A disturbing series of unfortunate events.
Note: Some submissions contain graphic medical details, bodily fluids, death, self-harm, and suicide. Please proceed with caution."I’m an ER nurse, so I’ve seen some pretty wild things in my time. There's one night shift that’s burned into my memory forever.
A guy came in with what we thought was a simple cut on his hand — nothing too wild. He was in his late thirties, pretty calm about the whole thing, but there was this weird smell. You know that distinct 'something’s not right' scent? Yeah, that. It was strong. The doctor thought it was just his clothes or maybe he hadn’t showered in a while. Turns out, this guy had been holding a dead rat by the tail for the last two days, gripping it with his hand because he was too embarrassed to admit it had been bitten by the rat's teeth. The rat had been decomposing in his hand, and the infection from the bites was spreading, but he hadn’t sought help until it was nearly too late. And that smell? That was the dead rat’s flesh slowly rotting under his grip." "The guy’s explanation? 'I didn’t think it was that serious. I was hoping it would heal on its own.' He was also worried about looking 'silly' in front of his buddies for getting a rat bite. Anyway, we had to clean it up, drain the infection, and get him on a solid regimen of antibiotics. The poor guy had no idea how much damage he'd done by not taking care of it sooner.""I was an intern assigned to the colorectal surgery service. As a new person on the job, I naturally received only the best and most prestigious assignments. This, of course, included assisting with manual disimpaction for patients with constipation. This involved placing anal suppositories and enemas, then fishing around with my fingers to get things moving. There was a 400 lb patient who hadn't pooped in weeks. By this point in the rotation, I had become quite proficient at getting things moving. I did my thing, and after removing my finger, the poop started flowing. Nothing dramatic happened , but the poop just kept coming. It had a texture somewhere between pudding and soft-serve ice cream. It filled the space between his legs and then flowed down onto the floor. He pooped continuously for almost 30 minutes, volumes of poop I didn't know a human body could hold. It was truly something to behold.""I was on the medical emergency team at a local hospital. We responded to codes for already admitted patients. I was performing CPR on an old, frail woman. Her heart was not functioning. After a minute or so of compressions, she woke up during CPR. I stopped compressing, and she would pass out. She had no heartbeat. I started compressions again, and she woke up again. At some point, she grabbed my hands and said, 'Stop.' It shocked me and the doctor. The doctor looked at me and nodded. I stepped back and let her die. That was 30 years ago, and I can still see her face. I will never forget her.""Medic here. A group of kids broke into a paper factory and started playing go-karts with the forklifts, which still had keys in them for some reason. The lift gets hit, topples, and the canopy falls onto the kid's head, crushing him. PD was there prior to us arriving and had to tell us to walk carefully as there were pieces of his head all over the ground because it had shattered. The more people who arrived on the scene, you started to hear a crunch here or there from small skull pieces. Some sounds you don’t forget.""I'm a nurse. There was a mom with really bad COVID who needed a crash C-section in her ICU room because her oxygen tanked, and they intubated her while the baby’s heart rate dropped. Performed by an OBGYN with nothing but a disposable scalpel, got the baby out, and coded for half an hour before calling the death . Nurses used their phone flashlights to help her see, as there weren’t enough lights for a bedside surgery. Apparently, the baby wasn’t her husband’s or her boyfriend’s, and she’d been in the middle of a divorce. No one claimed either of their bodies after she died the next day." "I found out later that they’d intubated her and not given her any pain meds until the baby had been out for 15 minutes, and a labor nurse assisting the doctor realized tears were streaming down her face, but she couldn’t move due to the paralytics for sedation. So she felt everything and heard everything, and her head was turned towards us as she cared for her baby. It was the most horrific thing I will likely ever see, and it was only my first week orienting for our NICU.""EMS here. Several years ago, we were called to the apartment complex across the street from my station for a woman lying in the breezeway covered in blood. We get there, and she is indeed covered in blood. You can see the trails and puddles where she’s been banging on people's doors for help. She’s unconscious, with atonal respirations. Find out that the blood is coming from her mouth. We go to intubate her and literally cannot suction the blood fast enough to see anything. We finally inserted the tube by placing it in the bubbles. Somehow that worked. She codes, we work