Absolutely Not What That’s Meant For
“I had a patient come to the ER complaining of severe pain and swelling ‘all down there.’ During the physical examination, we noted a really remarkable amount of swelling, and both the internal and external tissues were extremely red and irritated. She was so swollen she couldn’t even pee until we put a catheter in. The physician did a pelvic exam and found blisters on her cervix.
We asked when the symptoms started. She said, ‘Well it was itching tonight. I thought I had a yeast infection, so I poured a cup of bleach up in there to kill it. But then after awhile it kind of started to hurt.’ Yeah, I bet it did. Also, when I asked her why she used bleach, she said, ‘I had to use bleach because I didn’t have any Lysol.’ Fun fact, Lysol used to be marketed as a feminine hygiene product, but that was 80 years ago, and Clorox is much much harsher.”
Ol’ Sugar Lungs
“I’m a paramedic, and I once responded to a nursing home for a diabetic patient who was unresponsive. The nurse didn’t keep up with the insulin and gave a tad bit too much, decreasing the patient’s blood sugar, but that’s fixable.
Then I walk in to see another nurse pouring Splenda down this lady’s mouth. She has snoring restorations and the Splenda is just being inhaled into her lungs. It also isn’t doing crap for this poor lady because it isn’t even sugar.
After that, I gave this lady some D50 (IV sugar water), and she came to, but felt like she couldn’t get enough air. She ended up being treated for a few days for pneumonia.
I swear, some people get their medical licenses from the bottom of a Cracker Jack box.”
That’s Not Even Why He Was There
“When I was a med student, a guy came in to the emergency department with 2 combs and a toothbrush in his butt. He had stuck the toothbrush up there for pleasure, but lost it. He tried to fish it out with a comb, but lost that, and tried again with a second comb, and lost that as well.
The kicker: he was there because he had gotten in a car crash. He wasn’t there to get the stuff out of his butt. He volunteered the information after we asked if there was anything else we needed to know.”
Guess It Made Sense To Her
“We have a needle exchange/harm reduction station at the clinic I work at. We have IV users come in pretty frequently to get their abscesses cleaned out and dressed properly. So one patient comes in wanting to get her abscess cleaned out like many other patients before her.
We take her back to a procedure room and get everything ready to start. She has an ace bandage covering up this spot on her arm, so of course, we are thinking it’s fine because that’s better than just letting it be open to the air.
She proceeds to take off said bandage and exposes not only HUGE abscess, but a FOUR INCH LENGTH OF VEIN sticking out of her arm that is rotting away and drying up. We are like, ‘Uh what’s going on here?’ and she says she took it out of her abscess and left it out because it made injecting opiates easier. So she basically she ran her own IV with a vein she cut out of her abscess. We then called the ambulance.”
That Mix Is A Recipe For Disaster
“I had a diabetic patient who went to vacation in the Caribbean, left her insulin on a cruise ship, and hadn’t taken any for a week. When she got back to the States and Medicaid wouldn’t pay for lost or stolen meds, she refused to pay for another bottle because she ‘doesn’t have any money.’
Realizing that no insulin=more sugar in blood, she somehow got the idea in her head that more sugar in the blood means that her blood is now ‘thicker,’ so she decided to take a bunch of Plavix, Warfarin, and Aspirin (all blood thinners that cause bleeding, and high doses can and will lead to internal bleeding and death) to thin her blood.
I got the story when she came into the pharmacy to get refills on her Warfarin and Plavix, and I asked her why she needs those early. I told her to immediately go to the ER, but I have no idea if she actually did.”
It Proceeded To Wrap Around Her Spine
“My buddy is a medic in the United States Navy, and once told me a story about how a young (late teens/early 20s) woman came in complaining of severe stomach pain. He was expecting to diagnose her with menstrual cramps or something else rudimentary and gave her basic pain meds and such.
She came back less than a week later, complaining that the pain had only increased. He decided to send her for an x-ray to get it checked out, and he could not believe what the results showed.
It looked like roots of some sort were twisting and turning inside her abdomen, and proceeding to wrap around her spine.
Apparently, as a form of do-it-yourself birth control, this young lady had followed her mother’s instructions and cut the end off a potato and stuck it all the way up in her lady parts.
Well, in a damp, moist environment, it began to thrive, as well as partially rot. I cannot even imagine what her gyno must have said, but this story had me in a cold-sweat, near dry-heaving. Easily tops one of the most disturbing stories I’ve ever heard.”
It Looked Like A Snuffleupagus’ Trunk
“I’m a surgical nurse, and I once had a patient come in with his member looking like a Snuffleupagus’ trunk. Apparently, while his lady (who was very attractive and not even close to overweight, we had to go check) was riding him one evening, she came down the wrong way. There was a pop and intense pain, but he waited a second and powered through.
He said that after the initial pain it didn’t hurt, so he went to sleep and woke up with it swollen. Wasn’t thrilled or convinced that he needed surgery, but reluctantly agreed. We CUT IT OPEN to drain the blood. Ended up removing some skin–he was uncircumcised before so we used the extra skin to repair AFTER we repaired the hole through his muscles that we found at the base of his member.
