Medical Folks Shared 68 Times People Learned The Hard Way That Tiny Causes Can Have Huge Consequences

Necrotizing fasciitis in a dudes shoulder, during a car ride he reached into his back seat and got a little cut on his shoulder. Boom.

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 blood 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.

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.

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

Blood in urine, especially in women, gets constantly dismissed by patients and doctors alike. I have seen enough women with metastatic urothelial carcinoma that have told me they'd been having bloody urine for months.

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

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.

Ignoring routine foot care when you have type 2 diabetes... Diabetic neuropathy can manifest as lack of feeling, so injury to the foot in those cases can go unnoticed and untreated, lead to ulcers, and possibly to amputation if the situation isn't corrected in time.

Older men who climb to the roof without any safety precautions to do "a minor thing/work up there" just like they used to do back when they were younger.

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.

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


get your shots everyone.

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.

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

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

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. .

We had a patient that was gonna discharge. He was inpt for one night, he had something simple. I can’t remember his original thing, but it was probably like a knee or a lap appe. Regardless, he was in his 30s young, no medical history, a great independent patient. The nurse did not put an O2 monitor on him overnight because he was getting up and going to the bathroom on his own and he was going to discharge the next morning. The LNA found him deceased in his bed during 2 AM vitals. He was already cold by the time we started compressions, we got 1 weird rhythm on the AED but he was gone. Turns out he had had like an unknown heart condition…

But I always wonder if we would’ve been able to save him had that o2 monitor been on.

Pregnant patient came into the hospital with the sniffles.

Mother and baby passed away in less than 18 hours from a (likely) rickettsial disease.

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.

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.