her, she ends up dying. Come to find out she had an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm repair that was tacked onto her lung. Somehow, that ruptured, and her aorta just poured blood into her lung. Drowned from the inside out in her own blood. Only days afterwards did it occur to me what a horrifying way to die that must have been.""This happened to me years ago when I was a junior in casualty. A guy who was about 20 came in on a Sunday morning wearing a long trenchcoat , looking very drawn and haggard. Buzz starts going around, and I go see him. He was at a house party that night, found a padlock, and thought it’d be funny to put it around the neck of his testicles. The 'friends' with him then jumped him and broke the key in the lock, resulting in a very large and rather permanent genital piercing. The guy went home to get the padlock off, but it just can’t make it over his testicles. So what did he do? Smothered them in baby oil. There was still no result, so he decided to try and squeeze each one of his testicles through the hoop of the padlock in turn. He told me he had to count to three and make a muffled squeal as he tried to make them oval to push through...but it still wasn’t quite enough, and the pain was so great he fainted." "He stood there in front of me with very shiny, rather purple, and distinctly swollen testicles. We had to call the fire brigade with bolt cutters to free them, and the guy was out of casualty like a shot.""My mom is a nurse. She was just starting out and had to watch this patient, who kept pulling his penis off. They had to reattach it probably three to four times. He said that satan told him to do it, so he kept pulling it off. Finally, they realized that he was not going to stop and restrained his arms to the hospital bed. Lo and behold, my Christian mom had to be the one to watch him just in case he tried to pull it off again. All night, in the dark, alone. He kept telling her how satan was his almighty lord, and if he didn’t do it, he would die ." "My mom was horrified and was praying ALL NIGHT. Mind you, this was when she first started out. She hadn’t seen anything like this before . She was traumatized, scared for her future patients, and probably wanted to quit, but she's still a nurse to this day .""I used to work in a hospital sponsored by the Catholic church. It was a fairly typical hospital, but one unusual aspect was the small chapel located on the ground floor. A camera was pointed towards the altar, and patients could watch the live feed on the TV in their room. Except for Sunday Mass, nothing ever happened on 'chapel channel.' One time, a woman arrived at the ER's front desk and asked the nurse for bug spray and a scalpel. When questioned, she clarified that she wanted to cut open her skin and use the bug spray to kill all the bugs living under her skin. She then proceeded to point out exactly where the bugs were crawling and followed the bumps with her finger . The nurse consequently put her in a room, and I was called, because in that hospital, everything that was not a case for the surgeons was automatically referred to internal medicine." "So I talk to the woman, and she's sticking to her story. At that point, it felt obvious that she was at risk for self-harm, and we needed to get her to a psychiatric hospital as soon as possible. It's also fairly obvious that she won't go willingly, so, as per the law, we have to involve the police. While I'm on the phone, a nurse is supposed to stay with her, but another emergency comes in, and she is left by herself. The police arrive, and we go to her room to see her off. The nurse opens the door to a disaster zone. The woman is naked and covered in ultrasound gel. She had also emptied all the drawers on the floor and smeared the walls with poop. As soon as the door opened, she ran out with arms flailing. The police officers were trying to catch her, but she's naked and slippery , and she slips past, runs out of the ER, through the entrance hall, and into the chapel. Security, a brave nurse, and the two police officers run after her. It takes several minutes for them to catch and subdue her. They finally managed to hold her down, put her in handcuffs, and take her to the psychiatric hospital.""I was working as a Patient Care Technician in the ER while going through school to become a paramedic. The patient came in because his tumor was bothering him. The tumor was a massive, I’m talking larger than a football-sized tumor that was growing on the outside of his neck. The patient had been declining medical treatment for some time, attempting to heal it with natural remedies, since they couldn’t take it off surgically due to being too vascular. I remember starting his IV and getting a whiff of that sickly smell of decaying flesh. His tumor was rotting. When I looked at it, I could see maggots crawling in it and around it. The RN that night irrigated it and removed two suction canisters' worth of water and maggots from all the holes they had created." "He spent a day or two in our observation unit and would frequently go on walks