“Blood Started Pouring Out”: 43 Surgeons And Doctors Recall Their Worst “Oh No” Moments

I was doing a corneal transplant when I had the "oh s**t" moment. During surgery, I cut off the patient's own cornea and replace it with a new donor cornea. During that moment when the host cornea was off but before I could get the new one on, there's literally nothing on the front of the eye except a tear film and aqueous humor. Anyway, the patient takes that moment to start vomiting.

The reason we tell everyone to skip food and drink is so they don't aspirate in case they throw up. This patient lied about eating breakfast and started throwing up everything. The eye is still "open sky" at this time. Everything inside of the eye can now become outside of the eye. And she's bucking and vomiting.

Those not in the know will say this is not good. Those really in the know will say "oh s**t."

Anyway, I had to grab the new cornea and start stitching as fast as I could on a patient actively throwing up. I use 10-0 nylon sutures which are thinner than an eyelash. It turned out okay but not great.

Don't lie about eating breakfast before surgery, folks.

Heard an "oh s**t" moment as a patient on the operating table.
A couple of years ago I was in labor for 28 hours, pushing for six, when my child started showing signs of distress. He had slightly elevated heart rate and I had the makings of a fever. My midwife at the hospital told me the doctor was coming in to check to see if a vacuum assist could help. She checks me and immediately stands up with blood on her hand and says we're going to the OR now. At that time, I started feeling that zoomed out tunnel vision I know for me is shock. I had anxiety, but figured she knew what was best. She did. We got in the OR 8 minutes later and when they opened me up, I heard the surgeon say, "oh s**t. Look at this." They say blood in my catheter bag and upon fully opening me up found my son was actually trying to come *through* my uterus. He had ruptured it. They got my son out. Those moments where he was stunned and not crying were an eternity. He cried and he was born a completely healthy baby. After I woke up and was back in my room the doctor came in and told me what happened. I knew a ruptured uterus sounded bad, but oh d**n I googled and started having a massive anxiety attack. A ruptured uterus is extremely rare and so very dangerous and often fatal. I read from the time it happens you have about 15 minutes before you bleed out and baby is dead. When I went back for my post csection follow up my midwife let me know as a practice that's been around 35 years with over 30 midwives and doctors they had never once encountered that and it was such a big deal for them a few days after my birth they all got together to discuss my case.
I was so incredibly fortunate I chose to labor in hospital, that the doctor just knew from my vitals and baby's that something was off. They just didn't know until they got me open.
I can't even tell you how grateful I am for Dr. S. You saved my life and my son's life and our family with forever be grateful.

Doing a C-Section for this poor Mum who’d been in labour for hours. Baby wouldn’t come out of the hole we’d made, so more pressure was applied to the fundus (top of the uterus) and suddenly whoooooosh, baby zooms out like a torpedo, covered in lubricating vernix, zips over the surgical sheeting which has the texture of a slip n slide and almost rockets straight off the table. The baby’s foot was caught by the Reg who whipped her up in the air upside down like in old cartoons, but almost dropped her again due to gloves + vernix. Thankfully the midwife was ready with the towel and caught the baby to wrap her up. Mum and Dad seemed to think this was normal practice and didn’t notice but me and my colleague just stared at each other with a look of absolute horror. It still makes me shudder to think how close the baby was to hitting the floor head first. Never happened before or since.

Everytime I see a question like this it takes me back to one of the greatest Reddit comments in history:

*OR Nurse here. This is kind of a long one...*

*I was taking call one night, and woke up at two in the morning for a "general surgery" call. Pretty vague, but at the time, I lived in a town that had large populations of young military guys and avid m**h users, so late-night emergencies were common.*

*Got to the hospital, where a few more details awaited me -- "Perirectal abscess." For the uninitiated, this means that somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the a*****e, there was a pocket of pus that needed draining. Needless to say our entire crew was less than thrilled.*

*I went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed me the chart was "Have fun with this one." Amongst healthcare professionals, vague statements like that are a bad sign.*

*My patient was a 314lb Native American woman who barely fit on the stretcher I was transporting her on. She was rolling frantically side to side and moaning in pain, pulling at her clothes and muttering Hail Mary's. I could barely get her name out of her after a few minutes of questioning, so after I confirmed her identity and what we were working on, I figured it was best just to get her to the anesthesiologist so we could knock her out and get this circus started.*

*She continued her theatrics the entire ten-minute ride to the O.R., nearly falling off the surgical table as we were trying to put her under anesthetic. We see patients like this a lot, though, chronic d**g abusers who don't handle pain well and who have used so many d***s that even increased levels of pain medication don't touch simply because of high tolerance levels.*