Basically, after we removed the skin, there was a hole the size of a quarter you could look through and see his urethra. According to the urologist, he was unlikely to retain romantic function. I suppose coming in early wouldn’t have prevented much, however, his reluctance to have surgery certainly would have had terrible results.”
A Lot Better Than Cow Dung
“In many parts of the world, from Asia to the Americas, it is a traditional practice to cover the wound from severing a newborn’s umbilical cord with fresh cow dung. Many societies believe in a connection between temperature and health and accordingly, consider heat to be an important part of healing. One available material that is very warm, easily applied, and readily available is fresh cow poop. Right on the belly of the newborn with the cut cord.
Needless to say, that it is a terrible idea. One common outcome is neonatal tetanus. A colleague, fresh out of medical school in Mexico, was doing a rural health rotation. New docs often have to practice for a couple of years at a rural health station as a part of their payment for med school.
In this area, the villagers had this practice and believed heat was important for healing. He kept getting cases of babies with tetanus or other infections, but he couldn’t convince the villagers (who generally never bothered with having trained birth attendants present for births) to stop using dung. They kept clinging to their heat belief.
Here’s the brilliant part. He decided to work within their belief system. He said that dung was unclean and unsafe, but there was something else that was very hot and available–mezcal. He convinced people to use the stuff, which ‘burns’ in your stomach when you drink or burns when you put it on a cut. Not only was it a better alternative to cow poop, but the moonshine they cooked up was almost pure ethanol and an excellent antiseptic.
The practice caught on, and cases of neonatal tetanus in his district plummeted. All because of a brilliant young doctor thinking outside the box.”
It’s Not The Same Thing
“I’m a nurse, and I once had a mom come in who was caring for her son who had a G-tube most of his life (a feeding tube that goes into his belly). Sometimes when it got clogged, she would put Coke into it to dissolve the clog, a common practice with G-tubes.
At one point the child went home on IV antibiotics. The IV goes into the bloodstream as opposed to the stomach. At home the IV got clogged. So the mom tried injecting Coke into it in order to dissolve the clog. Luckily it did not work, because Coke into the blood probably could have killed the child. In the mom’s defense, I guess all tubes look pretty similar.”
He Taught Himself With YouTube
“I saw this patient last year. He had a long history of abdominal pain that was quite nonspecific, and his previous workups were negative. He was convinced that he had intestinal parasites that caused the pain (which, as an aside, he believed that he got them after an ‘encounter’ with a woman he met on the internet).
So despite having seen several physicians and gastroenterologists, and numerous investigations including gastroscopy and colonoscopy, no diagnostic source for the pain was found. But he was undeterred from believing it was intestinal parasites.
So he developed a plan in which he ordered surgical instruments and local anesthetic online. He then watched YouTube to figure out how to perform a laparotomy (to get into his abdomen). And so after his preparations, he performs a self-surgery using a video camera to watch himself and managed to get into his abdominal cavity. He had trouble completing his self-surgery, and called an ambulance.”
Mom Of The Year
“I work in a hospital lab. I work the night shift and routinely get called up to the emergency room to draw blood. One night I get the call, go up there, and find a two-year-old boy completely unresponsive, and a mother screaming frantically and hopping around.
I draw the blood, go down to the lab, and start my tests. I found an ethanol level of 350 mg/dl (BAC of 0.35%, which is possibly fatal even for an adult). I call it up to the doc and they bring in Social Services and whoever else to question the mom.
Apparently, she found her son in the garage with a bottle of antifreeze and he was acting kinda weird, so she figured he was drinking it. She went online and saw that the cure for ethylene glycol poisoning is ethanol.
So she went to the bottle cabinet and started POURING STRAIGHT JIM BEAM DOWN THIS POOR KIDS THROAT! Then, of course, he passed out, and she decided maybe they should go to the hospital. Kid lived, thank God.”
What Are You, A Moron?
“Guy on a crew doing contract work in Mountain Valley, California, got a puncture wound right in the middle of his hand when he slipped and caught himself on a rock. An old hippy on the same crew had told this guy a few weeks prior that superglue was a great way to treat cracks in the skin, which is apparently what superglue was originally designed for.
Anyway, this dummy decides to put superglue on his puncture wound, wrap it up, and go back to work the next day…you know, digging square pits in the clay using hand tools. After about 3 days of everyone telling him to go to the hospital, the crew boss demands he take off the bandage and show it to him.
He does, and it’s green and borderline gangrenous. He drives him to the hospital immediately, and as soon as they get in to see the nurse, he shows her the hand, and she starts yelling, ‘OH MY GOD, WHAT DID YOU PUT ON THAT?!’
‘Well my buddy said that superglue…’
‘SUPERGLUE? SUPERGLUE?! WHAT ARE YOU, A MORON?’
I never get tired of that story.”
Man Around Town
“I work in therapy, and one time I had a referral for an older gentleman that had a minor surgery. Nurses noted that he was incontinent of bladder. He was 95ish, so no big surprise.
