Brutal Honesty
OgnjenO/Shutterstock
“I went on a police ride-along once, and we responded to a collision on the highway at about 2:00 AM. For the previous two hours, I had stayed either inside or just near the car for serious calls. This time, I recognized my friend’s boyfriend who was a paramedic already on the scene, so I approached. I didn’t want to distract him or anyone else who was working, so I just stood and watched him work on one of the victims. I don’t know whether the man was driver, passenger, or passerby, but his eyes were wide open and darting around, and he was red with blood from his neck to his knees. My friend’s boyfriend calmly picked up what looked like a pile of wet laundry (it was the man’s insides), place it in his lap, and softly said to him, ‘You’re not going to live.’ All the breath left my body when I heard him say that. Somehow, it was clear that he meant it as something tender and human-to-human in the last moments of this man’s life, but it chills me, and that’s all I think about when we’re talking.”
Suspicious Ceiling Leak
“Story is from one of the paramedics in the area. He received a call from the superintendent of an apartment complex. Apparently, there was a rotten smell coming from one of the units and no one had seen the tenant for quite some time. He had been there so long he had liquified and his remains were dripping through the floor and into the apartment below.”
Be Careful With Over-The-Counter-Meds
“I had a lady with TEN- toxic epidermal necrolysis syndrome- a rare, aggressive substance reaction where your skin starts to separate and slip off your body.
Anyway.
I was helping the nurse wrap her up- picked up her arm and the skin ripped at the bicep and slipped off like a wet sock.
Horrified.
The top of her tongue and the bottom of her feet also slid off later.
Bonus? It was a reaction to Tylenol.”
The Swamps Of Dagobah
Thaiview/Shutterstock
“I was taking call one night and woke up at two in the morning for a ‘general surgery’ call. Pretty vague, but at the time, I lived in a town that had large populations of young military guys and avid speed users, so late-night emergencies were common.
Got to the hospital, where a few more details awaited me — ‘Perirectal abscess.’ For the uninitiated, this means that somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the butthole, there was a pocket of pus that needed draining. Needless to say, our entire crew was less than thrilled.
I went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed me the chart was, ‘Have fun with this one.’ Amongst healthcare professionals, vague statements like that are a bad sign.
My patient was a 314lb Native American woman who barely fit on the stretcher I was transporting her on. She was rolling frantically side to side and moaning in pain, pulling at her clothes and muttering Hail Mary’s. I could barely get her name out of her after a few minutes of questioning, so after I confirmed her identity and what we were working on, I figured it was best just to get her to the anesthesiologist so we could knock her out and get this circus started.
She continued her theatrics the entire ten-minute ride to the O.R., nearly falling off the surgical table as we were trying to put her under anesthetic. We see patients like this a lot, though, chronic substance abusers who don’t handle pain well and who have used so many substances that even increased levels of pain medication don’t touch simply because of high tolerance levels.
It should be noted, tonight’s surgical team was not exactly wet behind the ears. I’d been working in healthcare for several years already, mostly psych and medical settings. I’ve watched an 88-year-old man tear a 1″-diameter catheter balloon out, while screaming, ‘You’ll never make me talk!’ I’ve been attacked by an HIV-positive neo-Nazi. I’ve seen some stuff. The other nurse had been in the OR as a trauma specialist for over ten years; the anesthesiologist had done residency at a Level 1 trauma center. The surgeon was ex-Army and averaged about eight words and two facial expressions a week. None of us expected what was about to happen next.
We got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and I began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she’d been injecting substances through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad substances, but overall, it didn’t seem to warrant her repeated cries of ‘Oh Jesus, kill me now.’
The surgeon steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, all heck broke loose.
Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern full of pus, rotten tissue, and fecal matter that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision like we were recreating the funeral scene from Jane Austen’s ‘Mafia!.’
We all wear waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works — all of which were as helpful was rainboots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, I was still finding bits pasted against the back wall. As the surgeon continued to advance his blade, the torrent just continued. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until, within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse’s shoes.