*We got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and I began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed, a little bit of pus was seeping through, but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she'd been injecting IV d***s through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad d***s, but overall, it didn't seem to warrant her repeated cries of "Oh Jesus, k**l me now."*

*The surgeon steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, all hell broke loose.*

*Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern full of pus, rotten tissue, and fecal matter that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision like we were recreating the funeral scene from Jane Austen's "Mafia!".*

*We all wear waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works -- all of which were as helpful was rainboots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, I was still finding bits of rotten flesh pasted against the back wall. As the surgeon continued to advance his blade, the torrent just continued. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until, within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse's shoes.*

*I was nearly twelve feet away, jaw dropped open within my surgical mask, watching the second nurse dry-heaving and the surgeon standing on tip-toes to keep this stuff from soaking his socks any further. The smell hit them first. "Oh god, I just threw up in my mask!" The other nurse was out, she tore off her mask and sprinted out of the room, shoulders still heaving. Then it hit me, mouth still wide open, not able to believe the volume of fluid this woman's body contained. It was like getting a great big bite of the despair and apathy that permeated this woman's life. I couldn't f*****g breath, my lungs simply refused to pull anymore of that stuff in. The anesthesiologist went down next, an ex-NCAA D1 tailback, his six-foot-two frame shaking as he threw open the door to the OR suite in an attempt to get more air in, letting me glimpse the second nurse still throwing up in the sinks outside the door. Another geyser of pus splashed across the front of the surgeon. The YouTube clip of "David at the dentist" keeps playing in my head -- "Is this real life?"*

*In all operating rooms, everywhere in the world, regardless of socialized or privatized, secular or religious, big or small, there is one thing the same: Somewhere, there is a bottle of peppermint concentrate. Everyone in the department knows where it is, everyone knows what it is for, and everyone prays to their gods they never have to use it. In times like this, we rub it on the inside of our masks to keep the outside smells at bay long enough to finish the procedure and shower off.*

*I sprinted to the our central supply, ripping open the drawer where this vial of ambrosia was kept, and was greeted by -- an empty f*****g box. The bottle had been emptied and not replaced. Somewhere out there was a godless b*****d who had used the last of the peppermint oil, and not replaced a single f*****g drop of it. To this day, if I figure out who it was, I'll k**l them with my bare hands, but not before cramming their head up the colon of every last m**h user I can find, just so we're even.*

*I darted back into the room with the next best thing I can find -- a vial of Mastisol, which is an adhesive rub we use sometimes for bandaging. It's not as good as peppermint, but considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup, we were out of options.*

*I started rubbing as much of the Mastisol as I could get on the inside of my mask, just glad to be smelling anything except whatever slimy demon spawn we'd just cut out of this woman. The anesthesiologist grabbed the vial next, dowsing the front of his mask in it so he could stand next to his machines long enough to make sure this woman didn't die on the table. It wasn't until later that we realized that Mastisol can give you a mild high from huffing it like this, but in retrospect, that's probably what got us through.*

*By this time, the smell had permeated out of our OR suite, and down the forty-foot hallway to the front desk, where the other nurse still sat, eyes bloodshot and watery, clenching her stomach desperately. Our suite looked like the underground river of ooze from Ghostbusters II, except dirty. Oh so dirty.*

*I stepped back into the OR suite, not wanting to leave the surgeon by himself in case he genuinely needed help. It was like one of those overly-artistic representations of a zombie apocalypse you see on fan-forums. Here's this one guy, in blue surgical garb, standing nearly ankle deep in lumps of dead tissue, fecal matter, and several liters of syrupy infection. He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman's a*s and there was no Yoda. He and I didn't say a word for the next ten minutes as he scraped the inside of the abscess until all the dead tissue was out, the front of his gown a gruesome mixture of brown and red, his eyes squinted against the stinging vapors originating directly in front of him. I finished my required paperwork as quickly as I could, helped him stuff the recently-vacated opening full of gauze, taped this woman's buttocks closed to hold the dressing for as long as possible, woke her up, and immediately shipped off to the recovery ward.*

*Until then, I'd only heard of "alcohol showers." Turns out 70% isopropyl alcohol is about the only thing that can even touch a scent like that once its soaked into your skin. It takes four or five bottles to get really clean, but it's worth it. It's probably the only scenario I can honestly endorse drinking a little of it, too.*

*As we left the locker room, the surgeon and I looked at each other, and he said the only negative sentence I heard him utter in two and a half years of working together:*

*"That was bad."*

*The next morning the entire department (a fairly large floor within the hospital) still smelled. The housekeepers told me later that it took them nearly an hour to suction up all of the fluid and debris left behind. The OR suite itself was closed off and quarantined for two more days just to let the smell finally clear out*

Story by u/banzaipanda.

