50 Times Medical Workers Pretended To Be Calm While Seeing Something Truly Unbelievable

I was the patient actually. I was sideswiped by a car, then ran over by the truck behind while cycling to work. I was essentially impaled by my right femur, which shattered my pelvis and shoved bone fragments into my guts.

Last thing I remember before I got knocked out for surgery, was the surgeon telling me everything was going to be fine, and it was all routine.

I didn't wake up for a month. When I did, I was missing the entire left leg, and most of the muscle tissue in the right. I was too weak to move much, couldn't talk because I had a tube through my neck, and I was very uncertain about reality due to what I went through in my coma.

Parades of doctors came to tell me how I should be dead, and it's crazy that I lived. I was told over and over that my survival was very much against all odds.

My surgeon on the other hand, never said anything like that. He always maintained that he was going to get me through. His attitude honestly helped when I had to go back to his table a few more times before I was done.

For 4 years, I kind of blew off the people who made a big deal about my survival. I adopted my orthopedic doctors attitude. Then I met a woman who's in the medical field. I fell in love, and eventually trusted her enough to let her read my medical records. I had never read them, because it's a massive pile of paperwork.

She broke down crying and couldn't read anymore. She told me that the beginning of my time in the hospital was full of the type of write-ups you find in the morgue. She told me that when they opened me up, bits of my pelvis fell out. I asked her to stop there. She won't read anymore, and I don't want to know anymore.

I now know my doctor has one h**l of a pokerface.

Years ago my then 11 year old shattered both femurs and her hip. At the time, her Orthopaedic specialist was so reassuring and confident that we had no doubts about her recovery.

A year later, we went back for a review and he asked me if I'd like to see her trauma x-rays. Not having any idea of the reality I said yes. What I saw looked like her leg bones had exploded.

After my freaked out reaction I commented on how cool and calm he was, and how certain that she'd be fine. He said he'd actually had to go for a short walk around the hospital to collect his thoughts since he had no idea how he would put this child back together. He also told me had used the films as a teaching aid. He's one of my heroes.

A dog bit my little sister in the face, ripping through her mouth and cheek. It was at a soccer game, she crawled on top of a big dog called a borzoi, which startled it, it rolled over and bit her in the face. This was the late 80's, smaller town. There were no pediatric surgeons available, no plastic surgeons, she was in the ER with her face ripped open.

Anyways, our general pediatrician (who is now my kids pediatrician, 30 years later), who had only graduated maybe 10 years prior, sewed her face back together. It was 30 stitches on the inside of her mouth, and 30 or so on the outside. She had a massive scar down the whole side of her face.

Anway, fast forward 15 years. She grew normally, her face is fine, her smile is fine, no long term damage. Apparently, a face is full of nerves and muscles, and thats why only plastic surgeons work on faces. Particularly with children, having nerve and muscle damage can make their face grow crooked as they age, it is a highly specialized field. But in this case, there was nobody else, just a general pediatrician, and he managed to save her face, with no long term nerve or muscle damage, or even scarring now that shes an adult.

We found out 25 years later from our pediatrician's wife, that he spent an hour or so crunching his old med school books in the seat of his Plymouth Reliant in the hospital parking lot, studying facial anatomy, nerves and cheek structure, etc. He walked into the hospital and performed a multiple hour surgery, on her face, sewed it back together, perfectly. You would think a plastic surgeon did it.

His wife told us he came home that night, just flopped down on the couch, and sat that there, amazed that he'd done it. Proud, but cautious. A new general pediatrician, sews a toddlers face back together.

And it worked. Now, you would never know it happened.

...and he has never, ever, done another surgery like that again lol

edit: if the tenses seem odd, it is because he was MY pediatrician then, and now that I am old and have a child, he is our daughters' pediatrician again. And he still calls my by my full first name which still drives me nuts. We chose him for his excellent medicine skills, not his personality. Thank you all for the gold and stories, I will share this with my sister and probably not him next time we see him, though I can promise you he doesn't know or care what reddit is. He doesn't even have a computer except the one he is forced to have at his clinic, and he calls it "henry", to spite the man who made all the doctors in his pediatrics group carry tablet pcs.

