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

My grandmother of at the time 80+ years old had her second heart attack on the bus. She got off the bus at the next stop which was the hospital, walked in and collapsed in the reception hall. Was resuscitated there with AED and back home within the week. The cardiologist was amazed. My grandmother had bruised ribs and a great story. She knew that it was a heart attack because she had her first when she was 65 and recognized the feeling. She had a couple more great years.

My one friend is an ER doc and the other is a surgeon and they're both here watching TV while I'm playing on the computer and their answer is:

ER Doc: "It happens, it's not the most common thing but the reason you here so many stories about it is because people who really will die without immediate intervention wait until the last second to come in for help."

Surgeon: "Seconded. I can't tell you how many people will know something is majorly wrong and wait until they're on deaths doorstep to get it looked at."

The conversation then proceeded about a lady who was s******g out of her v****a for three months and somehow survived and it was only known when she came in to the ER for her foot rotting off due to diabetes. They used a lot of big words I don't know but that's the gist of the story. Gross.

Ooh! My favorite. I had a patient a few years back- went in for a routine OB appointment. Her office was connected to the hospital (important). She was getting over some respiratory bug that her daughter gave her, but was doing okay elsewise. Sat down in the chair for vitals and promptly passed out. BP low as h**l. They called a code blue, whisked her to labor and delivery (very quick walk). Ended up doing a crash cesarean and her belly was just *full* of blood. Trauma surgery had to get called in to assist and they found she had ruptured her spleen RIGHT THEN AND THERE IN HER OB OFFICE.

Anywhere else, her and that baby would have been dead. They both had great outcomes.

My stepdad showed up at the hospital for a scheduled colonoscopy with a heart rate of 23. He was admitted immediately and given a pacemaker. Not really a one minute situation, but if he hasn’t had the colonoscopy appointment he would have stayed home alone all day and probably been dead by the time my mother got home from work.

I was patient transport services in highschool. My favorite was a guy had gotten in a car accident and had his bone sticking out of his arm. He did the "I'd have been dead in a few more minutes!" And kept trying to have all services directed at himself. 1 hour later they brought in his passenger who had his arm torn off and was impaled through the chest with a peice of a sign after they freed him from the wreck. He demanded starbursts and water ice at our earliest convenience.

I'm a respiratory therapist and work in the ER. It's pretty common to have patients code in the ambulance on their way to the ER. But I think in these situations, they know right away that things are bad and they barely make it. One of the paramedics who taught my CPR class said that since we're in a dense, but geographically small municipality with 2 hospitals, the chance of surviving cardiac arrest is much higher than average. They call once they're in the rig and they're outside the hospital by the time report is given.

I always like Boyles (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) response when he got shot in the a*s. “The doctor said an inch to the left and 3 feet higher and I would have died.”.

Not an ER nurse, just a witness. Rush hour morning traffic into the sun. Guy ahead of me on a motorcycle. Truck in front of motorcycle guy. Truck had huge wooden box of some sort vaguely strapped down in the truck bed. Motorcycle sees an opening, passed truck and he’s outta there. Seconds later box falls out of truck bed splintering into a million pieces causing a lot of chaos for those of us behind it. Motorcycle guy dodged death by seconds—and will never ever know. I still think about you motorcycle guy.

I'm a psychiatrist, so we don't have a ton of these types of stories, but there is one that sticks out in my mind from residency.

I was on-call one night when I got a call from an outpatient of one of the attendings in the clinic. The pt's wife said that he had recently started a new medication, and wasn't feeling well, and just wanted to make sure it was nothing serious, apologizing for bothering me. I looked in the pt's chart and noticed that he had a history of liver issues and was currently being monitored and treated for cirrhosis. The medication he had recently started was known to be hepatotoxic, or potentially damaging to the liver. The pt's doc should not have started the medication given the pt's history.