around the unit until we had to ask him to stay in his room because other patients were complaining about the trail of smell he would leave when walking by their rooms." He died at a neighboring facility when he went for a scan, lay down on the table, the tumor ripped off, and he bled out very quickly. My skin still crawls picturing those maggots feasting off a man who was still very much alive.""I'm a radiation therapist. One of my patients was a six-year-old nonverbal autistic boy with leukemia. He had to be sedated for a procedure and panicked when the anesthesiologist approached him with a needle. After several moments of struggling against her, she was able to sedate him, and he slumped over in his wheelchair. His father lifted his limp body from the chair and tearfully carried him to the table, wordlessly crying as he looked at his unconscious son. I will never forget the look of absolute despair and defeat on that man's face. As the little boy looked like he was dead, I just knew that this man was thinking that he might be seeing a heartbreaking preview of the future.""I am an EMT. Last year, we pulled up to a house because a mom had called about a violently ill child who was vomiting profusely and had extreme abdominal pain. We got there, and the nine-year-old was practically dry heaving, and she's doubled over in pain. It turned out that in the span between the time the mom called and the time we got there, the little girl also had diarrhea, all the way down the hall to the bathroom. The older sister was supposed to go to soccer. While her mom was on the phone with her dad, she walked out into the hall, slipped on the poop, and fell down the stairs, injuring her shoulder and head. The mom had heard the noise, came to the bottom of the stairs, and tried to catch her other daughter, but her soccer cleat hit her in the face, splitting her forehead open." "So, the nine-year-old daughter had a burst appendix and needed emergency surgery, the 12-year-old had a visibly-displaced broken collarbone and dislocated shoulder, as well as a minor concussion, and the mom had to get 18 stitches total on her lip and forehead. Everyone's covered in diarrhea, the younger girl is groaning, the older one is oddly quiet due to the concussion, and the mom is a mess. When we got to the hospital, the dad was already waiting at the E.R., and this man was recovering from ACL surgery.""An 18-year-old moved in with her boyfriend, and she didn't want to poop in the house with him, so she took Imodium on a schedule. She didn't have a bowel movement for two months. She came into the ED with abdominal distension. She had a stool impaction that was her entire abdomen, pelvic bone to the base of her pericardium. It was like 15 kg. It had stretched her colon so much, it necrosed from the pressure — we had to do an open laparotomy to remove it and the dead sigmoid colon.""I’m a pediatric emergency medicine doctor. We see…a lot. Child abuse, horrible accidents, and cruel diseases. Horrible decisions leading to life-altering consequences. I had a young teen brought in by an ambulance in full cardiac arrest. She was in gym class and had some trouble breathing. She had wheezed once as a child, but hadn’t used an inhaler in well over a decade. She was an athlete, in amazing physical shape. The school called an ambulance, and she was struggling to breathe when they arrived. Lights and sirens en route to the ED, but before they arrived, she vomited and then aspirated , and her heart stopped. There was CPR in progress on arrival." "My resident doctor intubated her , and the ET tube just filled up with vomit. We did everything, and her heart just never moved. I will never forget the look on the resident’s face when he asked me if there was anything else we could do. There wasn’t. She died. A completely healthy teenager with zero medical issues kissed her family goodbye one morning, and they next saw her dead on an ED stretcher.""PICU nurse here. There was a 10-year-old kid who was properly restrained but had fallen asleep in the backseat, his neck relaxed and his head tilted forward, just like kids do when they fall asleep sitting up. The car was t-boned and his head whiplashed in a way that 'internally decapitated' him —neck broken, spine severed. EMS got there early enough to intubate him and keep him alive. I had him on his second day in the unit when they knew the extent of his injuries. He had no sedation, no pain meds, not a single drip infusing to keep him intubated, because he wasn’t going to be able to self-extubate, because he was completely paralyzed and without feeling from the base of his skull down. But the kid’s brain was 100% okay." "So there’s this kid, intubated, aware, and his eyes communicated how terrified he was. This is MY biggest fear, to be paralyzed and intubated and 100% aware of everything but unable to move or communicate in any way. He had to blink once for no, twice for yes, but that doesn’t come close to conveying everything he wanted to say, ask, or do.""I'm a former EMT. A few years back, we responded to a call for a 'burn victim.' We