Medical Workers Reveal Cases That Started With Seemingly Minor Issues

Friend of a friend took her 3 year old to a petting zoo. Child gets e.coli from the animals, spends 7 weeks in hospital with kidney failure and eventually such severe brain damage that they end up turning off life support. She passed away a few weeks ago. All because she patted some farm animals. Craziest part is that another child was infected the same day and made a full recovery.

I had a poor patient that lost an infant and had her footprint tattooed on his shoulder as a memorial. It got infected and it led to sepsis and spinal osteomyelitis that eventually left him a quadriplegic.

Riding mowers and tractors with a child passenger. The kid inevitably sees you out mowing one day, runs to join, and loses a limb or their life. Totally unnecessary.

A healthy woman in her early 30s ended up with locked-in syndrome (everything paralyzed but eyes) after a serious of complications which started with a slipped epidural during childbirth.

Had a patient apply some salve for her leg pain. Ended up with chemical burns. It was superficial at first, but no matter what we did to save the leg, the necrosis became too much and we had to amputate.

One of my nursing instructors had an abscessed tooth and didn’t want to take time off to get it dealt with, spring break was 2 weeks away. They had it pulled first day of spring break, infection had already gone to their heart. They developed sepsis and passed a week later. They were only in their late 40’s.

Patient popped a pimple on her face and then ended up with a cavernous sinus thrombosis (b***d clot to the brain) because of it.

EM doc. So many people with devastating head injuries because they didn’t wear a helmet.

Saw a person who'd accidentally lacerated a tendon in their pinky finger. They refused tendon repair to that finger (mentally unwell) and wrapped the whole hand up in bandages and carried it around wrapped up like it was acutely wounded and *didn't use it at all*. By the time I saw them just a few weeks after the initial injury, they'd generally lost function *in the whole hand* due to atrophy and contracture. .

From a bicycle crash. Guy was on a paved cycle path, missed a bend and rode down into a grassy ditch about 1m deep. Soft landing on thick heather and grass. Wasn't going particularly fast. Wearing a helmet. Ended up with 8 vertebral fractures, upwards of 14 rib fractures, bilateral haemothorices, and the rest I don't remember now. Ended up intubated / ventilated in ITU. A relatively moderate mechanism compared to many I've seen (and usually with far less injury burden!), but this guy's body basically just exploded when he came off.

Patients not taking their ARVs despite knowing their HIV status. So many disastrous complications that I couldn’t even begin to list them all. I’m not blaming the patients, not taking medication is often a result of systemic failings, it is just terribly sad.

I had a friend for years who suddenly started having what looked like pimples under the skin on his thighs and arms. Not diabetic, no heart disease, early 40s, just overweight. Over the next few years, the things kept coming back and getting bigger to the point where they were decubitus ulcers, but the skin was mostly intact outside of a pimple and you could see the redness underneath about the size of a quarter, like someone with a mosquito bite welt. He had to have them pierced and drained and then started doing the whole pack with saline and gauze routine. Again, this went on for a couple years.

Finally, the breakdown got into his femoral artery and he was hospitalized and ended up needing a femoral artery transplant on both legs. Before the surgery, I went to see him and he got up to just walk to the hospital room bathroom to pee, next thing I knew, he was bleeding out from b***d gushing out of one of the injuries. I ended up literally applying pressure and yelling at his spouse to push the code button.

Post surgery, he went through rehab and eventually discharged with IV antibiotics via a port. Took his kids to school, sat down on the couch, probably threw a clot, and his older daughter found him cold about an hour after the school trip. He was 46.

During my time at paliative care, I saw a retired first responder. He noticed a minor bleed occur from a freckle on his upper back. He didn't really pay much attention to it, until it ulcerated and started to hurt. At that point it turned out it was full blown metastatic melanoma. Mets in the brain, bones, liver...

During Covid a patient had a small lesion on his lip. Because of masking no one saw his face for months. When I saw him he took his mask off and there was a huge skin cancer growing off of his lip. Could've been cut out in the office if caught early instead he had to go for reconstructive surgery.

My collegue (a nurse). She broke her ankle, on the stairs, in the hospital, during a shift. After years of pain treatment she developed CRPS, she was almost bedbound, and now she just had an upper leg amputation...

Guy who nicked his foot with a nail clipper, ignored it, and got full-blown tetanus


get your shots everyone.

I had a diabetic patient who got lobster red sun burn on his feet one day at the beach. It didn’t register with him that anything involving the feet in diabetics is serious. He wound up with bilateral AK amputations. Very, very sad.

Severe liver failure from taking st John's wort and paracetamol.

Devastating head bleed because they didn’t take their b***d pressure meds.

Not a doctor but experience is still wisdom.
My little sister was born premature. No big deal right? She grew up to be taller than me. Stronger than me. Healthier than me. But back in the 90s they never did a work up with her birth.
Fast forward to her being 14 and I was 15 and I watched my little sister collapse to the ground and passed immediately. No. Reason.
Until the autopsy showed she had an over sized heart and it wasn’t treated and she was being super active. And it just gave out.

PLEASE even if your baby is healthy coming out.
Do
The
Tests

I know they are frustrating and they make parents uncomfortable and the baby cry

But I’d rather have my son go through it all now while young and won’t remember and have a clean bill of health