I was nearly twelve feet away, jaw dropped open within my surgical mask, watching the second nurse dry-heaving and the surgeon standing on tip-toes to keep this stuff from soaking his socks any further. The smell hit them first. ‘Oh god, I just threw up in my mask!’ The other nurse was out; she tore off her mask and sprinted out of the room, shoulders still heaving. Then it hit me, mouth still wide open, not able to believe the volume of fluid this woman’s body contained. It was like getting a great big bite of the despair and apathy that permeated this woman’s life. I couldn’t breathe, my lungs simply refused to pull any more of that stuff in. The anesthesiologist went down next, an ex-NCAA D1 tailback, his six-foot-two frame shaking as he threw open the door to the OR suite in an attempt to get more air in, letting me glimpse the second nurse still throwing up in the sinks outside the door. Another geyser splashed across the front of the surgeon. The YouTube clip of ‘David at the dentist’ keeps playing in my head—‘Is this real life?’
In all operating rooms, everywhere in the world, there is one thing the same: Somewhere, there is a bottle of peppermint concentrate. Everyone in the department knows where it is, everyone knows what it is for, and everyone prays to the gods they never have to use it. In times like this, we rub it on the inside of our masks to keep the outside smells at bay long enough to finish the procedure and shower off.
I sprinted to our central supply, ripping open the drawer where this vial of ambrosia was kept and was greeted by—an empty box. The bottle had been emptied and not replaced. Somewhere out there was a godless heathen who had used the last of the peppermint oil, and not replaced a single drop of it. To this day, if I figure out who it was, I’ll kill them with my bare hands, but not before cramming their head up the colon of every last speed user I can find, just so we’re even.
I darted back into the room with the next best thing I can find — a vial of Mastisol, which is an adhesive rub we use sometimes for bandaging. It’s not as good as peppermint, but considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup, we were out of options.
I started rubbing as much of the Mastisol as I could get on the inside of my mask, just glad to be smelling anything except whatever slimy demon spawn we’d just cut out of this woman. The anesthesiologist grabbed the vial next, dowsing the front of his mask in it so he could stand next to his machines long enough to make sure this woman didn’t die on the table. It wasn’t until later that we realized that Mastisol can give you a mild high from huffing it like this, but in retrospect, that’s probably what got us through.
By this time, the smell had permeated out of our OR suite, and down the forty-foot hallway to the front desk, where the other nurse still sat, eyes bloodshot and watery, clenching her stomach desperately. Our suite looked like the underground river of ooze from Ghostbusters II, except dirty. Oh so dirty.
I stepped back into the OR suite, not wanting to leave the surgeon by himself in case he genuinely needed help. It was like one of those overly-artistic representations of a zombie apocalypse you see on fan-forums. Here’s this one guy, in blue surgical garb, standing nearly ankle deep in lumps of dead tissue, fecal matter, and several liters of syrupy infection. He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman’s butt and there was no Yoda. He and I didn’t say a word for the next ten minutes as he scraped the inside of the abscess until all the dead tissue was out, the front of his gown a gruesome mixture of brown and red, his eyes squinted against the stinging vapors originating directly in front of him. I finished my required paperwork as quickly as I could, helped him stuff the recently-vacated opening full of gauze, taped this woman’s buttocks closed to hold the dressing for as long as possible, woke her up, and immediately shipped off to the recovery ward.
Until then, I’d only heard of ‘isopropyl showers.’ Turns out 70% isopropyl is about the only thing that can even touch a scent like that once it’s soaked into your skin. It takes four or five bottles to get really clean, but it’s worth it. It’s probably the only scenario I can honestly endorse drinking a little of it, too.
As we left the locker room, the surgeon and I looked at each other, and he said the only negative sentence I heard him utter in two and a half years of working together:
‘That was bad.’
The next morning the entire department (a fairly large floor within the hospital) still smelled. The housekeepers told me later that it took them nearly an hour to suction up all of the fluid and debris left behind. The OR suite itself was closed off and quarantined for two more days just to let the smell finally clear out.
I laugh now when I hear new recruits to health care talk about the worst thing they’ve seen. You ain’t seen nothing, kid.”