Lots of stories, many already covered by others. I will share this particular story with my legs crossed.

Motorcyclist came in after some one left turned without checking. He had gone over the hood, slid and somehow somersaulted landing on his a*s sitting up. He slid across intersection mostly on his a*s, getting serious road rash. Luckily he was only a block from hospital and ambulance. They pack him and bring him to the ER.

We end up c*****g off his chaps and jeans and begin the cleanup of gravel and sand embedded in his thighs and a*s when all of a sudden, his testicles fall out of his s*****m. He had basically sandpapered a hole in his s*****m while skidding on his a*s.

The attending pauses, grabs the saline, irrigates s*****m and nuts, fondles them back into place while humming. I handed him some gauze to pack the wound and smiled at the patient who was under a local.

Then I went on break, went fetal and dry heaved.

Young man (18) apparently comes in about something else (trying to work up courage). Right before he should actually be leaving (this can be really annoying if there are people waiting), he says 'I need your advice. `i'm having s*x with my mother.' What do I say? 'Oh my god'? No, I didn't... I said, 'This isn't the first time someone has told me this.' This wasn't true. Turns out that he knew it was wrong, that mother had initiated it, he was trying to extricate himself, and he was desperate for help. But the thought that someone else had been in his position meant to him that he hadn't been judged, that he wasn't doomed or would go to h**l, and that there was hope. But he didn't know what to do because the person to whom he should've looked for advice was actually his a****r. But the lie helped defuse the situation.

I had to have my leg rebuilt after a car accident and was eventually sent to Duke university for my surgery. My surgeon was supposed to be like the best orthopedic surgeon in the country, I think he used to work for the Baltimore ravens. Anyway all the doctors from my hospital at home were very unsure if I would even have a functioning leg let alone walk normal again. The first appointment at Duke that dude told me it was really not a big deal and he would have me fixed almost good as new. I honestly thought he was just trying to be nice and optimistic but he was very serious. 5 months later I was walking and learning how to run again. He said I was one of the most complicated surgeries he has had to do and a group of surgeons flew in to observe him do it.

In 2011 I had a saddle pulmonary embolism two weeks before my scheduled wedding. My quite seasoned heart surgeon seemed pretty confident that I'd be okay, and he even said he'd get me to my wedding on time.


Long story short, I was in the hospital for about a month due to complications. Several weeks later, when I was visiting my heart surgeon for a follow-up, he told me he'd only ever seen two other people as sick as I was. Those two didn't survive.

ER Tech here, a few months ago we had an elderly gentleman come in presenting with shortness of breath. As I was getting him into the gown and into hospital socks, I noticed very old, yellowing bandaging around his foot. I inquired to its purpose and he told me it was a large wound on the back of his heel that wasn't getting better.



I asked him if I could unwrap it to inspect it/possibly re-wrap it (basic wound care is one of my duties), and it was a literal hole in his heel about 4cm in diameter, skin necrotic around the edges, with a large flap of skin covering the middle. I wasn't terribly shocked...until I swore I saw the skin flap writhe a little bit. I got the patient's consent to look under the skin flap and sweet galactic Jesus, there were 3 sizeable maggots just chilling. I've read about it before but I have never seen it in person.



My brain went "what in the solar f*ck" and despite my attempt at a poker face, the gentleman read my reaction and asked, "Is it that bad?" I was straight up with him and told him that the wound had maggots and needed immediate treatment and the poor guy started apologizing for "bringing something disgusting." I told him, "I see this more often than you think. Maggots are actually great at cleaning out dead tissue and are used as treatment sometimes." He seemed relieved by that but it was definitely my first time ever seeing a m****t infected wound.

Not the doctor, but the patient. In 6th grade, i contracted so many different forms of dysentery that I was placed into CDC quarantine while they tried to figure out where I got it. I was barely conscious throughout the whole time but all I remember is my doctor in my room with me, having hooked up my Wii and playing Brawl as I recovered. I had no clue that my parents were being investigated for child abuse or that I was in quarantine until a few months later, or that I had passed out and had been covered in vomit and s**t for hours before my mom found me and took me to the hospital.