Pathologist here. Biggest mistake I ever made was c*****g myself during an autopsy on an HIV patient. Lucky for me, I did not acquire the virus, so everything had a happy ending. (For me, anyway. That guy was still dead.)

Not a surgeon, thought I'd share this though.

Husband went in for a routine colonoscopy and as they were prepping him, anesthetist asks him if he's a ginger. My husband tells him yeah. When he was a kid growing up, he had fire engine red hair, though it's faded to a more strawberry blonde now. The anesthitist laughs and says, okay, i gotcha, we'll give you the redhead dosage and winks. Well my husband thinks it's a funny, until he wakes up at the tail end of the procedure (pun intended) and doctors are just chattin it up and what have you. Turns out it's not a joke and redheads have some type of natural block to anesthesia. Dude had given him max allowable dosage and he still woke up. Happened a couple years later. They gave him ketamine and some other s**t to knock him out to get wisdom teeth out when he told dentist about the colonoscopy thing. He still woke up at the end of that one too.

I had an ingrown toenail. It was supposed to be a Quick fix.. I was 14 and had my mom with me. They let an apprentice do the surgery and he goes "oh s**t". The doctor in charge Just laughed and said "No risk, No fun". Turns out they f****d up my toe and I had to have 4 more surgeries to correct it. I cried.

Happened at my hospital- a mentally ill young woman, who was pregnant at the time was in denial, locked herself into her room when she realized the contractions were coming. She basically didn’t push and the baby didn’t come naturally. Her family called 911 because of the smell. The ER realized her baby had died inside her and was basically rotting due to the smell. She was taken to the OR to remove the baby and apparently all the nurses and surgeons were vomiting because once they opened her up the smell was overpowering and it was traumatizing to see a rotting baby.

Edit: not a surgeon. I’m a hospitalist physician.

Not me but my uncle - he's a respirologist and was supervising/sitting in on lung surgery to remove a tumor. Turns out the tumor was a rootball - some type of seed had gotten into the patient's lungs and started to grow.

When I was younger, I had a rather complex external fixator (cage) applied to my leg.

it had three rings, two large 360 DEGREE rings around my leg (one in the upper middle of the shin, one n the lower0, which had humongous rods to keep the cage fixed to my leg, and a third one, which was a horseshoe type ring around my ankle, which threaded all sorts of pins through my ankle. each pinned set in a certain wa. the point of this external fixator was to relocate and fix the positioning of my ankle., so it wouldn't be so f****d, basically. I have/had a birth defect called talipes (club foot) equines.

a lot of bone got removed before the fixator was put on, so this way it could all grow

it was a 9-hour surgery, and my doctor, who I won't name, was pretty chuffed with himself after seeing it all installed on my leg.

this was until he looked closer. the pins I spoke about before, with the numbers on them (almost like those sizing things on cheap coathangers) were all coloured and numbered, set for my dad to do every morning and night.

he was looking at the pins, and the numbers. he looked glance away and looked back with a stressed face on. after a few seconds, and a slight hand on head gesture, he whispered 's**t'.

in his mind, he had organised the pins in an incorrect way. he was stressed beyond his mind for a few minutes. he was worried he f****d everything up

luckily he hadnt. he just needed to move one or two numbers

1 year later, 8 months after the frame was taken off (which was in for 6 months) I ended up having my leg amputated. the surgery didn't work how we wanted it too, or at least how I wanted it too (which we were sort of expecting). the goal was to get me walking. the amputation got me running.

bare in mind, the amputation was MY call. i was 12 when it was done. best decision i ever made.

5th year resident here. There are lots of bad oh s**t moments throughout training, such necrotizing soft tissue infections or take backs for bad complications or deaths during cases. However I'd like to share a recent positive "oh s**t" moment.

15cm kidney tumor with thrombus into the vena cava. Big incision, great exposure of the vasculature and the tumor. My attending and I are dancing around the aorta and vena cava. We are able to feel the tumor thrombus in the IVC. I was expecting that we'd need to cut and clamp the vena cava to get all the cancer out. But my attending literally squeezes the tumor out of the vena cava back into the renal vein, and then has me tie the renal vein off so the tumor doesn't slip back into the vena cava.

Patient went home in like 4 days, margins were negative, and is still doing great.

First time I felt like 'oh s**t. I'm a surgeon.".