That’s No Baby…
“As a paramedic, responded to a call of ‘traffic accident, baby ejected.’ We prepared for the worst we could imagine. Arrive in about 8 minutes, trooper 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. Lifted the sheet to check vitals/pronounce death, and it was not a baby, but the top half of the 19-year-old girl that was driving the small pickup truck about 50 yards away.
She was driving and arguing with her 19-year-old husband who was the passenger. They were doing about 55mph on a two-lane road and met an oncoming truck pulling a doublewide mobile home. She ran under the front corner of the mobile home, cutting her in half. Her bottom half remained in the driver’s seat, while her unhurt husband watched as the truck then skidded another 50-60 yards, sideswiping a minivan, sending it into the ditch upside down. It looked like a movie set. Her top and bottom looked unhurt. The husband was absolutely freaking out about what he had just seen. He was babbling incoherently, running around swinging at people, just a mess. A witness who lived right in front of the scene started having chest pains and had to be transported. We took the husband, and I called medical control and actually got orders to give him IV benzodiazepines, something paramedics normally can only give for grand-mal seizures. The driver of the big truck was fine but was also very, very distraught at what he had just witnessed. That was 16 years ago, and I can still remember pulling up to that scene like it was yesterday.”
What? I Was Hungry!
“There was a rash of missing OR biopsy specimens. Patients would have surgery with intraoperative biopsies, but for whatever reason, the number of specimens never made their way to the pathology department for evaluation and tissue diagnosis. Turns out that a tech was eating them in the corner of the OR. She was promptly fired and rumor is she went on for a psychiatric referral.”
You, Sir, Are An Optimist
“EMT here – Husband and wife were riding a Harley on the freeway at 70 mph. Hot day. Husband was wearing leather chaps, leather jacket, and full helmet. The wife was riding on the back in jeans, a small half-shell helmet, and a bikini top. Wife fainted, fell off the motorcycle and rolled. Multiple broken bones, internal injuries. Road rash over most of her body. But the thing that sticks with me: both of her ‘girls’ were ripped off her chest.
I was in the ambulance bay when the husband rolled up with a couple other Harleys. Heard him talking on the phone to someone saying, ‘Yeah… she fell off the back of the bike. I think she’s going to be OK though.’ Uhhh, no… she isn’t.”
There Will Be Blood
Jamesboy Nuchaikong/Shutterstock
“I work in a mental health institution. Somebody pulled their bedside alarm. I was the first person to respond and it was in a patient’s bedroom. Blood. Lots of it and everywhere—on the ceiling, walls, floor, bed—everywhere. I looked at the patient and I saw that his ear was on his shoulder.
Turned out, he had slammed his head in the door so hard, so many times that he had peeled his ear away from his head and it was holding on just above his shoulder attached by a little bit of skin. Can still see it clearly after 5 years.”
Digging For Gold
“I used to be a nurses aide. I once had to put a very obese woman on the bedpan (she was only mid-40’s) and I left. She put her call light on, and when I answered, she said she was all done. I turn her on her side to remove the bedpan only to see that it is empty. My first thought was that she had been mistaken about having pooped. But then I look and realize that her butt cheeks were so massive her entire dump couldn’t make it the length of her cheeks and had gotten wedged in between them. I had to dig the entire load out of her as by hand. It was only about two months into the job, and it gave me some serious second thoughts.”
The Good News Is, No Broken Bones
“I am an X-Ray tech and have an ER rotation. Once I got called to do arm and leg portable x-rays on a patient who had been in a motorcycle accident where he had fallen and rolled more than 50 feet. This poor guy was on his back with a neck brace on holding his arms and legs as high as he could off the bed so they weren’t touching anything, holding them and whimpering from the effort and the pain. Lots of his skin, entire layers had peeled off like using one of those wire cheese slicers, it was blackened and red and just blood everywhere.
Doing the x-rays with a portable x-ray machine means you have to put plates underneath the limbs at various angles and manipulate the machine arm as well, so I had to move his limbs around a lot and he would just shriek whenever I had to touch and manipulate his arms and legs with little to no skin on them, and he was just sobbing when I had to ask him to hold still while I took the x-rays. Felt so bad for him. Fortunately, nothing was actually broken it was all skin that was damaged.”