I discussed the situation with his wife, who reported that her husband had been feeling ill, vomiting, felt weak, had abdominal pain, and when I asked, reported that his skin and whites of his eyes were yellow. She also noted that he had been displaying progressive confusion and seeming "out of it." I told her not to give the pt the new medication anymore, and to either bring the pt to the nearest emergency room or call 911. She asked me if that was really necessary, as she and her husband were already in their pajamas and were going to go to bed soon. She asked if they could just go to urgent care in the morning. I basically said, "Ma'am, if that were my father, I would either be on the phone with 911 right now or getting in the car to come over and bring him to the emergency room myself." She seemed to take that seriously, and said that they would get dressed and go in.

I checked in about 1-2 hours later on the pt's chart and saw that the wife did bring her husband in, thankfully, and that he was immediately admitted to the ICU with acute liver failure. His exam findings and labs were pretty terrible. Had he and his wife gone to bed with the plan of going to urgent care in the morning, he would likely have died.

Otherwise, I have definitely heard my fair share of pt stories about being on the brink of death when they weren't, having experiences within healthcare that would never happen or are impossible, or presenting labs/exam findings/med doses that are meant to show the severity of something that do the opposite. Most of the stories I've read on Reddit about people reporting they woke up during surgery seem incredibly exaggerated if not completely made up based on the way that ORs are set up and how surgeries are done. Just about any story you see including things like "so the nurse saw my leg and just started screaming," or "all the doctors and nurses were shocked and had no idea what to do" are likely exaggerations as well. There is very little that actually shocks medical staff, and nurses have seen s**t and can handle a lot. I've had numerous patients sit down in front of me and say that they are likely the worst/most f****d up person I'll ever meet, that they've gone through the worst trauma I've probably ever heard of, or made comments like "yeah, you're probably wondering how I'm even still alive right now." In all cases, they have been wrong. The worst/most f****d up patients I've ever met don't consider themselves so. The worst trauma I've ever heard of has come from patients who don't put a lot of thought into comparisons. There are definitely pts that amaze me by still being alive, but none of them boast about how bad they have it like there's an award for the most suffering a human being can experience.

The only one I can think of was the dude that coded in the parking lot after driving himself to the ED feeling short of breath. If he wouldn’t have gotten into the parking lot when he did, things could have gotten real ugly real quick, especially if he’d coded while driving.

I’m certainly no ER nurse and was obviously too young to remember it (or be able to validate) but I’m told that a few weeks or months (not sure) after I was born that:

1: I was sleeping WAY too much.

2: My mother had already had two kids, so she knew it was particularly unusual.

3. She took me to the family doctor who immediately called an ambulance and there was a team waiting when I got to ER.

4. I had scepticaemia and it was pretty touch and go. Story goes that my parents were warned they may need to start making arrangements.

According to the story, if mum hadn’t already had the experience of having a couple of bubs then she probably wouldn’t have clocked that I was way too sleepy for a new-born.

I was told this story a few times growing up, but now that mum is older she says she doesn’t even remember it, as with most of our early years.

No idea if it’s true or not TBH.

The other ‘near misses’ in emergency I remember were the almost monthly childhood asthma attacks that always had dad racing through red lights and occasionally being stopped by cops who then escorted us to ER, after which I’d spend a week in the oxygen tent. I DEFINITELY remember those, but can’t attest as to whether I was really minutes away from death.

Can’t really validate the first story but I always feel for my parents at how stressful it must have been for them with the almost monthly visits to ER for asthma. I’d be terrified if I had to go through that as a parent.

My mom was told that if she was thirty minutes later bringing me in to the ER, I would've died. To be fair, I was 5 months old and had a severe case of rotavirus and I was so dehydrated that my eye sockets were sunken. They also had a lot of trouble getting an IV in me because my veins were collapsed, so they had to put in a port.

ER nurse of two decades. TBH a lot. That being said, we often tell people these things to underscore the importance of them coming in. You have no idea **how many** people take two Tylenol for their chest pain and take a nap vs coming to the ER. Or think the “worst headache of their life” will go away.

I’ve had a few patients where it was literally “if they hadn’t been in front of us they would have died”. A few. But in the end I want people to know if s**t seems weird, just come in.