Surgeon here. I’ve dealt with loads of morbid stuff but one thing that made me stop and go “oh s**t” was a conversation with a young patient who had a perforated colon from diverticular disease, which is a common wear and tear of the colon. He was one of youngest patients I had seen with this condition and certainly the youngest with a perforation so bad as to require an operation. When I was counselling him on the operation, which involves removing the perforated part of the colon and giving him a colostomy, he told me his biggest concern was how he was going to have a**l s*x with his same-s*x partner. He would only have a small stump of r****m left inside, which would be at risk of perforation with any force applied to it. It made me really think about the implications of the surgery we do. The operation is the easy part!

When I was a new RN working the ICU in a large teaching hospital, I came into work one morning to a patient that was admitted that night, intubated (breathing tube in), sedated, Foley catheter (tube in pee pee hole) and all. Long story short, he was extubated (breathing tube out) that same shift and was completely alert and oriented.

He was an end stage renal patient meaning his kidneys didn't work and he needed dialysis, and was only in his late 30s. Said he neve made urine anymore and didn't need the Foley catheter so he wanted it out because it was hurting.


Now the catheter bag had been empty my whole shift which is normal seeing as how he didn't make urine anymore, and this hospital had a nurse driven Foley removal policy, meaning while we needed a doctor's order to insert one, we could remove one at our discretion, unless a Dr specifically put in orders not to. This patient had no such dr order, so I went to remove the catheter. They are held in the bladder by a balloon on the end that is inflated with 10ml of saline. I deinflated the balloon removing 10ml of saline, and pulled it out.


As soon as the cather left his p***s, blood started pouring out in a heavy stream. Turns out the nurse who placed it on admission hadn't advanced it far enough since there was no urine production to indicate correct placement and had inflated the balloon while still in his urethra causing trauma.


It would not stop bleeding. I had to hold this man's p***s "shut" to put pressure on it while my coworker paged the resident who came and looked at me with pitty as he told me to just keep holding this 30 something year old man's p***s In my hands to staunch the blood flow until urology could get there to assess. It just kept gushing blood everytime I eased up to check. For over an hour total I held this mans p***s and tried to make polite conversation until the urologist arrived.

I'm not a surgeon but when I was in med school there was an "oh s**t" moment for everyone including the surgeon's, anesthetist's, nurses and students. They were prepping a patient for surgery and put him under and the nurse said "ok, he's out" before they were about to start slicing him open. The patient just had enough strength to move his head from side to side and said "no, I'm not out yet". Everyone laughed it off but if the patient didn't do that it could have ended badly.

Not a surgeon but I was having surgery on my breast to remove what they suspected was cancer. It was benign. But either way I woke up during the surgery and I looked up and saw 4 people with scrub caps on, staring down at me. I looked at my b**b in pure horror and that is all I remember because they knocked me back out. Still makes me want to vomit thinking about it. I was only 13 :(.

As a very young doctor in training I misdiagnosed a woman with epilepsy. Some years prior she had sustained a gunshot wound to the frontal area, damaging the underside of one of her frontal lobes and severing an optic nerve to one of her eyes, as well as some of the muscles that rotated that eyeball. Surgery saved her life but the frontal lobe was scarred and the eye was blinded and always pointed down and at an angle away from her nose.

A few years after that she began having spells of a bizarre sensation, altered awareness, a pounding in the chest, and she had to sit down, stop what she was doing, and couldn't speak. These were odd spells and I assumed she had developed frontal lobe epilepsy from the scar on her brain. Increasing doses of anti-seizure d***s seemed to work initially, but then the spells came back.

A couple years after my diagnosis her endocrinologist, who treated her for diabetes mellitus, checked a thyroid. It was super-high. The spells were manifestations of hyperthyroidism. She drank the radioactive iodine cocktail which ablated her thyroid, got on thyroid replacement therapy, and felt well thereafter. No permanent harm done and she was able to come off the anti epilepsy d***s.

She was obese - not the typical skinny hyperthyroid patient - and if she developed thyroid eye disease, I couldn't tell because her one eye was already so messed up. I see how I screwed it up. but in retrospect I have never been sure what I could have done differently, except test her thyroid at the outset of treatment. Hence, a *lot* of patients - thousands - have had their thyroid checked by me since then. Every so often I pick up an abnormality and it gets treated.

The lady was an employee of the hospital where I trained and I ran into her one day;she gave me a hug and let me know how this had all gone down. She made a point of wanting me to know she didn't blame me "because I always seemed to care about her and what happened to her."

I think about her, and how I screwed up her diagnosis and set back her care, almost every day. I am a much better diagnostician now but I always remember this case and it reminds me not to get cocky or be too sure that my working diagnosis is correct.

