ER Nurses Share Wild “One More Minute And I’d Be Dead” Stories From The Hospital

Emergency calltaker here. Most recent was a small child choking on some food. The ambulance my colleague sent was 10 minutes away the helicopter 15. While i was giving first aid instructions to the parents my colleague called the local family doctor, who in a stroke of luck took a last glance at his phone before he would have gone for a run where he would have left it at home. He was there within a minute and managed to dislodge the stuck food.

PT here. I was a new grad at the time like two weeks off boards FRESH, working at a rural hospital. I had a eval in the last spot of my day on a Friday for “back pain.” Woman walks in and I can tell she’s in way more pain and discomfort than what she’s put on the intake form. We are going through the eval, dots for straight musculoskeletal pain were NOT connecting. Absolutely nothing I did reproduced her pain. And as I’m helping her roll to her side to sit up I feel her heartbeat in her abdomen. My mind is SCREAMING a triple A, abdominal Aortic Aneurysm. So I politely escort her to the ED below the clinic… mind you everyone in the clinic has gone home it’s just me and my newbie skills. The triage nurse heard me out (bless her) and had the woman immediately taken back.

The woman I evaluated ended up living. I was right, she did have a AAA, that if I had just sent her home, the surgeon told her she would have died because it was very close to bursting. She writes to me on every memorial of the day I met her, she says I was the only medical professional that finally took her pain seriously and that I am her guardian angel.

All I can say is thank goodness for Differential Diagnosis and clinical reasoning skills and maybe just maybe a REALLY scared new grad PT. 6 years later still a very proud moment of mine, but just doing my job.

IM doc here. I had a guy who came in after feeling “weird in the chest” all day. 40s, athletic, in the middle of a divorce, stressed. EKG looked ok. I see nonspecific chest pain all day long and it’s usually heartburn or stress or asthma or a strained rib muscle and I was SO CLOSE to sending him out with some Maalox but there was something about this guy that made me send him to the ED. I asked if he wanted a wheelchair escort and he said no, he’d walk. (It was about 200 feet).

Anyway, an hour later I logged back into his chart to see how things were going in the ED and the first thing I see is a code note. He’d made it to the ED, gotten some blood drawn and turned out to be having a mild heart attack and while the doc was delivering the news and explaining next steps he’d had a cardiac arrest. They got him back immediately since having your arrest in an ED in front of a emergency physician is kind of a best case scenario. When I saw him again a week later he was doing great but told me that he’d almost gone to get some food (it was lunchtime) before going to the ED but decided against it. If he’d waited he would have had his arrest in a Jimmy John’s and things probably would not have gone so well for him.

Anyway, almost 20 years of practice and that’s my closest call.

One story that I'll never forget is a family of 6 (2 parents, 2 kids, 2 grandparents staying over) who saved themselves from a collective carbon monoxyde poisoning by sheer luck :

Everybody was asleep, the mom got up to pee, and fainted (from the CO poisoning) on her way back to bed. The sound of her fall woke her husband up who checked on her and called an ambulance. The first responders' CO detectors went off upon arrival and they evacuated everyone.

If she didn't have to pee, they'd be all dead.

If she just made a few more steps and reached her bed without fainting, they'd be all dead.

If the husband had a heavier sleep and didn't hear her fall, they'd all be dead.

If they thought the fainting was nothing and she'd see a doctor the next day, they'd be all dead.

Instead I had them all in the ER casually recovering from a moderate poisoning, chatting casually about this "unusual night" they were having, completely oblivious to how close they all got to make the local news the next day. It was eerie.

My dad had a food truck chicken sandwich years ago, in the 80s. He was a long haul truck driver driving home from Quebec to the Maritimes of Canada and he started to get crampy, pulled his fully loaded tractor trailer (lumber flat bed) off to the shoulder of the trans Canada highway and got out to urinate in front of the grill. Said blood was pouring out in his urine.

He managed to get back in the truck and got it going again, and not very much longer, he got severe pain in his lower belly, so bad he couldn’t push the clutch in all the way. He used the CB radio to try to get some one but being Quebec, everyone was speaking French and he did not parlez. He finally got one guy to answer and dad told him that he wasn’t sure what was wrong but he don’t know where the hospital was or if he could get to it with the big rig.

Guy told him to make it exit whatever it was and he’d meet up with him and an ambulance. Guy was a truck running along side dad by this point having caught up to him. He’d radioed dispatch who called emergency services.

By this point, dad was getting weaker and weaker and wasn’t able to get the truck to come to a halt. The other trucker moved his box trailer in front of dad, who’d manage to gear down, having never truly gotten up to speed, and dad deliberately ran into the back of the other driver, coming to a halt.

Ambulance arrived and off he went to Campbellton, NB and into surgery for a perforated bowel and blood loss from a chicken bone in the sandwich. The surgeon told mum that dad was about 30 min from bleeding out, had he not made it to care.

