pulling from below, FINALLY, that annoying lowball glass surrendered.
In addition to wedging into his pelvis, it had also, somehow, created some sort of vacuum behind it, even with all the backed up contents. That was why it was so bloody hard to remove.
Santa ended up with a sore bottom, a row of staples from stem to stern and a defunctioning colostomy for a few months to let his poor abused colon heal.
And that, kids, is why we say ‘don’t do this at home’ and definitely ‘don’t stick that thing up your bottom!'”
Check The Tapes!
Africa Studio/Shutterstock
“Had a guy in a Chinese take away get punched in the side of the face, come outside and identify the attacker to us.
I put cuffs on the guy and give him the caution. He keeps explaining that he slipped on some sweet and sour sauce (which is usually sticky) and fell into the guy. Kept on telling us, ‘LOOK AT THE CCTV, LOOK AT THE CCTV.’
So we check the CCTV and it shows him and his friends throwing food at the victim, who turns around and says something to the effect of please stop, and the attacker walks over and punches him.
Guy had a tooth knocked out. Not sure why he thought that footage would get him out of it…”
He Just “Fell”
Duplass/Shutterstock
“Once when I was waiting in the emergency room with my boyfriend, some college-aged kid got wheeled in with his leg badly scraped. Blood was running down it heavily, he’s got some bloodsoaked towel pressed against it, you can see the raw, angry patches of missing skin from clear across the ER, just… bad.
I heard him tell the front desk that he slipped and fell… off of a three-inch curb. Meanwhile, his friends are turning around and hustling back out to their still-running car. One of them stumbled in a way that made it pretty obvious that they were all probably drinking.
Dude gets taken back immediately because he’s starting to leak on to the floor. My boyfriend, who actually was an EMT/firefighter for a while, said that it looked like a nice case of road rash and that the kid had probably been car-surfing. Because apparently, he’d seen several other cases like it, and it was a fairly common thing at that particular college.
The security guard had been eyeing the guy the whole time. Wonder if he ever got in trouble for it.”
A Needlessly Complicated Stroke
“I’m a paramedic, many years ago myself and my partner were called to the carpark of our local nudist beach for a male possibly having a stroke. We found our patient, along with a very panicky female, sitting in a car parked in one of the more obscure carparks.
The male had very obvious paralysis down one side, very possibly a stroke. While we were attempting to get the usual history from the female as to what went on, she kept shrieking that they were only there having some lunch. The male had his zip on his trousers undone and his shirt untucked. No sign of any lunch anywhere, mid-morning so a bit early for lunch.
The patient was very large (in a muscular way) and unable to move one side of his body, so we requested backup via radio for help with lifting him out of the car. Our comms center was asking for a more precise location as there are many carparks along this section of coastline. My partner replied that we were in the nudist beach carpark, the female flipped and shouted ‘Don’t say that!’
We reassured her that the general public could not hear our communications, but no matter – she just kept shouting ‘we were just here having some lunch!’ Bear in mind that only a few hundred meters away there is a carpark overlooking the ocean at the top of a cliff which is very popular with those seeking to have their lunch break with a view. The nudist beach carpark is basically in bushland.
It turned out a lot of people showed up. Police attended merely out of curiosity and the local fire service was dispatched for some help with the heavy lifting. This increased the panic level of the female to no end. She started becoming concerned about where the bill for the ambulance was to go to.
We replied that the patient would receive the bill at his residential or postal address. This sent her into even more of a panic as she implored that we couldn’t send the bill to his address as his wife would see it. Never mind that for all intents and purposes, the male was seemingly having a stroke and we were taking him to a hospital; his wife would no doubt find out about this, it’s a difficult thing to hide from a spouse.
The worst thing was, they were work partners, wearing the same embroidered shirts and the carpark of the nudist beach is about a kilometer drive from the nearest hospital. She could just as easily have driven him to the hospital herself and claimed he had a stroke while she was driving, none of this needed to have occurred.”
He Really Wanted To Get Out Of Cuba
“My high school English teacher told us this story once:
He used to be an EMT in the Navy and was stationed in Cuba. When medical situations were bad enough, they had to fly the patients to Miami for treatment. And I guess a lot of people would rather be in Miami than Cuba.
So this guy comes up to him with an infection in his leg, with ‘no clue how it happened, just woke up like that.’ Massive, black bulge sticking out of his shin. My teacher assumes that this guy was just trying to get sent to Miami. So he avoids that, lances his boo-boo, and treats him on the spot. The patient gets all better after a couple of days and some antibiotics.
As it turns out, this guy had directly injected goat feces into his leg to cause a small infection, and it got out of hand.”
It Wasn’t What They Assumed
“My wife tripped on a power cord in the kitchen and fell, hitting her arm on the edge of the granite counter top. Put one heck of a nasty bruise right above her elbow.
She went to the doctor and told him what happened and that she thought she’d broken her elbow. He sends her off to the imaging clinic for an x-ray, and, on the DOCTOR’S orders, they x-ray the lower part of her arm. Not the elbow. Of course, THAT part wasn’t broken.
Apparently, he thought it was domestic violence because how the heck can someone trip and fall like that? So the x-ray was looking for a break from me grabbing her arm and twisting it. Dude, the other day she broke her foot for the THIRD time by dropping something on it. I promise I’m not beating my wife!
Now her arm hurts every time the weather changes because it was never set properly.”
He Was Just Helping The Bunny!
“I was almost arrested for trying to steal cars and really, I was just trying to save a bunny’s life.