I ended up getting it from someone not washing their hands after handling a snake and then cooking dinner at my science camp. Wash your d**n hands people!

EDIT: I do work in the medical field, but I'm not a doctor so technically I am a medical professional. Also, I can't believe my top rated comment is about me being covered in various bodily fluids.

As a new nurse, I worked on a nephrology unit, which meant that we dealt with mostly patients who had kidney failure and needed hemodialysis three times a week to clean their blood. A patient was admitted through the emergency room and told me that he hadn't been to dialysis in 4 weeks. He had HIV, kidney failure, had lost custody of his kids after a messy divorce, and had no will to live. He planned to just stay in his home until he died. He probably wasn't far from it, but a neighbor, who hadn't seen him for a few weeks, peeked in the window and saw him sitting, unresponsive on the couch. They called 911 and he was brought to my hospital.

Three weeks is an insanely long time to go without dialysis. Dialysis removes toxins and excess fluid from your blood. Missing a session can leave you feeling sick and swollen. Missing 12 sessions can k**l you. This guy was SO swollen. I've never seen a person who was so full of fluid. He looked like that girl from W***y Wonka that turned into a blueberry. His feet and ankles were particularly massive. I wasn't sure that he'd live. Miraculously, after several dialysis sessions, he'd fully deflated. However, he was left with lots of loose skin afterwards, which had the fragile texture of an old balloon.

One night, he called me to his room and said, "I think my foot is bleeding". He was right. He'd slid down towards the bottom of his bed and used his legs to push himself back up towards the top. In doing so, the fragile skin on the bottoms of his feet and been totally sheared away, leaving only tissue and bone and so much blood.

I had no idea what to do, so I just called a Code Blue. The patient wasn't dead or dying, but no part of nursing school or practice had prepared me for an HIV+ patient who had ripped the soles of his feet off and was currently laying in a 3ft wide, rapidlu expanding, puddle of blood. I just needed to get a whole bunch of people to the room as quickly as possible.

I threw on a waterproof gown and some gloves and held pressure on the bottoms of his feet with a towel until help arrived. They didn't know what to do either. We called in the general surgeon, who seemed to think we might be exaggerating the extent of the damage and blood loss. He told us he'd be there in an hour and just to hold pressure until it stopped bleeding. We soaked towel after towel until, finally, the surgeon shows up.

He breezes into the room, moves my towel away, and says, "hmph". Then he reaches towards the patients foot, and pulls off a a HUGE, softball sized, blood clot. In that moment, time stopped. He held out his hand, holding the huge clot, and I, without really thinking about what I was doing, held my hand out too. He plopped the clot right into my outstretched hand.

In the next moments, several things happened all at once. I realized I was holding a big, coagulated mass of blood. I started dry heaving. I dropped it on the floor. It splattered. The surgeon exclaims, "OH JESUS F**K", not in response to my gags or the fact that he was just splattered by the clot I dropped, but because the patient's foot is now profusely bleeding again. He darts off and tells us to get the patient down to the OR immediately. We get him down there and, on the way back, realize that he'd left a trail of blood down the hallways, into the elevator, and to the operating theater.

I saw the patient during my next shift and he jokes, "I thought you were going to pass out when the doctor handed you that mess!" to which I replied, "Sir, I was positive that you were about to bleed to death".

Not medical professionals, but we were the patients. My daughter, who was 3 at the time, had to have a cavity filled. As we were leaving, the dentist told me just to watch my daughter because sometimes kids chew their gums because it's numb and feels weird. So the drive home took 30 minutes and I had been talking to my daughter the entire time to keep her busy. I park my car in my drive way, opened the passenger seat to get my daughter out, and her entire lower lip on the left side is gone. She had chewed it off down to her chin. She ended up in emergency surgery, but the surgeon kept telling us it would be fine and he sees this stuff all the time. She ended up having multiple surgeries, and when she was finally healed, the surgeon told us that it was the worst injury like that he had ever seen. He wasn't sure how she would heal, but you can hardly tell it happened now.