I don’t know if mine really counts, but when my son was 11 months old he started having respiratory issues. We called the on-call pediatrician, and he tried to explain the whole “sucking” on the abdomen and if it got to that then to bring him in. This was at like 9pm on a Saturday night. I stayed up all night with him, while he coughed and didn’t sleep and didn’t drink any milk. At 8am the next morning I took him to my nearest urgent care, they sent me to a different urgent care. I went to that and the PA gave him a breathing treatment. At this point his oxygen level was at 82%. I knew absolutely nothing about what this meant at the time. The PA said it was up to us if we wanted to take him to the hospital or not. He was completely casual about the whole situation and didn’t express any sort of concern, so we didn’t think to be concerned either. We decided that we would take him to the hospital, just to be safe, and opted to call an ambulance because the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. Thank god we did. When the EMTs arrived they were shocked at the lack of concern, and immediately insisted that we rush to the nearest children’s hospital with lights and sirens. As we were driving my son started to lose consciousness. It’s been 4 years, and even as I’m typing this story I have chills. I don’t know what would have happened if any different decisions were made that day, and I will never forgive myself for not taking it seriously sooner. We visited the hospital several more times with him, and he was diagnosed with asthma. I will say we learned to take it seriously, and the following hospital visits caught it very early.

One of my CNA coworkers was in the cafeteria getting lunch. A 30-something visitor suddenly collapsed, no vitals. Coworker immediately started chest compressions while someone else alerted the code blue. Person lived and made a full recovery. I don’t know about “one minute more”, but I know if she hadn’t collapsed in the hospital around an entire cafeteria of people with vast experience in CPR, she’d most likely have died.

My lung collapsed and I thought it was anxiety when I finally ended up in the ER I had to sign a paper and then into a room for an emergency chest tube. The urgency in which they worked around me definitely felt like one of those I could’ve died moments, but no one ever said it to me. I’m curious if it has ever actually been said to a patient out loud.

Not quite the same, but many many years ago I had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl. Haven't touched anything in 9 years but yeah..

By the time they got me awake they used two bottles of narcan, my lips were blue and my breathing was so laboured that they told me if they were a minute or two longer I'd be dead.

I'm not an ER nurse. However, I am a recovering Acute Myloid Leukemia patient. I was told that my prognosis wasn't ideal by very skilled and cagey communicators. I picked up on my care team's careful wording very early on. They never made declarations like, you only have a certain time frame. Making promises and definite declarations opens them up to lawsuits so they do need to be careful about what they say.

The only time anyone came close to saying, "one more minute and you will be dead" is when I was preparing to have a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, the prebmt testing showed that my leukemia had come raging back. I remember the initial phone call I had with one of my oncologists after the new wave of cancer was discovered. He repeatedly apologized, told me that sometimes he needs to just sit in his car and scream in frustration (bless him. I can't imagine the stress he works under. I would scream in my car too.) while we discussed next steps. Reading between the lines I definitely understood that no oncologist apologizes like that unless they feel like they have failed.

Years later he disclosed that he was shocked I made it to remission.

Maybe I didn't and still don't ask the right questions in the right manner to elicit a dramatic response, but this has just been my experience while living with a severe illness.

4th of July weekend 4 years ago I was coughing and hacking, feeling lethargic and heavy in the chest. I'd been to Urgent care the week before and they said it was likely bronchitis and gave me steroids etc. I just couldn't get over the feeling and so had the wife take me to the ER. I was admitted to the cardiac care ward with congestive heart failure. Walked out a week later with a defib vest and an EF of 25-30 which was supposedly twice what I had when I went in. If I had gone to sleep instead its likely my wife would have woken up next to my corpse in the morning. I felt sick but not dire by any means.

Not quite a minute or two but hours myself. I was so far into diabetic ketoacidosis before I was first diagnosed type 1. I was so weak I couldn’t even make it back down the stairs to get to the ER after a doctor visit. I was in DKA for months before my body started to fail.

My mother had left the state for the weekend so I was alone and couldn’t do anything. Thankfully she came back when she did because even the doctors and nurses said I wouldn’t have made it another day. Spent almost a week in the ICU before I was even stepped down to the ER.