Not a nurse.... I am a lifeguard.....

I was on vacation and it's habit to scan the water and count kids.... I had a group of small children I counted and there was 7 of them.... I kept looking around just kinda hanging out on the beach.... Next time I looked there were only 6 of them..... I was pretty sure none had left the water (they were on a sand bar type thing and would have had to walk directly at me to leave by walking....


I got nervous and got up to look.... Started walking out on the sand bar and I could see neon green underneath the water..... I swam over (it was off the sandbar) as fast as I could and pulled a 7 or 8 year old boy out of the water.... Ran him to the beach and slammed his back, I could feel a pulse but he wasn't breathing.... I gave one rescue breath and that kicked his system back on and he choked out water and started to breath....


If I hadn't been watching, or if I didn't get up to make sure one hadn't gone under he would have definitely died... The parents were facing away from the water so they could face the sun.... Just assumed since the sand bar was there it would be okay.... Only 2 out of the kids could actually swim....

ER Nurse here, I am of the opinion that I would rather you come in and have us say "It's nothing, go home". Than not come in when you really should.

That being said, most of what walks through the front door could be treated at an urgent care during normal business hours. It's cheaper, I guarantee it.

I've had two patients in my care that experienced those. One guy had a little upset stomach and generally feeling crummy. Nice guy. Really chatty. We put him through the CT, and I watched his abdominal aorta dissect as the images came up.

The serendipitous part was that the trauma team just got finished with one guy, so they were all two rooms down. Guy brought in baked goods for the ER staff.

I recently had a patient carried in by her dad that was peri-arrest from anaphylaxis. Dad was uncomfortable using her epi-pen and thought he was close enough to the hospital to drive in instead of calling 911. She had weak central pulses, no peripheral pulses, and her BP was 50/30s on arrival. She was minutes? away from a bad outcome potentially. We did a lot of education and she ended up okay. If you have an epi-pen, know how to use it.

Edit: the dad was well-intentioned, appropriately worried when he arrived, and cared for her lovingly at her bedside as she recovered. This wasn’t meant to shame him. Emergencies look different for everyone, and allergies evolve quickly. She probably was not “that bad” when he decided to get in the car and it’s not always easy to know how bad something will get. But he got her to us just in time, which was what OP was asking about. To answer the prompt, there are very few of those cases, which is why this one came to mind. She was safe and dad learned a lot, so everyone won.

L&D nurse here.  I had a patient who was 38+3, pregnant with twins.  She was checking in for a routine induction.  History of panic disorder and anxiety but nothing else.

Got her admitted over the next hour.  She had some borderline hypertensive pressures (h**h 130s over 80s) and when I placed her IV her heart rate went up to 130.  Concerning, but in no way emergent, and possibly related to the panic disorder.

With no obvious event or explanation, Baby A had a precipitous drop into the 50s. I went into the room and her sats were in the 70s, heart rate 178.  We ran her to the operating room and delivered her emergently, then transferred her to the ICU.

Final diagnosis?  Acute heart failure with an EF of 17%.  It was sheer dumb luck that she was scheduled for an induction within an hour of her heart deciding to crump.

I have a story that happened to me. When I had my hysterectomy I was sent home to heal. There was a lot of endometriosis so the cut was huge and the doctor used staples to sew me back. I had an allergic reaction to the staples. My stomach was swelling up. I went back to the ER. But I had been swelling up so I had started to break open from where they had closed the wounds.

At the ER I was checking in and things went sideways fast. I started bleeding out in the ER waiting room. I woke up in the after surgery area and had to have a blood transfusion. (Several pints)

I have several autoimmune diseases so it's not crazy for me to have weird reactions to things. My doctor told me I am the only person he ever had who was allergic to surgical staples.

This is before Uber and 24 hour urgent care centers.

Got called out for an unknown medical around 3 in the morning.

Arrive on scene to find a lady in her late 40’s dressed, sitting in the lobby of a condominium building.

She was staying at a friend’s apartment for the week and didn’t have a car.

She was embarrassed that she called 911 but she was having such terrible indigestion since 11 pm and was afraid she had food poisoning.

No problem, we load her up, get a set of vitals, and then she mentions that it doesn’t get any better or worse when she lays down or sits up. That is a red flag in EMS, 99% of the time it means it’s cardiac related.

We hook her up to the EKG, and she’s throwing tombstones. My partner and I look at the monitor, look at each other, and both go “s**t”.

We started two IV’s, aspirin, morphine, and booked it to the nearest hospital with a cath lab.

When we came into the ED, the cardiologist is already there. He takes a look at the monitor (now running a full 12 lead), asks a few questions, we take her directly to the cath lab, and she codes.

We got her back after one shock, stabilized her, and they proceeded to perform the catheterization.

I heard she did fine in the cath and made a full recovery.