I had to see an orthopedist oncologist because I had two sarcomas. One in my left thigh in the sciatic nerve and one in my left pelvic.

My surgeon said he would get both out and the most I would get would be a drop foot (where you can’t lift up your foot on your own).

I went back two years later and my doctor told me he thought he would have to remove my leg because of how the sarcomas were enmeshed in my bones, muscle, and nerves. I honestly thought the whole time that it was an easy out. Though the two 10 hour surgeries may have been a clue that it wasn’t so simple.

These days I have a limp as I’m missing half my left pelvic bone and most of my glute and thigh muscle- but I got to keep the leg!

As a medical student doing my first placement in the emergency department, I was waiting outside the triage room to ask the nurse something. I was the lowest ranking, most clueless person in the department. I knew a lot about the Kreb cycle, not a whole lot about, you know, medicine.

A young man came up to me and said he was sorry to disturb me, he just wanted to check, it was just, well, not to queue-jump or anything, but he wanted to check, can this definitely wait for triage..?

He then unwrapped a towel from his hand and showed me his thumb, which he had dropped a loaded barbell onto. It was shattered, just flattened, with splinters of bone coming out. I stared at it. He stared at it. I stared at it.

Then I told him oh yes, no problem at all, he'd better take a seat and I'd make sure someone was with him right away.

I was the patient in this case. Had pain in the lower right part of my abdomen that grew more serious over a few days. Eventually got so bad I nearly passed out and was on my bathroom floor screaming on the third night. That morning I felt much better and went to work, but felt the pain coming on again that evening. Also decided to go into work the next morning while running a fever that was getting steadily worse. Finally decided to go to the doctor, where they immediately referred me for a CT scan. My appendix had been ruptured for a day and a half at that point, and I had sepsis/gangrene/massive infection. I was in surgery within a few hours, but prior to that the nurse that was with me said, "Yeah, this will be no problem. You'll be fine." Surgery was ok, but was followed up with a bunch of time in the hospital on intravenous antibiotics. My primary care doctor called me while I was recovering and told me the CT scan was one of the worst they had seen. The doctors I saw post recovery all had a *holy s**t* look when they saw scans and read the surgeon's report. Kudos to that nurse who kept me calm before surgery. Don't screw around with lower abdominal pain.

Probably too late to the party, but I had a lady come in to the ER listed as “Multiple Medical Problems”. This usually means diabetes and the issues stemming from it or maybe bleeding issues from another disease or maybe odd blood tests results at a clinic. I hadn’t seen the patient yet, but the Dr. came to the nurse’s station asking who had room 15. I jumped up and followed him into the room.

I walked in and saw what I thought was a corpse. Then the patient’s eye swiveled over to look at me. She truly looked like one of the people they found in a concentration camp. I could see every bone and her body was twisted in a decorticate position with her jaw locked open. Then the smell hit me: rotting flesh, death, and body fluids. I struggled to keep a neutral face and not gag.

I tried to place a blood pressure cuff on her arm and her skin just started flaking off in my hands. I gagged. The dr. started removing her clothes to examine her. Her feet were black to the ankles. Her hip bones were poking through her skin and were black. The skin around her ribs was worn away to oozing muscle fibers. Her calves were incredibly swollen and the skin was splitting like ripped pants. I removed her Depends, and there was feces coating her entire genital area. Then the dr. went to remove a large bandage on her lower back. Her entire sacrum was exposed and the bones were BLACK! The skin around it was a black liquified mass. It smelled like nothing I’ve ever smelled. I can’t even describe it. The dr. Told her family I would clean up her ulcers and wounds in preparation for surgery (liar, no surgeon would operate on her).

I had no idea how to clean dead bone tissue and liquified skin (they don’t cover that in nursing school). When I went to clean her sacral area, all the liquified skin separated and oozed all over the bed. I really struggled to keep my s**t together.

Afterwards, I needed a moment in the supply closet to cry it out for a second. I had no idea the human body could breakdown so much without dying. I still think about that woman sometimes and what led to her living like that. It still breaks my heart.

