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

Former hospice worker here. Our medical director expressed frustration at a patient who was golfing two weeks prior to hospice admission and then passed away from a hernia that was easily repaired by surgery. Patient had fashioned a sort of sling to support the hernia instead of going to the doctor.

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...

Worked with a young teenager once with a spinal cord injury from jumping, feet first, into the deep end of a pool.

Someone with a shellfish allergy ate a crawdad. Admitted for 5 days of treatment. He likes the taste.

Nec fas secondary to a thrombus in a young carpenter’s hand. She’d gotten decent sized splinter in it at work, pulled it out, and finished the work day wearing leather gloves which were moderately (standard) work-site dirty and too small for her.

Ignored the increasing pain for far too long bc she a) thought she was making too big of a deal out of nothing b) figured it was just normal pain and the pain meds weren’t working and c) previous negative experiences in hospital. Understandably.

Patient got a coronary CT as a cardiovascular risk stratification tool and as a result of a false positive the patient ended up requiring a heart transplant.

Edit: coronary CT was read as having a high risk blockage. Patient went for angiogram, gold standard for diagnosis coronary artery blockages, which showed no blockage. Unfortunately patient suffered a procedural complication called a coronary artery dissection that required open heart surgery to fix. Patient did poorly in surgery. Went into post-cardiotomy shock. Went on ECMO. Got listed for and eventually received a heart transplant.

Devastating head bleed because they didn’t take their blood pressure meds.

I once saw a pedicure result in amputation, which caused depression, and the patient ended up passing because of the depression. So heartbreaking. The pedicure place had run out of nail polish remover and had instead used chemical grade acetone.