could smell the charred flesh coming up the driveway and ultimately found a woman in her early thirties who had tripped and fallen directly over a small bonfire pit. Her husband had found her and pulled her away, but it was far too late. Her entire body above her knees was charred to the bone, and her internal organs had spilled out of her burst abdomen. Fortunately, she likely was knocked unconscious after falling, as evidenced by some bricks disturbed from the fall with blood on them opposite the side she would have tripped over. Likely, she suffered a major head injury and was hopefully spared the pain of burning alive. It was a rough one for sure, but mostly for the poor husband who I believe a few months later quit the fire service.""I was a Personal Support Worker, and visiting a lady in early winter of 2018. I had seen her maybe four or five times prior, and it was approaching her bedtime. She had dementia and would go over her nightly steps a couple of times, forgetting they were done already; otherwise, she was a very vibrant, chatty lady. She was very vocal about how she felt, from her lovely breakfast to her insufferable oxygen line. I began feeling uneasy when I got there and found she hadn't left for her room from the TV lounge . I asked her if she'd like to go to bed, and her first response was, 'I don't know, I don't feel like it. Am I on my way out?' At first, I didn't know what she meant, so I helped her up and set her on her walker. She did not want to walk with it today and seemed labored when moving." "I called for a staff member of the building and noted her difference in demeanor, and the lady said she had just arrived an hour or so prior and had no notes of odd behavior. By the time we got her to her room, she had no energy to move from her walker to her bed, and she said, 'Do I need an ambulance? Am I on my way out the door?' Now I'm bugging out internally. 'What do you mean? Would you like me to call an ambulance for you? How are you feeling?' The remainder of my visit was sitting with her and comforting what I felt was a completely lucid woman, wondering if she was feeling her first instances of bodily shutdown. When the ambulance arrived, her heart rate was elevated, but she showed no other immediate symptoms. She gave the most heartfelt goodbye to another older woman in the lobby who had come to see who was getting hauled by the ambulance, and all that the other lady could say was, 'Don't be silly. You'll come back, and I'll be right here.' She never came back and died three or four hours later that night. I got a work email mentioning that her services were discontinued due to her passing. All through the hallway to the lobby, and then as they wheeled her out, 'Am I a goner? Am I on my way out the door?' She knew. Dementia or not, she still knew.""My sister is a nurse, and this story is one of the most shocking ones I have ever heard. When doing placement on the urology ward, a patient comes in with pain in his penis. So when my sister and a male doctor ask if they could take a look, he obliges. At this point, they see his black and blue swollen penis. Then, hanging out of the urethra is a folded-in-half phone charger that he had inserted up there for sexual pleasure. Then, not happy with just doing that, he then masturbated for three hours and was unable to remove it after his 'session.' So it had sat in there for two weeks until the pain was unbearable, and he presented to the ED. In the end, his penis required amputation.""This case came when I was working in the ER. There was a road accident — a woman was run over by a large truck. The lower half of her body was cut off. No limbs left. There was only a flap of skin remaining in one of the lower limbs, no bones. She was fully conscious, talking. We were all dumbstruck. We began handling all primary care and tried to put a Foley catheter, but that whole area was avulsed. We couldn't insert one. This is one of those cases that'll never leave my memory.""I worked with an ex-nurse. She came from a full-care facility for older people with mental illnesses. One night, an older woman said she was pregnant and having pains in her vagina. They examined her and found she had stapled herself closed. It was already infected and smelling terribly. She had done it a couple of weeks prior. Took her to the hospital and removed the staples. When they did this, the hospital staff found that she had put a Costco chicken inside her vagina, stapling it shut to keep it from falling out. She snuck a chicken from the kitchen. My co-worker didn't say much more beyond that the older woman was sad that she didn't have her baby anymore.""Ultrasound tech here. I was brand new in the field and called up to do a venous scan of a leg for DVT. No problem, I go up to the floor and start doing my thing. The patient is initially uncomfortable but cooperative, but I can't see anything; the veins are all shadowed out. This is NOT normal for an extremity. I start thinking it's my inadequate imaging to blame, so I call my coworker up to help. I start seeing actual bubbles zinging across my