Hey Pandas, What Are Some Of Your Hospital Stories? (Closed)

I’m 7 years old and I have tonsillectomy. The surgeon prescribes cold food only for a week. That night the nurse brings semolina soup. My mum says "sorry, the surgeon said cold only." The nurse snaps "that’s what kitchen have given me." My impecunious mum ruins herself in sandwiches from the dispenser. the nurse is snappy and unpleasant till the end.

I’m 13 and I need emergency appendicectomy. I come to and I realise it’s the same room as when I was 7… and the same nurse. I’m weak and butterfingered and I drop my glass - it’s in smithereens. I apologise to the nurse who clears the mess up with lots of grumbling. I ask for another glass. No reply; no glass. I drink off the jug for a week.

A few years later, my mum works at the railway station. There’s a long waiting line and this customer moans "when am I going to get served?" My mum looks up. Yes, it’s the nurse. My mum goes "you, shut up.’

This involves an Ambulance ride and a Hospital story…

I was involved in an “All Service” emergency simulation when I was in my early 20’s. It was to test the ability of the local services to work together in a major incident.

The scenario was that a passenger plane had crashed at the local airport. I was one of the wounded…. Full wound make up, blood, bits of bone sticking out etc…

They assessed me, loaded me up on a gurney into the back of the ambulance and took off for the hospital. When I say it was real simulation, it was… lights and sirens the whole sheebang.

As the ambulance went down a recently upgraded road they hit a seam in the tarmac that bounced the vehicle slightly. This was when I found out that my gurney hadn’t been fully clipped into the hooks as I suddenly shunted forward and my gurney hit the internal door release.

The door flew open and I was suddenly on the verge of doing a “Hudson Hawk” out the back of the ambulance. Fortunately my attending paramedic grabbed me and screamed for the driver to pull over.

We got to the hospital emergency department and they immediately put the blood pressure cuff on me… I was expecting it to be elevated, but when the machine read my blood pressure as 312/40 my nurse said… well there is either something wrong with the machine or your dead!

Took three goes to finally get it, and yes… it was up…

About an hour later we were told that there was a bus waiting to take us back to the airport for debrief and to get our cars.

They pointed the way out and about 12 of us ‘walking wounded’ (did I mention one of the ‘victims had a metal plate sticking out of his neck and another had an eyeball hanging out) walked out towards the exit… unfortunately the exit meant going out through the waiting area for the ER…

It was by now about 10pm and the screams from the waiting patients, children, parents was rather impressive

Well mine is kind of funny. I noticed someone mentioned their epilepsy, I also have it and I had two bad seizures on the same day, both times smashing my head open. Second happened directly outside the hospital after they stitched me and released me from the first one. Well, now they realized this was a problem. I don’t remember the tests but turns out I had brain swelling, brain bruising and minor brain bleeding. Straight to ICU.

So! I’m a stubborn one. They had me VERY drugged and I was not exactly myself. I kept yelling at those poor nurses that they had no right to keep me, that I was leaving “right f’ing now!”. Well, I certainly tried my best.

Once I was left alone I ripped out three Iv’s, the gown off my body, all the electrodes on my chest and pulled a catheter out of my lady parts. I tried to stand and fell. My legs had temporarily stopped working (needed physiotherapy for a bit after). So what did I do? I began to army crawl towards the door wearing nothing but a thong.

What I did NOT know was that in ICU there are weight sensors in the bed to alert the nurses if you leave it so they caught me pretty quickly. Woke up with everything reattached and now I’m strapped to the bed. Over heard one nurse tell another I was “fiercely independent”. Made me smile. I’m fine now though! Still get seizures but that was probably the worst of them so far.

Hard to narrow down to one story, but I'll tell this one. When my youngest brother was in hospital when he was 4, he was in ICU and basically on palliative care. I spent a lot of my time in there visiting (skipped a lot of school). Not long after he was admitted, we found out my best friend's cousin was also in the ICU. Talk about coincidence! Anyway, I can't remember exactly why she was there, but I think she had some sort of infection or something that went septic. She was in/on(?) an iron lung. I thought that was interesting (I've always been into medical stuff) because I hadn't heard of them being used in recent times, only in decades past. It was really serious, she was also considered at end-of-life care. The amazing thing is she survived, beat the infection and came off the iron lung. She recovered fully and now, 20 years later, she is in perfect health with one or two kids. My brother also survived, at least for another 6 years, amazingly.

I spent 4 days in a VA hospital. I was the only female veteran inpatient so I had a private room. Every night a nurse would come walk me around the hospital. She had a calming voice and accent and would tell me how good I was doing. On my second night she brought me a pink blanket. My stay was made so much better by her presence.

Some context: my dad works at this hospital.