ER doctor here: It is exceedingly uncommon to see a patient who would have died had they not come to the ER a minute earlier.

I have heard numerous patients make claims like this and in the rare case that it's both potentially relevant to their current care AND I have enough time to look ... I've looked up the relevant records. In precisely zero of those cases would the person have died if they waited another hour. Another day? Sure.

I've had one personal case where the guy would have died if he had waited any longer to come in. He felt odd. Lightheaded. Nothing specific. 40 something generally healthy guy. Went into VFib right after he arrived. Shocked him out of it. He went back into a fatal arrhythmia a few more times but ultimately stabilized after more shocks and amio. If he hadn't arrived in the ER when he did, there's a h**h chance he either would have died, or not walked out neurologically intact like he did.

I exaggerated one once, on purpose, and it saved my father's life.

He woke up one morning feeling "weird." No pain, no dizziness, just a consistent feeling of strangeness in his chest and stomach. He said it almost felt like indigestion. After drinking some water and the feeling not going away, he asked me to drive him to an urgent care facility. About half way there, he says to me that he was starting to feel dizzy, and he was getting tunnel vision. I knew he had a history of heart disease, so I made the decision to go to the ER instead.

As I walk into the ER, the nurse at the desk tells me to take a seat and she'll call me when she's ready; there was already someone checking in at the desk, and a line of people behind them. I knew that explaining the situation would take too long, so I pushed the person out of the way and told the nurse that my dad couldn't breathe. That got him rushed past the line and into an open room, where he was found to be having a heart attack. Two IVs, a crash cart, and a defib later, he was stable. He was moved to another facility, where he had open heart surgery, and has since made a full recovery.

The doctor told me that it was already a razor thin margin that he made it, and had I taken the time to wait in line or try to make the nurse understand the whole story, he wouldn't have survived.

I used to work with a general surgeon who LOVED telling patients that their gallbladder, appendix, hernia, etc was:

1) The worst one he'd ever seen
2) He got there "just in time."

Patients loved hearing it and repeating it. It wasn't their fault; it was this old b*****d's.

I never really saw this in the ED to be honest. The human body is amazingly resilient, especially when it has some time to adjust. I had plenty of people walk in and I was like "holy s**t, how long have you just been walking around like this?"

In my last job I had a patient who had a VT arrest while visiting his mom (also our patient) on the tele floor of our hospital. It could have easily k****d him if it had happened almost anywhere else. He came through it neurologically intact and in pretty good shape.(Other than needing a heart transplant).

Me! Blue lips and short of breath but refused to go. Ambulance came. The ER nurses tried to explain and helped calm my husband before I put in an induced coma. I had heart and lung failure due to sepsis. Chest tubes were placed and surgeries followed. But sincerely it was the ER nurses and ICU nurses that saved me multiple times from drowning in my fluids and lack of O2. They believed me, it wasn't anxiety. Thank You Nurses!! They held my hand and stayed with me when scared ♥️.

Couple year ago I had a 13 yo boy come in one time after a skateboarding accident who had a sizable epidural hematoma but was neurologically fine. Hospital I was at did not have a pediatric ICU and I’m not a pediatric neurosurgeon, so was arranging for helicopter transfer. As that was brewing he went comatose and blew a pupil, so I took him to the OR for a crani and evac, then straight to CT to confirm no recollection, then helicopter to hospital with peds ICU. He walked out the hospital two days later. Just the nature of epidural hematomas. If he had blown a pupil in the helo, not insignificant chance he would’ve had permanent injury or been dead on arrival.

When I was 12, I spent a week throwing up strange colors and having cramps in my guts. At the end of the week I woke up one morning and it hurt so much I couldn't even get out of bed.

My mom was very alarmed, called her friend who said I was probably faking and to see if I was better by Monday (this was Saturday morning). My mom fortunately decided to call an ambulance anyway, and I was rushed into emergency surgery as soon as I got to the hospital.

That week of leadup was my appendix telling me it was in distress, and Saturday morning it burst. According to what I was told later, another hour delay and I'd have been dead from the toxic c**p my guts were swimming in. As it was I spent almost 2 weeks in the hospital.

Out of my ten years, I’ve had one patient. She drove herself to the ER and as I immediately wheel her inside triage to do an EKG, she went into cardiac arrest. I called a code, started cpr, and we shocked her back awake. Had it been just a few minutes earlier, she’d be dead in her car somewhere. Don’t drive yourself to the ER.

I’m not an ER nurse but I will share my own story: my son was in the NICU after giving birth to him at 32 weeks (complete placenta previa), and I was visiting him for the weekend. I got the worst headache of my entire life and nothing was helping. Next thing you know I began to feel really weird and couldn’t breathe and called the nurse in. I was having a stroke! If I had not been there and the nurse hadn’t come in that very minute I would have been a loooottttt worse off. They were able to get me on oxygen immediately and it was below 80%.