“Her Scream Has Been Imprinted On My Heart”: 40 Moments That Left Hospital Staff Shaken

I’ve told this story on here before, but it still haunts me. I worked night shift and I had an older lady admitted for abdominal pain/constipation. She was around 75 years old and was a recently retired nurse. She had just stopped working less than a week ago. We had talked a lot the night I took care of her, and she told me all of the future travel plans she made. She was finally going to go to Europe. She told me that she had bowel obstructions before, and thought maybe the stress from retirement triggered another one. She told me she had a CT scan done in the ED, and her doctor would read it in the morning. I looked at the preliminary results, and it showed tumors on the pancreas, liver, and colon. It hit me hard, and I cried a bit that night thinking about this nurse who worked her entire life and won’t live long enough to enjoy her retirement because she has pancreatic cancer.

I had. 17yo pt. He had been out drinking with friends. His friends didn’t take home to his house instead put him on a couch in the garage of their house. He vomited and aspirated his friends found him barely alive the next morning. He came to our hospital brain dead. His parents donated his organs. I took care of him the night before his organ procurement. His mom stayed the night with him we pulled him over as far as we could in the bed and his mom crawled up in bed with and had her head on his chest all night. I told this story to my kids many times and told them I didn’t ever want to be that mom to please call me I would come. And they did.

I worked for a rural hospital and we had a patient that came in with a heart attack. We worked on her fruitlessly for 30-40 mins. The doctor declared her and invited the family in. Her body layed in front of the grieving family for almost another half hour. Her family members begged her to come back and say goodbye, she promptly obliged. She sat up hugged one of them and said goodbye. The entire re staff rushed in and ran a full code for the second time. She was pulseless and cold when we started the first time, and worse when we ran the second. She never made it. But she was back to say goodbye. It was one of the most unsettling things I ever saw there.

A 9 year old girl came in once. Her parents had been finding her dolls hanging around the house with belts or strings tied around their necks. She went into a rage and held a knife to her own throat. They brought her to the hospital and during her psych evaluation she said she heard voices in her head telling her she was stupid and telling her to [end her own life]. She said she didn't want to but she had to listen to the voices. I couldn't sleep for weeks...

He was 14 in advanced heart failure. He was the oldest child of 5 and during the six months he lived on our floor, his mother was also a pt in advanced HF. He wasn’t eligible for an LVAD or a heart transplant bc he was “non-compliant”. He lived 2 hours away in a family with complex issues and he often missed clinic appointments. This poor child with no ability to get to doctors appts was denied life-saving care. He was so sweet and had the hugest innocent brown eyes and soft-spoken voice. I just wanted to take him home so bad and rescue him. Life is unfairly cruel at times.

Covid in NYC in the ED. a woman in the resus area was panicking and begged me for help saying she couldn’t breathe. a patient near her who i was getting to also couldn’t breathe but was starting to slip and we were getting ready to intubate. no one was around to help the panicked woman who wasn’t required for the intubation. i had to decide between helping this panicked woman or going to the intubation where maybe someone’s life could be saved. i said “i am so sorry, but i can’t help you. i have to go.” because it really was like that (these were NOT normal times)

The panicked woman i think [was gone] later that shift and i was one of the last people to speak to her on the last day of her life. i will never forget her. i cry every time i think about her

i know there was nothing else i could’ve done but it’s my job to always remember her.

A man with ALS who was a DNR. He coded and his sons overturned it, wanted everything done. The poor soul ended up on ventilator, unable to be weaned off. He ended up in the nursing home I worked at back then; we were one of very few in the state that took long term vent patients. He had no use of his arms and his legs from the advanced stage of ALS, and couldn’t turn his head at all. He begged anyone and everyone who came into the room to take him off the vent. He would cry and beg. He had to mouth the words because of the trach. Many of the staff would just ignore him. Family rarely visited. That was 38 years ago and it haunts me to this day. I sure hope a situation like this wouldn’t happen today.

Maybe more disturbing than creepy, but..I get called into work late one night. I am an RN working in surgery, and late night calls are always a roll of the dice as to what you might get. The hospital operator calling had very little detail as to what we were coming in for, just the surgeon and patient name. I get there and the doctor had booked a transmetatarsal amputation on a diabetic patient, which is not unusual. When I go to talk to the patient, it turns out that due to his diabetic neuropathy, and therefore lack of sensation in his feet, he had a sore on his toes that had gone untreated (again, not unusual).

