“The Nastiest Thing I’ve Witnessed”: 45 Doctors Share Their Most Horrifying Delayed Cases

Nurse here.

I work in a very rural hospital, and we have a patient population that seems to avoid the hospital at all costs. I have had so many, usually related to diabetics with foot sores- almost always resulting in amputation of a toe (or more).

However, my favorite was an elderly farmer who came in with chest pain that, 'Wouldn't go away', as he put it. When we asked him if he had it before had it before- he had said that he had been having chest pain on and off for years, but it would typically go away after he grabbed his electric fence.

Apparently, the first time he had the pain- he was standing out near an electric fence on his farm, and he reached out to steady himself and accidentally grabbed the electric fence, which shocked him, and made the pain go away. So after that, whenever he would have the pain, he just went and grabbed the fence and it made him feel better.

He had literally been cardioverting himself for years.

He was fixed up and sent on his way- but we all still chuckle about it now and then because he was so nonchalant about it.

This has happened a few times, actually...

But I had a gal come in on Monday after being discharged from the hospital Friday after giving birth.

So basically, we tell ladies to avoid intercourse until a doctor clears you, and well, her spouse kept insisting and insisting and insisting that Friday night she caved and let him go to town. He wound up tearing some stitches that were placed and bleeding like a stuck hog all weekend long.

Came into our clinic, blue in the lips and fingers, and her hemoglobin was 4 (normal should be 12 - 15).

She didn't wanna be a bother, so she waited until she started feeling dizzy all the time. She got another trip to the hospital for transfusion and repair for that.

But...like I said, this isn't the first time I've seen that, so for the love of God...if homeboy is begging for it after you just had a baby, maybe he needs a lesson in self control and a bottle of moisturizer.

I’m still just a nursing student, but my professor told us a story of when he was an ER nurse. An elderly 80 something year old woman came in to the ER, and as he assessed her, he noticed her oral temperature was normal despite her neck being extremely hot to the touch. He decided to take a rectal temperature, which ended up being like 103 or something crazy. While he was down there, he noticed something peeking out of her v****a and proceeded to remove it. It was an old sock. She said her uterus had prolapsed months before and she was using the sock to keep it in. They began treating her for TSS immediately but sadly she went septic and died later that day.

Tongue in cheek, he told us she died of toxic sock syndrome. 😩💀 nurses have to use dark humor to cope.

I had a patient once who I use as an inspiration to others.

In his late 40s he was diagnosed with alcoholic cardiomyopathy (his heart was only pumping 15% of the blood out per stroke, normal is 60%+), atrial fibrillation (fast irregular heart), diabetes, and hypertension in the same day. He weighed 140kg, smoked heavily, ate nothing but food from the pie shop, and spent every night in the pub. The cardiologist told him he was basically about to die (true), and was put on five different medications.

He stopped drinking altogether, started exercising, quit smoking, ate nothing but salad. He lost 45kg, his diabetes reversed and he stopped some medications, his heart went back to 55% stroke volume (pretty much normal) and most of his HF meds were stopped, his blood pressure dropped to normal.

He was "the happiest he'd ever been, and not just to be alive". After a couple of false starts, he found himself a decent girlfriend. He still went to the pub for the social aspects, but drank soda-water.

He was a really decent bloke too, and was quite the inspiration to many people in the small country town where we were living at the time to improve their lives.

A&E/ED doctor here!
A farmer in his 70s reluctantly came in with his wife after falling over outside while wrangling a sheep one WEEK earlier. He did not want to be there but had been “forced” to come by his wife who was worried about him. On questioning/examining he was pale, short of breath, and clearly in pain all over the right side of his chest but not wanting to show it! X-ray and bloods showed he’d broken loads of ribs, punctured his lung and bled profusely into his chest and was now very anaemic!

Elderly woman fell at home and broke both femurs. Son thought she just needed to rest so he carried her to her bed. She laid there in her own filth for 3 days before anyone called 911. The son lives with her, and there’s family next door as well. HOW. WHY?!

Former medic here. Called to a patient who had cut their leg while chopping wood about a week prior and now it was really itchy. Old gentleman, didn’t drive, lived alone. Got to his house, unwrapped the ungodly swollen leg to find that he’d tried to superglue the wound closed and maggots had commenced to growing inside. The itching he was feeling was the writhing maggots under his skin.

Had a patient brought in by her son who “took care of her,” when she arrived to our unit I performed a skin assessment...took off her socks and found a fallen off gangrenous toe. Seems fake and I wish this was but it was by far the nastiest thing I’ve witnessed. Son said he had no idea when his mother’s foot became “that bad.” No words.

I had a patient come in saying he couldn’t see. How long had it been going on? For five days. The man had been blind for five days and didn’t come in because he thought it might be “like a cold Or something”.

During the exam when I asked him to move his legs he said “oh, I can’t do that”... (??) I asked how long he’d been unable to move his legs or walk? Wife chimes in- about two years. Never saw a doctor about it- They just borrowed a friends wheelchair and kept it rolling.

Turned out he’d had multiple strokes with multiple risk factors he never addressed. Given how little insight he appeared to have into the condition I honestly felt sorry- he didn’t have insurance so I’m sure that played a role in him avoiding seeing anyone.

Had a guy show up in my clinic one day with a complaint of finger swelling. So as the story went, his finger got swollen and painful about a week prior. Just got worse and worse, and about 3 days prior to coming, a hole opened up in the tip of his finger (this is where I, personally, would have noped right to the office).

So come the day of the visit, he says, “By the way, I pulled something out of the hole in my finger yesterday with a pair of tweezers, no idea what it is.” I asked him if he took a picture or kept it, and he produced a tissue from his shirt pocket.