I was getting a cast after breaking my wrist. The doctor who came in is good friends with my dad, but I didn’t know him very well. To make me feel better, he said he wanted to show me the contact photo in his phone for my dad. It was a Lego man. This Lego man looked EXACTLY like my dad. It was ridiculous

I was sent home, still pregnant, after 2 days of inducing labor, 3 weeks overdue, because they don't do induction on Sundays!

Healthy 8#7oz baby girl born on Monday ❤️

I went in for a scheduled MRI, 7pm. I parked on the wrong side of the building, but I’d already taken my parking slip so I just trekked 10min through the hospital. There was nobody at any of the info desks to validate my parking ticket. After the MRI, I tried to go back through the hospital the way I came and hit dead end after dead end. Finally decided to escape through an ambulance bay and walk around the outside of the hospital. I’m following the sidewalk around the hospital and it suddenly spits me out into the neighborhood. Ugh, fine, I walk a few blocks and finally get to where I can head back to the hospital, and I find my car. I put my ticket in the machine on my way out, figuring I’ll pay the fee and then request a refund, but nope. “Push HELP button,” the screen tells me. I push the help button. It rings for almost a minute then the security person who picks up asks me where I am. I tell them the name of the hospital entrance and they clearly have no idea what I’m talking about?? I get put on hold for several minutes, then they come back and ask me where I am a few more times and finally tell me they’re going to send someone to find me. Shockingly, this part only takes a couple minutes. Security guard rolls up, puts his window down, aims what looks like a garage door remote at the gate arm, and…nothing. He parks and gets out, walks right up to the gate, and presses the button again. Nada. He has me back up so he can look at the ticket machine. Nada. He calls someone on his walkie talkie, who tells him to check in the parking kiosk. He pretty much gropes the little kiosk floor to ceiling, finds nothing. Another security guy walks up, asks me how I’m doing. I’m like, “Fine???? 🙄🙃😂😒” He asks the first guy, “The badge scanner didn’t work?” and first guy looks confused. Second guy holds his ID card up to the employee badge scanner on the ticket machine. The gate arm goes up and I am finally FREEEEE.

So I was staying for five days in the hospital for a sleep study for my epilepsy. We were checking into the room when the nurse started asking us questions. I was terrified out of my mind (like the nurse came in and noticed I wasn't okay, asked, and I started crying), so I wasn't acting how I normally do in front of people. I was just kinda swinging around with my rainbow bear in my arms. I don't think the nurse thought I was paying attention, but I was completely focused on her. I just can't make eye contact. One of the last questions she asked my mom was "does she have any.." *whispers* ".. developmental delays?" Y'all. I was shocked. I don't have any, I was just acting in my normal I'm- terrified- and- anxious- out- of- my- mind way. Obviously it doesn't to me if someone has any mental disorders or anything, I think I was more shocked of the way she asked it, it was like she didn't want me to hear her. It was a new experience for me because no one has ever asked me that before lol

Not a huge crazy one. But my best friends dad ( they live 400 miles away) went to the emergency room, and I get a text from my friend saying his dad had a really bad stomach ache. No other information, I’m nowhere near a doctor. In fact failing middle school. I knew immediately it was appendicitis. I told my friend what I thought. Sure enough fifteen minutes later I get a message that says I was right.

Also once I had to go to the hospital at 8 at night because I broke my arm on a couch

I gave birth to my baby boy in April 2022. As I was pushing him out, his head got stuck and he had to be vacuumed out. He pooped inside me and I also probably pooped while pushing. This is all gross and embarrassing to me (yes, I know its natural). However it was made worse because of a conversation had by two nurses. "I just had to change the sheets cause of a nasty mess" "ewww gross". This conversation was had RIGHT NEXT TO ME. The doctor and doctor in training were still sewing me up. It made me feel embarrassed but I was too drugged up to stand up for myself. So this is pretty bad In itself, how ever it gets worse.
Later on my baby and I are in the recovery room. I'm noticing he seems to be breathing at a rapid rate. It just seemed off to me. This is my first baby, and I didn't know 100% so I mentioned it to the nurse.
Guys, it took me to say something to 3 different nurses and 2 different doctors for someone to finally take me seriously. They finally took him away after 4 hours to put him in an incubator with a machine that breathed for him. He was in the NICU for 3 days. I'm not sure if I should name the hospital but I live in Toronto, Canada if that helps.