Well, in this case, he had awoken to crunching noises in the middle of the night...he wakes up and turns on the light to find that underneath the covers, his beloved chihuahua had eaten all 4 of his smaller toes and was working on the great toe. The wound was a pretty ghastly site, and the site of those tiny teeth marks is something I'll never forget.

I work in dispatch in the basement of the hospital. I was working the night shift and I was alone. I had the door closed, and there is a key code needed to unlock the door. I am the only one in my corridor of the basement at this time.

I heard over the intercom that there was a code yellow (missing patient) from the mental health floor. I have no idea how he got out, but now he was roaming the hospital.

About 10 minutes later, the door handle starts shaking and someone is trying to get in. I stayed completely silent until it stopped, then got up and looked through the peephole. There was a man just sitting against the wall wearing a hospital gown.

I went back to my desk and called security, and I spoke as quietly as I could so he wouldn't hear and run away. Security came and I heard them take him away. He was yelling all sorts of stuff that didn't make sense and was clearly resisting them. A guard came in afterwards and asked if I was okay and I told him I was fine thanks to the door lock.

Thank you, keypad.

Daughter and father drowning. 7 year old on floatie went in river and dad went after her. She was my patient in resus bay and dad was in resus bay next door. 


She was already long gone when young fire department dovers with still dripping wetsuits brought her in. We tried to start all the code stuff while the physician called it really quickly. 


She was cold and I wanted to put a blanket on her. She still had little heart stud earrings in. She looked a lot like my own kid and I thought about how normal her day probably started. 


I am still disturbed by the image of the family being brought into a room down the hall to deliver the news. I wasn't involved in that part but felt guilty already knowing what they were about to learn. 


Writing this made me realize how much this actually still bothers me.

I once had a severe malnourish, comatose 18 y.o. (later found out actually 12y.o.) girl in IMCU when I was an aide. Neighbor called the police because they did not see the patient for days and they found her lying unconscious in the bathroom.

"She was just sleeping." according to her family. Stage 2 pressure ulcer on both knees and nose from "sleeping" on the bathroom floor. Covered with various size and healing stage wounds all over the body. One of them is clearly from an iron. Missing one of the eyes from previous "accident". The husband and in-laws that lived in the same house being suspects of possible domestic violence according to the police that came with her.

Risk of elopement because groups of "family" kept trying to pull the tube and carry her out of the hospital. We did 1 on 1, 2 on 1, 1+security on 1. There would always be new group of "family member" after we ban the previous from visiting.

She was announced braindead the same week because these family kept pulling tubes out when they try to carry her away.

I was a hospital aide for a year working in a unit that saw its fair share of DNRs.

One night my shift was almost over, and a patient in the next unit passed. That unit only had one aide, so I went over to help her. She'd been there for years, so we get to work without really talking (cleaning the body, removing tubes, changing soiled linens). When it came time to put the deceased into a body bag, she rolled the patient (a large man) towards me, with the intention of sliding the bag underneath his frame. However, she rolled him and a large groan escaped his lips, and we both jumped and nearly dropped him.

It was just air or gas escaping his lungs, but it sounded exactly like a moan someone makes in their sleep. We double checked for a pulse, found none, and by now he was mottling on his underside (a color change when blood pools beneath the skin due to lack of flow from a heart beat) and hadn't had vitals for a few hours. Still it creeped me the [hell] out and gave me the heebie jeebies.

Creepy like the patient who kept eating himself, creepy like the patient who had lice to such an extent you could see his scalp moving, creepy like the ghost playing the piano, or creepy like the demented patients we keep alive for no reason?

Patient is covered in sores. They can't strap him down because he is basically lucid and there are rules, so he stayed in the hospital with his mrsa, his distressing numbers of untreated STIs, his various other major medical conditions. And with his talons of fingernails that have... stuff... crusted under them, he scratches himself until he bleeds. Then he eats the skin and scabs he's just peeled off. They coat him in what I assume is medical grade antibiotic ointment so he's covered in this skin/blood/slime slurry, so it all sludges up on your gloves when you try to hold his arm to draw blood. It's... there are no words.

Lice patient, homeless and immunocompromised, with semi dreads that were literally crawling with lice. You put on an isolation gown, shoe covers, a surgical hairnet, a mask because homeless usually means stinky, and try not to gag when his hair moves. Some nurses, bless them forever, shaved the patient and at least the most obvious infestation was taken care of.

