"Creepiest Thing I've Seen": 43 Doctors Share The Worst Things They've Witnessed On The Job

Whenever you admit a patient you have to inquire about their DNR status in case of a code being called. I had one elderly patient (late 80s/early 90s) who was severely demented and chronically ill (in and out of the hospital every month barely holding onto life - basically a horrible miserable quality of life). I asked the patient's family (I think it was a granddaughter who had medical POA, but I'm not sure, it was a while ago) about their DNR status (you don't want to put someone through a brutal resuscitation that may not even work if it isn't something that they would want if they wanted to die naturally). She flat out stated that "Oh, we want everything done for him because we really need his check". I didn't understand at first, but apparently the family was living off of his social security and could not have cared less about his pain and suffering or his wishes. I'm pretty sure it was the creepiest thing I've seen. These people were supposed to be his loved ones taking care of him and they were using him like an inhuman object.

I flew to Florida ( from Ontario) to pick up my 95 yr old grandmother to take her back to Toronto. She has severe dementia and constantly was hiding food and Kleenex all the time for her protection in her mind. On the plane she kept talking nonsense and just before we landed she said to me " I think this will be the last time I go to Florida, why are you here with me? I wouldn't want to Travel with me when I am being so crazy all the time but I love you for doing it grandson." Right after that she asked me how much she owed me for picking her up and then slipped back into comeplete dementia again. I will cherish that conversation for a long time. She passed away 1 month later.

My great grandmother told us the exact day she would pass away more than two years in advance. My great grandfather had passed away years earlier and she was always telling us she wanted to "go home", her wording for pass away and get back to granddad. Well I had one child and she was waiting for her to turn two, but right before my daughter's second birthday I got pregnant with my son. I was barely pregnant but she told me, "I'll wait til this baby's two, then I'm going home." She adored her great great grandbabies, and told everyone she was waiting til the baby boy turned two, and she passed away in her sleep on his second birthday. Though I was sad, I mean, she'd been planning it for two and a half years. But seriously, to. the. day.

Not a doctor, but I work in a personal care home. We used to have a resident who would constantly yell out 'hello', drove us a bit bonkers. After he passed away a lady moved into the room. One night I was working a double, evening to nights, she pulled her call bell. I went in and she asked me to make him stop.

"Make who stop what?

"The old man standing beside the bed, he won't stop yelling hello.".

Working the night shift as medical on call. I'll explain that I'm easily startled. It's around 3am, and I'm back on a ward where I started my night to see how an unwell patient from the start of my shift is getting on.

I have a chat with the nurses at the desk, they tell me he's much better, and most recent obs are improved, but that his chart is on the end of his bed. No problem, I trot off to the bedside.

In I go, pull the curtains round and, to not wake the other sleeping patients in the bay, I use my torch to check his chart. All looks good and I'm happy.

I turn around, and suddenly in the dark I'm toe to toe with a hunched over old man, who has obviously noiselessly crept in behind me. Well I just about have a heart attack of my own right there.

I jump back, scream, and knock over a drip stand. He starts to yell, and the nurses come running, someone wheeling the crash trolley.

"Oh doctor, that's just Albert, he likes to have a wander at night!".

While I was in nursing school I did rotations in a small ER. We had done compressions on a full arrest for quite a while and the doctor finally called it. Afterwards they called it I was asked to do post mortem care. As I was rolling the patient with a coworker, the patient was rolled towards me and almost up against my body as the nurse cleaned her backside. At that moment she began to vomit and she kept vomiting, all over my white scrubs. Vomit sucks. But a corpse vomiting on you takes it to a whole other level.

I watched a patient's heart stop on the monitor once. There are false alarms sometimes of course. However, I was experienced enough to know that it was true alarm. I called the nurse and told her she might want to check the patient. I remember her laughing nervously to tell me that she was talking with the patient at that moment so she could not possibly be without a pulse. I could even hear the patient talking to her cheerfully in the background. I double checked the monitor and saw a few beats here and there and looooong lines. Just as I was advising the nurse to manually check the patient I heard her drop the phone and go... "Oh no!" followed by the code blue alarm. That patient did not come back.

I worked in an ER and the creepiest thing I can remember wasn't so much an event as a look.

A 4 month old child was brought in because it had basically suffocated in it's crib due to neglect. Maybe it was the shock, but watching as one of our priests tells her outside the trauma bay "Heaven has claimed your daughter", the glassy, thousand-mile stare she gave as she asked if there were police going to her house and if she could go home.

Something that utterly wrecked everyone in our ER and she had this otherworldly, totally distant look because she was thinking about how she's going to get busted.

Some days, your faith in humanity is tested.

Not a MD, but I do work at a hospital. I was sitfing a patient up at the edge of the bed in the ICU when she started getting all squirrelly. She didn't speak much English but kept saying "stand, stand" so I helped her stand up. After standing for a few seconds something told me to lay her back down. Before her head ever hit the pillow her eyes rolled back and she was gone. She had a massive stroke and was gone on the spot. But, I like to think I honored her last wish of wanting to stand.

Obligatory "not a doctor" statement, but I work in a nursing home. I wouldn't say it's the creepiest thing EVER, but I once had a patient who was hallucinating and kept talking about the person behind me. I knew he was hallucinating but I'm not gonna say I didn't turn around and check a few times...

Not a doctor, but both of my parents were.