screen through the veins and really have no idea what's happening. My coworker gets there, the patient has gone from uncomfortable to in so much pain they've maxed out the amount of morphine you can safely give to someone." "We keep trying to scan, but even my coworker who'd been doing this for 15 years can't get images. Everything is still so foggy. She sees the bubbles but can't explain what they are either. Finally, we are asked to leave the room because they're going to rush the patient to emergency surgery. From what I heard, they opened up the leg, the infection spread instantly, and the patient died on the table. It was a form of aggressive gas gangrene. In 24 hours, someone went from a fine, minor injury to writhing in pain to dead. It still blows my mind to this day.""My mum used to work in the hospital. A guy came into the accident and emergency department because he was high on bath salts and jumped off the roof. Both his legs broke and snapped off at the knee, skin all gone. His body stopped at the knee, and you could see all the bone and muscle. He was still so high he was running through the ward on his knee bone stumps, a trail of blood following him.""An older woman rushed to the ED after the fire brigade opened her door because relatives hadn’t heard from her in five days. They found her unresponsive on the floor in her own excrement but still alive. She was covered in maggots, and we soon discovered why: she had been lying on her left side, and some fabric was stuck to the left side of her face. When we removed the skin, her eyeball underneath was gone, and the eye socket was filled with maggots. It was the same for her genitals. She was literally decomposing, though still breathing. We stood in shock and debated what to do next as it seemed unethical to keep her alive at that point. The CT scan showed a major stroke, and she died later that day. I will never forget it.""We rounded on our pregnant patient in the ICU last year, first day as a new high-risk OB attending. Her nurse let us know she had some significant vaginal bleeding that morning. We had to figure out how to do an ultrasound while she was prone, couldn’t move her, or she would desat. We finagled an ultrasound probe in, and there was no fetal heartbeat. She keeps bleeding, not stable enough to go to the OR for a D&C. During the follow-up ultrasound, we couldn’t find the baby anymore. We get permission from the family to do a pelvic exam, and sure enough, the fetus is in the vagina. Her water breaks, and we have to pull this 18-week fetus out, then have to get the placenta out afterwards. The mom died a few days later. I will never forget her.""I'm a rehab nurse. We had a patient post-stroke who had little to no motor/functional deficits but was significantly cognitively impaired. As it got closer to discharge, he would say things like, 'My wife won't come get me,' 'my wife won't take me home.' At this point, his wife, also a nurse, had been coming in to visit and stay to teach with the rehab team. She did everything we expected of someone taking home a patient who would need 24-hour supervision. We would redirect him and comfort him, and then he would be fine. The day of discharge comes, and his wife isn't there. After a few hours and multiple calls, we told her daughter, who lived across the country, that we were calling the police for a wellness check. They found her in the bathtub after she attempted suicide." "As a nurse, she felt obligated to put on a tough face and deal with what she was dealt, even though she was emotionally shattered. She felt that being a nurse meant she couldn't tell anyone she couldn't handle it. That was early in my career, and even though we didn't do anything wrong, I make sure to check in frequently with families and offer services and support groups right away. We waited for the psychologist to arrive and for his daughter to come and tell the patient exactly what had happened. My understanding is that he went to a skilled nursing facility, and the wife got the help she needed. I'm not sure where they are now, but I hope they are both getting the assistance and support they need."And finally,"I was on the trauma surgery service. A middle-aged woman was brought in after a motorcycle accident. She brought in two pieces. The arm had ripped right off, and she arrived first, followed shortly by the arm. Her demeanor was eerily calm, as if this were a regular Tuesday. Her only concern? She wanted all the bracelets on the ripped arm back. But she had worn them for years and never took them off, and the now-swollen limb wouldn’t allow us to remove the jewelry without breaking it, or alternatively, without sawing the arm into smaller pieces. Once it was determined that there was no way to reattach the extremity, the bone saw came out. A resident in orthopedic surgery cut the arm into small pieces so that each piece of jewelry could come off unharmed. They were returned to the rightful owner and the very next day were seen to be worn on the other arm, as if nothing had happened."
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