The piano ghost... a patient walked into one of the lobby elevators with me and told me she saw the ghost of a young Asian woman playing the piano in the main lobby area. It was 3 am, and nobody was there. As a complete killjoy, though, I want to point out that it's an automatic piano and the patient was probably just confused, heard the piano playing with nobody at it, and thought she saw a ghost. Several co-workers still refuse to walk through there at night.

As to the awful [things] we do to demented old people... I wouldn't keep a gerbil alive under the conditions some of these folks are trapped in, and it's shameful that we have to.

I was an x-ray tech for years. At one point, I worked the night shift and I worked alone. One night I had to x-ray a homeless man who had hurt his shoulder or something. Anyway, I had rolled him into the room and parked him against the door opposite where the control panel was. I got some film and was walking back into the room towards the man and he looked at me and said, "it's like watching an aquarium. You're surrounded." He went on to say I was surrounded by people and animals and that I was also "being watched by" people from some native tribe I had never heard of and told me I should feel honored since they didn't follow just anyone. It was like 5am and this freaked me out. For the only time in my life I actually had that cold icy feeling going down my spine. I know he was probably suffering from some mental issue but isn't that just the type of person who does this?

Weirdly, a year or so later when I was visiting San Francisco, I had a fortune teller stop me on the street and ask to do my reading. She said the same thing, that I was "surrounded.".

On my way to the morgue with a colleague. Pushing a bed with a recently deceased man. My first time going down there, so I was a little bit creeped out, but it was with a kind of cute colleague, so I kept my cool.
We leave the body in the cold storage room, she goes out while I handle the paperwork and I shortly follow and reach to close the door behind me.
After that follows one of the most terrifying screeches I have ever heard from the room behind me. I jump about 2 meters in the air and let out a loud screech.

Turns out the door screeches when closing, but not when opening. My colleague was laughing.

I worked in a nursing home as an RNA. While I worked there 7 residents called me into their rooms to tell me thank you and good bye on different nights over the 3 years I was there. All of them [passed] during the night after they told me. They all knew, I don't know how but there is no other way to explain it. One would be a coincidence, maybe even 2 but 7?

Young guy, 45. 2 young sons, a wife. I was a new ICU nurse. This was during Covid so 2021. He had been transferred to us via ambulance from a small hospital due to being covid positive and respiratory distress. He arrived with o2 sat in the 60s and maxed on bipap. Not intubated. Day shift nurse “stabilized” him- barely satting 85. I come on, help him prone himself, start precedex. Intensivist had gone home. I call her and am like look this dude needs intubated it’s not good. Tube him, prone him, paralyze him. Develops a cardiac dysthymia- flip him supine but we have another code in the room next door and are begging over the intercom for more people to come help us because we literally don’t have enough people. He codes. We coded this poor man for 3 hours. I remember doing CPR as his wife sobbed over him. Security jumped in to help with compressions. My other patient went into SVT and we were short staffed to begin with then add in 2 simultaneous codes and another unstable patient.

I will never forget that awful night. That week my ICU lost every single patient due to Covid. 20. In one week.

I remember a woman in her early 30s diagnosed with breast cancer and she decided not to seek treatment at all. She did not believe in medical treatment and was using “holistic” methods. Her chest was full of sores, cancer, and she was pungent. She had two sons and she went hospice 2 weeks later after being in the hospital. Husband was SO torn up. I don’t blame him.

I used to work as an STNA in a nursing home. Worked third shift throughout university. During the night we turned half the lights off so it was darker for the evening and didn't get a lot of light in the residents' rooms. We had one resident who was younger (70s) and was mostly in for mental reasons. She had long, dark hair and was very thin.

I was sitting at the nurse's station at the top of the hall and heard a call light go off. I stood up, looked down the dark hall, and on all fours - straight out of The Ring - this resident was crawling up the hall toward me. The other STNA had forgotten to put the bed rail up and the resident was VERY good at climbing out of bed.

Needless to say, I needed some new britches and my heart was racing a mile a minute.

I got the opportunity to shadow nurses and surgeons for two of my class periods in high school. I never really experienced being in the ICU before. What was creepy for me was seeing how many unconscious people were fighting for their lives. I followed a nurse to a major heart attack patient. This guy was put under an induced coma but his eyes stayed open. The nurse had me help put gel over his eyes. It's been three years and I still have his gaze stuck in my head. I also had to help reposition the guy and it was like trying to move an extremely stiff mannequin. Seeing a human in a not so human state is extremely uncomfortable and creepy.