After "retiring" Dad worked in geriatric care for a few of the nursing homes around town. One guy had this really weird affliction that I can't remember the name of, but it caused him to have really weird hallucinations, like snakes coming out of his nose and mouth. The strange part was that he was completely lucid and actually really intelligent, and my dad would talk to him frequently. They would be discussing films or philosophy, and the guy would occasionally calmly say, "Hang on a second," and then proceed to pull a two foot invisible snake out of his nose. He'd lay "it" on the ground, and then it apparently would slither away. He could talk about them and describe them in complete detail.

When I was working as a critical care nurse, I sent my patient down for a heart catheterization. She was so sweet, and I remember that she and I were joking about a bunch of different things before she went down for her procedure. When she came back, she was very drowsy, as is expected from the Versed, but very very confused. She proceeded to have ICU psychosis due to the sedatives. Every time I would come in the room, she she would throw cups of water at me and yell at me. She would make this guttural noise, and tell me that I was the devil. I walked in one time, and she said, "Dear Lord, please come down and slit this woman's throat." She continued to say this kind of stuff. She told her husband that I was walking into her room with poison balls. She said that my skin was falling off of my face. She scratched and hit me. It was very sad and scary. I hadn't seen this happen prior to this. We had to give her anti psychotics, and restrain her initially to keep her from hurting herself. It was pretty terrible.

Saw a lady once who chewed off her lips.

Not a doctor, but I'm a nurse that works in an intensive care unit.

I took care of a patient who had a history of esophageal cancer. Awhile back, he had surgery, got better and eventually went home. Months later, he got pneumonia and came back to the hospital in respiratory distress. He had to be put on a mechanical ventilator.

He was stable; no blood pressure issues, heart rhythm looked great, breathing wasn't terrible, responsive and following commands. All of a sudden, his blood pressure suddenly drops and he lost his pulse. We called a code blue and began CPR. We brought him back after an hour and continued to run tests to figure out why he crashed. None of the results of the labs or imaging were remarkable.

15 minutes after we had brought him back, his blood pressures drops again and he lost pulse. We continued coding him for another hour until it was clear he couldn't be brought back.

His wife came in after the fact. She told me she couldn't stop thinking about the conversation her and her husband had.

Wife: "honey, don't forget you've got an appointment with the home health nurse this Saturday"

Husband: "well I won't be here this Saturday"

Wife: "what do you mean you won't be here this Saturday? Where are you going?"

Husband: "I don't know... I just won't be here"

This conversation happened Wednesday. He was admitted to the hospital Thursday and he was gone Friday at 11:30pm.

I was having a pt signing her admissions paperwork. Everything was going normally and she seemed coherent until she looked out her window and asked me, "did you see that?" I hadn't seen anything and she said, "a man just jumped off the building."

Then she shook her head and mumbled to herself how her mind isn't right anymore. Freaked me out. Now I'm terrified of getting old and having dementia.

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn't the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it...more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, "and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure". You see the emotions it brings out. Here's a couple stories.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn't really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast. We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn't sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they're all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you're digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

Another story: A girl spent my entire 8 hour shift fist fighting the same ghost. She would throw a few punches, and obviously landed knockout blows, so she'd bend over and twist her hand around like she was wrapping some long hair around her wrist. She'd drag her opponent down the hallway, give a few good kicks, then set up for a curb stomp. Starts off kinda funny, then gets a little disturbing when you think about the graphic things going on in her mind, then just sad after you watch this replay for hours on end.

Not a doctor, but I work in a nursing home doing activities and housekeeping. I answered a call light of a little old lady and she asked me to remove a, as she put it "large, black woman" from her bed. No one was in the bed. I asked the "lady" to get up so she could go to bed. Didn't think anything of until I talked to a CNA and she had answered a call light the next room over and the gentleman in that room had asked the CNA to have the "large, black, lady" to stop pointing at him and leave his room. He is bedridden and only gets up for meals. These two don't talk to each other. So there is someone there. It's made me watch things a little closer.

Couple creepy experiences I can share from my third year of med school, which is when everything is still new to you and you have no idea what to expect or how to handle some of this stuff.

Psych rotation at the state mental hospital. Went in to evaluate a middle aged woman with history of visual hallucinations and erratic behavior. Through most of the interview, she looked at the floor and responded slowly with one word answers. Very flat affect and clearly schizophrenic, but not really endorsing any of the symptoms that brought her to the hospital. All of the sudden as I'm thanking her for her time and about to leave the room, she jumps up and grabs the lapels of my white coat, pulls surprisingly hard, and gets right up in my face, close enough for her breath to fog my glasses. Didn't say a word, just had the most intense look of fear on her face and just stared right at me, breathing hard. I froze. I didn't know whether to push her away or to say anything, and I had no idea what she was going to do. It only lasted maybe 4 seconds before other staff came in to help, but those few seconds were so terrifying.

Actual MD here

Nastiest thing was during my MS3 surgery rotation a homeless diabetic person who had maggots eating away at his feet and legs when we took off his boots. I had a mask on and managed to vomit inside of it from the stench, then vomit from gagging on my vomit.

Drunk, combative, foul smelling adults... just another reason why I love being a Pediatrician.

Not a doc but im an EMT, Honestly old demented women holding baby dolls. They pet em and that baby is REAL to them....freaks me the hell out.