“My Boots Have Never Been The Same Since”
“I’m an 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 horribly bloated from decompressed gas 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 stuff is SLIPPERY! My boots have never been the same since.”
Smokey And The Bandage
“I’m a physician scribe who is essentially an errand boy for ER physicians. I had been working for about 2 weeks when I got a call saying a VSA was coming in (vital signs absent). This was my first VSA. Usually, when this happens, we only get the patient’s age and a one or two-word explanation of what happened (stroke, heart attack, etc.). In this case, it was a burn.
I’ll never forget when this guy was brought into the room by EMS. My initial reaction was, ‘What is that?!’ The guy was completely head-to-toe red and black. He had been smoking at home with the gas on and fell asleep and was burned alive. They recovered his pulse but his blood gasses indicated he would be dead within the hour, so there was nothing to do for him, unfortunately.
When I went in to get a closer look at him I saw his skin on his hands was falling off like an insect might shed its skin. The rest of his body was covered in blisters, but probably the most disturbing thing was the smell. The entire emergency department smelled like a smokey fireplace for the rest of the day. Poor guy was only 40 or something too. Put a lot into perspective.”
Muddy River
“My dad has been a nurse for nearly 20 years. He has moved around from working on the ER to radiology and now the ICU. He is one of the most well-respected nurses in the hospital. I would know because I worked at the same place as a phlebotomist.
Anyway, our hospital is a ‘bariatric center of excellence’ so you know what that entails: some pretty big patients.
So this one day, I go up onto the fourth floor in the neuro unit to get a blood draw and as soon as I step off the elevator, I smell feces. Really foul, rotten egg smelling feces. I don’t think much of it as the hospital is older and is poorly ventilated (I know, right?) But when I get home, I ask my dad about it since the ICU is on the same floor.
He said that they had a guy who was 550 lbs in the unit, and he was having some abdominal pain. Turns out he hadn’t had a bowel movement in almost a month. Before he was transferred to our ICU, other clinics had tried giving him a few enemas to no avail.
So my dad is saying that he is putting in one of those balloons into the guy’s butthole so he can attach a bag, like a catheter. He turns around to check a monitor, and he hears this dripping noise behind him. Turns back around, and there is a river of poop falling from the bed. The entire floor is covered in a month’s worth of poop, dripping, splashing, all over everything, including my poor dad. He and all the nurses roll up their scrubs like they’re going clamming, and after an hour or so get this guy cleaned up. Housekeeping stopped by and just left a cart for them and said, ‘Nope!’
I guess right after they finished cleaning it happened AGAIN. I don’t even want to imagine the smell in that room if it was enough to stink up the whole fourth floor! I can’t begin to describe the respect I have for nurses.”
Gone Too Soon
“ER RN here. This, so far, is the only death I’ve experienced from work that I’ve lost a significant amount of sleep over. 24-year-old male walks, again walks, into the ER with complaints of flu-like symptoms for the past 3 days. He had decided to come in that day because he started to develop a ‘rash’ throughout his body that he was unfamiliar with. Sadly this rash was actually the result of a failed battle with bacterial meningitis, causing him to bleed internally and externally. By the time we got him back into the ER, he started crying blood and the terror in his eyes was palpable. He went downhill fast. His lucidity diminished with his blood pressure and the last thing he said before succumbing to pulseless was something about his mother that we could not make out. You could see his consciousness fade from his eyes as we started compressions. The code lasted close to an hour. At first, we could still keep his oxygen levels up with mechanical ventilation, defibrillation, and medicine, but blood was filling his airways faster than it could be suctioned out. He was bleeding too fast for any medications or fluids to keep his blood pressure up. He died soaked in blood and nearly unrecognizable due to his now almost uniformly purple skin and swollen face. We later found out that he was studying neurobiology, had a devoted girlfriend that was for all intents and purposes a fiancée, a large family, and many friends. He was an athlete who lived healthy. He had beautiful curly hair. This made the death tragic in a way that you just don’t experience when a 80+ year old dies. It made the unanswered pleads to God for help that had been sent echoing around the room by his family all the more bitter. I helped drag and push him into a body bag.”