Sorry in advance for this being so long.

Not a surgeon, but my mom had to have a kidney removed due to her waiting for almost 2 years to go to the doctor about her pain in her back. The doctors found out it was a large kidney stone and that her kidney was infected and had lots of gross pus shutting it down. After draining the fluids through tubes, over the course of a month and a half. she was finally ready for surgery.

Cue last Wednesday, the day of the surgery. She was ready to finally be done with it. They removed the stent put in and the tubes no problem, next was the kidney.

Here comes the “Oh S**t” moment. As they get ready to remove the kidney, there was complications. The kidneys infection had spread to a portion of her lung and a major artery, making them fragile as toilet paper. As the surgeon removed the kidney, a hole was tore in the lung, and even worse, the artery was severed. At that point it was a race to save her life and stabilize her. I don’t remember much about how they fixed her up there, but they had to fly her to a different hospital and have a heart surgeon fix the severed artery in a more permanent fashion.

Anyways, the heart doctor saw the grave situation and said she’s got a 1 percent chance for her to make it. But he did such an excellent job, that my mom is still alive, and getting stronger each day.

The moral of this story is: If you have insurance and are experiencing pain, go to a doctor as soon as you realize it. You may save your life, and also save some doctors from an “Oh S**t” moment like this.

I'm a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and "feeling drowsy". We start the usual workups and this dude's blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within 10 minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the "scratch" was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round. The guy didn't even know he'd been shot. When the coroner's report came back, we found that he'd been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could've done, but that was a serious "what the f**k just happened" moment.

My grandfather told a story about a clamp coming off an artery while he was pulling a kidney in rural Wyoming in the early 50's.

The abdominal cavity was quickly filling with blood and the nurse fainted. He was able to push down with his elbow on the descending aorta and got the clamp back on. Patient lived, but I think he chose his surgical assistants little more carefully after that.

Intern (1st year resident) in Internal Medicine here. My 3rd week out of med school, and I was in the ICU on night-shift. ~30 extremely sick and complicated patients for me and my senior resident to handle, and a few more coming in from the ER. My senior told me to manage the current patients while he did the new admissions. I was "signed out," meaning given information from the day team, about all the patients and what I needed to watch out for/follow-up on at night.

One patient in particular, Mr. X, was an elderly man in his 70s with altered mental status (he was acting loopy and nobody knew why) and nobody could get any information out of him. He was in arm restraints because he was pulling out his IV lines and acting aggressive towards the staff. He was also developing what appeared to be signs of sepsis. He needed a CT scan of his abdomen that night to look for a possible source of infection, and it was part of my job to follow-up on those results and start any necessary antibiotics/consult surgeons/etc if needed. No problem. About 30 minutes into my shift, I get paged that the patient is supposed to go down to radiology, but he's too agitated to sit still for the scan.

So I decide to give him a medication called Ativan to calm him down enough for the CT to be done. It's common practice to give a small dose of a benzodiazepine (a medication that works similarly to alcohol in its sedation-inducing effects) for agitation.

About 10 minutes after I gave the phone order, I hear the alarms go off and the overhead announcement of "Code Blue - CT scan. Code Blue- CT scan." My heart skipped about 5 beats.

I run down to radiology and call my senior to meet me there. As I arrive, the patient is laying on the scanner, unresponsive and not breathing. His nurse said his breathing became shallow then abruptly stopped. His adult daughter was standing beside him glaring at us.

But we were capable and ready to revive him without a problem - he just needed some respiratory support (a little help breathing). I got the bag/mask and meds ready. That was until his daughter said "Don't touch him!"...I had forgotten Mr. X was on file as DNR by his family's wishes. I knew I could save him, but my hands were tied.

In those last minutes, I had to watch my patient die. I anguished over my decision to give him the sedative. Did I give him too much? Should I have not given him the sedative and just cancelled the CT scan outright? What would have happened if we never found the source of his infection? Mr. X's daughter wasn't surprised that her father died that night. She was upset, but not at me. She was a better person than I would have been in her shoes.

The next morning my attending physicians (supervising doctors) told me Mr. X was on the edge of death to begin with, that he probably would have died of his infection in the next few days, that I didn't really make a mistake. I didn't and don't see it that way though; I knew they were just trying to be supportive. They all answered that if they had been in the situation they would have used an antipsychotic like Haldol instead of a benzo like Ativan. I still wonder how that night would have gone differently if I had known that medical fact just one day earlier.

That was in July. It scared the hell out of me, and haunted me for months afterwards. But it made me a more vigilant doctor.