I was walking home one evening and saw a bunny sitting in the middle of the road. I ran over and shooed it off the road, then crossed the road again back to the side I was originally on.
A couple minutes later a cop car pulls up next to me with the directional light shining in my face. I’m blocking my eyes and next thing I know my face is slammed into the hood of the cop car and my arm is being twisted behind my back. They’re yelling at me asking why I’m ‘checking car doors.’ It took me a while to realize that when I was crossing the road to shoo the bunny, someone had seen and thought that I was going from car to car checking if the doors were unlocked.
I had to try to explain to these two aggressive officers that I was just shooing a bunny out of the road. It was pretty humiliating considering a few people I knew happened to walk by and I looked like a criminal. They finally let me go after about 10 minutes and told me to walk straight home even though I was like 22 at the time and it was 9 pm.”
There Are A Lot Of Liars Out There
“One of my first cases ever as a cop was a guy we witnessed crash into a pole. He got out and started to walk away until he saw us. He then jumped back into his car and took off.
We’re not allowed to chase unless it’s for a violent felony, so he got away, but he crashed again down the street.
By the time we caught up to it, he was gone, but he left everything – including his ID and cell phone in the car. His girlfriend even called him while we were there and said he’d just left her house. Unfortunately, everything was dropped in court due to lack of evidence.
Also, so many thugs have obvious self-inflicted wounds but make up the same story about walking down the street minding their own business when they suddenly got shot. They are freaking idiots by nature. They carry their weapons in their waistbands without holsters and end up shooting themselves in the leg.”
From The Horse’s Mouth
“I was in a car with my friend. We may or may not have been ridiculously wasted. I definitely was.
He insisted on driving the two blocks home. I’ve seen him do this before while I was sober and he was impressively able.
Apparently, I flipped off the cop. Next thing I know my friend runs out of the car and I’m left clueless. Police chase and sirens. The cops throw me in the back of their car and ask me the 5 W’s. Who, what, when, where, and why.
All I say is ‘we got trashed at the gay bar and he said he’d take me to an after party. I just met the guy,’ as if he was pulling in a straight boy that wasn’t sober or thinking clearly. The cop called me out, immediately.
He was right, but there was nothing he could do or say about it. Tried to scare me into snitching but I knew better. My friend was in the apartment about 50 feet away the whole time.
They towed his car and showed up at my place the next day to follow up and repeated their questions, but I stood strong to my story.”
You Can Be Too Honest Too
“I’m a paramedic and was once called to a female with abdominal pain. We arrive at a house, walk in and are confronted with a male laying on a mattress on the living room floor watching adult films on the TV. He motions us down the hall when we ask who we are there for.
We walk down the hall and into the main bedroom and are confronted with a naked woman on the bed. We immediately cover her with the bedcover and ask her what her problem is. She replies that she and her boyfriend were having intercourse, during which she developed abdominal pains.
This is an awkward situation, being confronted with this kind of frankness (which happens from time to time). I and my partner were a bit stuck for words, and I blurted out ‘So you were having intercourse?’ She replied this was correct. I really should just have left it there, but stupid me just looked at my partner with a panicked expression and just kept going.
‘So, was it particularly rigorous or anything?’ I asked her.
‘Yeah, we were watching something on TV and really revved up, he was really giving it to me.’
My partner nearly doubled over with suppressed laughter, and I sensibly ceased asking questions after this.
When you take patients to the hospital, you have to ‘hand the patient over’ to a nurse or a doctor when you get there. This involves detailing the complaint, which of course proved very interesting when it came time. A very public Emergency Department, with other people everywhere. A few ears pricked right up when I gave my handover.”
Urban Legend Or Reality?
“This is a famous local story from where I live.
Guy finds a body in a street and brings him to a hospital. The body was beaten and bruised to death by a fraternity (hazing/initiation). His family is now calling the guy who brought him in as a “Good Samaritan” because he was the one who cared enough to bring him to the hospital.
Less than 24 hours later, it was found out that the guy was a member of the frat as well. Names were dropped, including prominent alumni who tried to make plans on how to cover for them. It was amusing actually, as it was a law school frat, everyone knew how to bend the law. This happened around September last year, and just last March 10 members were indicted and sent to prison.”
Free Parking Lets Driver Pass Go
“When I was working as a dispatcher for the Department of Public Safety at my old university, I had some hilarious incidents.
The one that was most annoying was when I was working an overnight shift and was just glancing through all the cameras. I saw a guy stumbling into the area where the cars exit off the parking ramp, barely missing the arm that swings up to let the cars out.
So I pulled up all the cameras for the parking garage and saw him going to the pay-by-foot machine. He was standing there for a little too long, so I turn on the help-line speaker and heard the machine telling him his card is declined.
So then he yells in frustration and goes to his car and a few minutes later pulls up to the exit where he stumbled in from and pressed the help-line button there and proceeds to tell me his ticket was lost.
I asked him if he was sure his ticket was lost because I had just heard him at the other pay machine getting declined and he got angry, trying to keep his story. So, the lieutenant goes out to deal with him.
Unfortunately, that lieutenant wasn’t very good at his job [careless, lazy, going through a divorce and unnecessarily aggressive towards women but VERY kind to men] and let the guy leave, despite the guy having about 20 dollars racked up from being parked in the ramp for days. Plus, it’s irresponsible of him to have let someone go out when we had gone over the fact the man seemed like he had been drinking heavily.”