I went to get him up for a walk, pulled back the covers, and noticed a large item concealed under his pjs in the crotch area. After some circular talk, slowly getting around to bringing up the matter at hand, it turned out he refused to wear adult diapers. He was still a ‘man around town’ in his mind, and had to always look his best for the ladies.
Since the whole incontinence thing was bad for his game, he decided the best course of action was to buy extra extra large underwear and place his ‘member’ into a urinal, and carry the urinal around in his undies. He said he knew when he was going, he just couldn’t stop it from happening so he’d just excuse himself as he was peeing and find a bathroom to empty his secret container. Plus, the gals saw the extra bulge and thought it was all him, giggity. I loved that guy, he was a very memorable patient.”
He Tried To Push It Out
“I had a man come into the ER complaining of pain in his lower abdomen with no more explanation. We give him an X-ray and MRI, which come to reveal a rather large foreign object in his small intestine.
After some questions are asked, it’s revealed that he used a ‘special toy’ to pleasure himself, pushed it too far in his butt, and lost it. He then took laxatives to, ‘try and push it out.’
Problem is, the toy ruptured the wall of his colon and poop literally spilled into his abdomen. What could have been accomplished with some large pick-ups and a probe ended up becoming open surgery to clean his entire lower abdomen.”
He Learned The Hard Way
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“I’m a urology resident, and I once went to a see a patient in the ER who had priapism (painful hard-ons). His girlfriend, who wasn’t the prettiest thing, was sitting next to him. Basically his hardness didn’t go away for 8-10 hours, so he came in. Most people choose to come in much before then, but some people choose to wait. It makes the job more difficult for both me and them when they wait too long.
The first step in treating him was to drain the priapism by manually removing the blood directly from the erectile bodies. I let him know that a side effect of the procedure is ED, but if he keeps his priapism for too long, his hardness is even more doomed because there’s scarring and fibrosis that occurs. So he agreed to proceed, and I get started.
I stuck a needle directly into the side of his member and drained as much blood as possible, then irrigated the inside with saline. I repeated this process over and over. Because he had waited so long, it took about 2-3 hours for the entire process.
I also injected phenylephrine repeatedly, which constricts the vessels feeding his unit so more blood doesn’t come in. This is all pretty standard stuff for any urologist. I use lidocaine of course, but it works only up to a point when you’re putting needles into a man.
Finally, after multiple punctures, aspirations, and injections, it was down to about 40% hardness, which is excellent. Keep in mind, the guy was completely awake in the ER. Usually if it stays halfway soft, it’s fine. But all too often, it returns, and then you’re back when you started.
So I told the guy that I wanted to give him about an hour in the ER, and then I’d come back to ensure that the hardness hadn’t returned. He agreed to rest up after the ordeal. I took care of a few other things on my list of things to do and returned in about an hour.
I asked the guy about his hardness, and he told me not to worry about it, and that he’s great. I asked to take a look, and to my horror, his hardness was about 90%! He again said not to worry.
Then he told me why. He was so worried regarding the side effect of ED that I told him about at the very beginning that he had been fondling his girlfriend in the ER since I left. He was thrilled that he could still get hard. I, of course, was so worried that I was going to spend another 2 or 3 hours draining this guy’s member. Luckily for both of us, I came back half an hour later, and it was pretty much flaccid, so he went home. He almost bought himself another round of needles, drainage, etc. What an idiot.”
His Brain Was In The Way
“As an EMT student, I responded to a man who called 911 complaining of an insect crawling up his ear. Upon arrival, we asked what ear the bug crawled into. He says his right ear, but keeps complaining about burning coming from his left.
We noticed his wife standing next to him holding a bottle of insect spray. Upon further questioning we come to find out she sprayed insecticide into his left ear thinking it would ‘flush’ the insect out of his right ear. I had to explain to her that our ear canals are separated by our brain. Yikes.”
That’s Not How You Treat Food Poisoning
“I used to work in a lab in a hospital in a rural town. One day I got a stool sample from the ER that was basically a blood clot the size of a golf ball. Sometimes the ER gets mixed up and sends me the wrong specimen, like some kind of body fluid mislabeled as urine, for example.
I called the patient’s nurse and asked what the deal was with the patient, and if it was really stool they sent up. The nurse I talked to said the patient thought he’d eaten bad pork, and to prevent food poisoning, drank a concoction of bleach, isopropyl, Smirnoff, ibuprofen and some Tums. Nice!”
A Noble Attempt
“I once responded to a 9-1-1 call for a man bleeding. Supposedly the guy had an angiogram (catheter stuck in the artery near your groin to look at the blood vessels near your heart for blockages) earlier that day and was released with the explicit instructions to not mess with the bulky dressing.
The old coot decides to ‘adjust’ it, causing it to open, and pouring blood out his artery. What does the guy do? He puts duct tape all around his groin. Not just a few pieces, either. No, he attached it to his junk and up and down his leg. It was a noble attempt, but did not do much to control the arterial pulsations.”