It was his distal phalanx (read: last bone in the finger). The bone had gotten infected and the body did it’s thing and basically tried to eject what was now a hot foreign body.

The guy pulled his fingertip out of his fingertip. A better magic trick, I have not since seen.

OR RN, was on call on a Friday night. Got called in for an exploratory laparotomy. Some late staff had gotten the case ready and patient in the room when I arrived. I walked into the room to see the patients testicle was bigger then a basketball, two people holding it up to prep it. The guy had a large part of his bowel in his l ft testicle, and his bowel had ruptured due to the pressure. We suctioned poop out of his abdomen for over an hour. Apparently the week before he lifted something heavy and felt a pop. Hadn’t urinated in two days because it was so swollen his p***s was not visible. That’s why he finally came in, he couldn’t pee. Although his testicle had been slowly growing for a week. Unfortunately he didn’t make it, he lived thru 3 abdominal surgeries but sepsis did him in from the ruptured bowel.

I’ve seen a few over the years, and they generally fall into the category of ‘If it’s not diagnosed then I can’t have it,’ or ‘I didn’t think it was that bad.’ As a medical student I remember an older lady that had a breast that was necrotic and falling off. It had been progressing over the last several years. But, if she didn’t get diagnosed with breast cancer, then she couldn’t have it. In the other category I’ve seen a few cases of Fournier’s Gangrene. Pretty much obese, male diabetics that had a pimple/sore that started in the pubic region. By the time they come to the hospital it’s a raging infection where the treatment is basically to cut away everything in the pubic/ groin region down to the muscle layer. That little sore didn’t seem like much at first.

I was working as a surgical junior when my team was called down to A&E to see a patient who had come in with a complication from a recent hernia operation. When we came down, we saw that the patient was holding a plastic bag over their abdomen. When this was removed, we found that their wound had opened and their intestine was visible to the air. It transpired that this was not something that had happened over night, it had taken several days. The patient had started using plastic bags and newspaper to dress the wound when they ran out of dressings.

Edit: Addendum - because this is getting a lot of views, I must stress that this case was exceptionally uncommon, and an example of what happens when someone does not seek medical attention when it is obviously required. In general, hernia operations are very common and very safe; that being said, if you have any surgical procedure and you are not certain the wound is healing properly, you must seek medical attention.

We once had a patient who went to Emergency for abdominal pain and they discovered a fungating breast wound (don't image search that) that she'd had for two years and hadn't gotten medical attention for. A biopsy and a PET scan later she was diagnosed with breast cancer with extensive liver, lung and bone mets. This was also in Australia so it wasn't a money issue. Just sad.

My girlfriend is a care worker and she recently told me that she slipped off a patient's slippers and remarked "I didn't know you had lost your toes" to which the patient responded "Well I hadn't till you took the slipper off dear"

Sounds like something from a grim sketch show, god bless anyone who can do jobs like that.

Story from my SIL who is a nurse. Young man was brought in to the ER. He had a sinus infection that he had let go to the point that it had eaten through the skull and into this brain. She was told that it had started several months before. He didn't want to go to the doctor for it. All it would have needed was 10 days of antibiotic pills. Instead, he was not brought in until he was unconscious, and died within a few hours.

My favorite story (psych NP). I was called to a suburban ER to see a man who said he had a horrible stomach cancer and needed to lose weight in order to get better. He insisted that he'd been diagnosed by a very prominent gastroenterologist with "Barrett's stomach" which isn't even a thing (it's an esophageal problem). I guess I got called in because the story was bizarre and the staff didn't know what to do with him.

He eventually disclosed that he'd shot himself in the leg a few days previously and was waiting for gangrene to set in. He believed that the resulting amputation of the leg would allow him to lose the required amount of weight, thus curing his cancer.

I excused myself to let the ER staff know that they should probably examine the leg and to call the county psychiatric service, which was protocol at this particular hospital. I'm not sure what ever happened to him but that was a very impressive manifestation of a delusion!

Guy came in with a dead leg. Waited until it turned black and then decided to head to the ER. They tried an angiogram to open up blood flow but it was way late for that. Guy had several clots in his lungs and legs. Undiagnosed atrial fibrillation. He couldn't believe we were going to amputate, kept asking me what else I could do.


Go back in time a week ago and come in. Kinda around when it turned blue.

My Dad is the one that wouldn't go in. He got a sore in the crease on the bottom of his second toe (the one next to the big toe, so it would be the Piggy That Stayed Home) and just kept ignoring it. He would go with his wife to her nail place and have his toe nails trimmed and I think that's where the infection probably got in when they soaked his feet. He blew it off for a couple of weeks until the wife made him see the doc. It's a good thing she did. The infection had gotten into the bone so they had to snip his toe off to the first knuckle to catch it before it went any further. The doc said had he waited any longer, he could have lost the entire foot. He's lucky to just have a Stubby Piggy and not a Stubby Leg.

Not a nurse/doctor but a lab scientist. Had a guy come in at the end of the day for chest pain that’s been bothering him “all weekend”. The ED doc ordered a troponin blood test which helps rule in/out heart attacks. If the test runs above 0.03, we consider that a sign for a heart attack and act accordingly. This guy’s very first troponin was 21.00. TWENTY-ONE. The highest we’ve ever had up till then was an 8.00. The guy should’ve been dead ages ago, but he somehow pulled through. Don’t ignore chest pains, people.

Edit: Just wanna clarify that the hospital I work for is a tiny a*s, 25 bed, rural community critical care hospital. Definitely not a place with dedicated cardiologists, cath lab, bedside assays, or even a big test menu, period. Bare basics! And the guy did, somehow, end up surviving.