I had a fall mountain biking and broke my elbow. As in, smashed the elbow socket completely off; you could feel and see the extra joint in the middle of my forearm. My husband took me to the ER at the hospital, where I explained I'd broken my elbow. I was told by the intake person, the triage person, the ER doctor, and the radiology technician that it was probably just a bruise. They plopped us in a room while the x-rays were being read, and then the ER doctor came in looking like she was going to throw up, holding her phone to show us an x-ray that you could see from space was broken. She sent me home with a prescription for one day's worth of painkillers and the wrong phone number for the hospital's orthopedic surgeon, who had told her we should call them first thing in the morning and let them know I needed to see them same day. My husband eventually figured out the right phone number but the office wouldn't make an appointment till they had seen the catscan, at which point they then refused completely to treat me because their hospital couldn't handle the surgery. Eventually ended up going to a different hospital's ER (MGH in Boston) on day 4 (don't forget, no painkillers since day 1 because the first hospital's on-call orthopedic surgeon had told the ER doctor they'd see me the next day). The MGH surgeon was very perplexed at the story of the first hospital, but was amazing, and took out all the splinters and reassembled the big chunks with a plate and screws. So one injury/incident, with one bad hospital story and one great hospital story.

i love telling people that i go to the hospital every few weeks (cause i technically do for physical therapy lol). i've gone to the hospital a bunch of times for minor things but i've only stayed overnight once. that was for a sleep study and it led to me getting my tonsils and adenoids removed which was no fun :/ i couldn't sleep at all and i woke up a bunch of times during the night but they got the info they needed to diagnose me ig.

Not Necessarily my own hospital story but my grandmother's son. So my uncle(My grandmother's son) had the flu a few weeks after he was born. It was getting so bad to the point where she took him to the hospital. When they got there he was taken to the ER immediately. When he was trying to be given a flu shot they couldn't find a vein to stick it into. (his veins were too small at the time.) They took him into the surgery room and all you can hear was the screaming of a crying baby. My Grandmother was scared to death as she waited. A nurse ran out of the room and my grandmother saw what was happening. Blood everywhere is what my grandmother said. They had nowhere to stick the needle and decided to stick it in his head. My grandmother saw and ran out saying she couldn't be there when her baby dies. She ran all the way home. Dominic (The baby's name) Survived but was hit by a car at the age of 2. Still alive today, not disabled maybe has some brain damage and anger issues and smokes but he is now 40 and is mostly healthy.

A few months ago I was getting a small surgery on both my big toes to permanently stop ingrown toenails. First time with anesthesia and I was 13 (still am)

I was like “I’m gonna stay up for 30 seconds under anesthesia and break the record”

Lol I didn’t last three seconds and it was weird af

Waited 6 hours with arm out of socket.
Charged 1,300 to be adnitted
Almost 1k for saline bag
16k MRI

My wife and I were in the same hospital room together once. Me for some chest pain something or other, and her for passing out constantly due to heart issues. They figured we were married and no need on giving us separate rooms since we were there at the same time.

I’m a night owl. Nurses confiscated my activity book (it had an electronic pen that flashed green/red and made noises depending on answers picked. I got so mad.

I also woke up after eye surgery (squint repair) and my eye was all red and weepy. Mum passed out cold and ended up in a wheelchair headed back to the ward with me.

I got to witness chemo delivered directly into the spine (intrathecally) as a student. Fascinating to see. Patient recovered.

I was allowed in for a procedure done on my mum, fitting a drain for ascitic fluid in her stomach (she had cancer) and did not pass out. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive.

Between being a patient, a member of staff, and my family’s health advocate, lots of stories!

being russian, my dad tried to get me into hockey as a small kid. I was about ten years, and i was about as thick and sturdy as a wooden pencil lol. So naturally the other kids start to beat me up, and i had to go to hospital because the 13 year old giant boy there broke my glasses, and one of the shards got stuck in the skin under my eye. when it was my turn with the nurse there she told my father that i was the “most pathetic little boy she’d seen all day”. lmao i cried all the way home, and the worst part is my father seemed to agree with her 🥲

Went into the hospital in my early 20's for kidney stones (too much whole milk!); had to have them surgically removed because they were needle-sharp. Recovery required heavy pain medications, so they were also giving me an anti-nausea drug to counter the side effects. Lying in bed on day two or three of recovery, and the muscles in my left leg start to twitch. I assumed it was probably from receiving so many injections, so I didn't think much about it at first, but over the next ten minutes or so, all the muscles in my leg start to clench up. Soon, I can feel the reaction spreading up one side of my body and down the other. It wasn't painful, but I couldn't relax any of my muscles--my arms were clenched in against my chest, my hands were drawn up into claws, and my neck was twisted further to the side that I can turn it naturally. I could still breath and speak normally, so I wasn't too worried, but a family friend witnessed it happening and freaked out. She called the nurse, the nurse called my doctor, and the doctor instructed nurse to draw up a shot of liquid Benadryl but not to give it to me until he arrived. His office was less than a mile away so he was there in ten minutes, and as soon as he gave me the shot I could feel the reaction reversing, again with the muscles relaxing sequentially up one side of my body and down the other. My doctor told me afterwards that this was a well-documented allergic reaction to the anti-nausea drug, but so rare that he had never seen it in 30 years of medical practice. Had to stay in the hospital an extra two days (on I.V. Benadryl) to make sure all of the drug had purged from my system, during which time I apparently became the talk of local medical circles.