Not a medicalprofessional, but I have impressed a couple.

It's not super weird but just uncommon I guess. I was overweight but active when I was younger and broke my lowest rib while snowboarding, long story short, I did not know it was broken (honestly) so I never got it checked by a doctor. The rib traveled up over the next 2 ribs and has since fused to them. I now have a permanent tilt on my spine where this rib attaches to it and now that I have lost some weight a bump you can see/feel on my chest.

It is kinda weird when you tell a doctor about something on your body and their face lights up like a kid on Christmas and they ask for permission to feel it.

A little late to the party—

Not the worst, but I had a patient once with a stomach bleed and a small bowel obstruction. We had to put in an NG tube (tube that goes in your nose and down to your stomach) to drain/decompress his stomach, which was pretty distended and hard.
I’m inserting the tube and has soon as it hits this guy’s gag reflex he projectile vomits and SPRAYS very dark, half digested blood all over himself, the bed, the wall, and the floor. It’s basically a scene from the exorcist. I had to dive out of the way and somehow was unscathed. He couldn’t stop for almost ten minutes as we’re trying to get this thing down to where it needs to go. Finally finish placement and it immediately suctions out ~3 liters of this black sludge that is old, digested blood. Pt was mortified and we had to play it off like “oh no no it’s fine, it’s really common to vomit during the procedure. We’ll just go get some towels and clean you up!”
My coworker and I left the room and just stared at each other in silent shock.

Posted this before:

4th year med student here. On my ER rotation a couple months back, I walked in to the ED and was immediately asked to help a nurse and resident put a catheter in a patient. Now a catheter placement is usually a one person job so I was pretty confused as to why they needed my help.

I walk into the patient room, and I’m immediately greeted by a disgusting rotting flesh smell. Worst thing I’ve smelled in my life. The patient has to be pushing 400 lbs and has the worst edema (soft tissue swelling) from congestive heart failure I’ve ever seen. His s*****m and p***s f******n are about the size if a small watermelon, and the f******n had swollen completely over the tip of his p***s.

The nurse had a speculum (t**l OBGYNs use to look inside vaginas) inserted into the man’s f******n while the resident took the catheter in a hemostat (pliers type thing) and jammed it into the man’s pee hole for 20 minutes. They finally got the catheter in and took the speculum out. It was covered in a thick brown discharge that looked like fermented p**s-s**t. I still don’t know how he let his s*****m and p***s swell that much.

Edit: We comforted the patient the whole time and kept telling him we had done it like this before. Total lie. No one in the ED had ever done or seen anything like it.

Ooh, me, I have a story.

I've been an RN for 12 years now, seen a lot of s**t. I was particularly lucky in nursing school and got to watch open heart surgery, joint replacement, kidney removal, all kinds of neat stuff right over the surgeon's shoulder.

The only one that ever gave me a problem was this kid about 10 years old getting his tonsils removed. The doc had this hooked knife, he's reach into the kids mouth, hook the tonsil, and yank it back to cut it out. Blood flying out of the unconscious kid's mouth. So I'm standing there, I look up and all of a sudden everything's getting sparkly. I just said "I need to leave. Right now."

Surgeon takes his tools out of the kid's mouth and says "OK. Someone please walk him out, thanks."

So I learned that for some reason, I get queasy when it's kids being hurt. Which is funny, because I was a pediatrics nurse for quite a while after school.

Anyway, the actual story. I wasn't even at work, but maybe four years ago, was living with my girlfriend at the time and her three young boys. That day, the youngest (about 7), had been climbing up a big lilac bush in the yard that I'd trimmed the day before. He slipped and fell out. A sharp, cut branch caught him in the face on his way down. I was in the kitchen, and heard this blood-curdling scream and ran outside.

I brought him in, sat him on the kitchen table and took a look. It seemed like he was pretty lucky, there was just a deep cut on the bottom of his nose. Well, it was bleeding pretty decently so his mother and I took him to the emergency room.

We get there, there's only a physician's assistant on duty. He takes a look and thinks maybe it could use a couple of stitches. Or, he says, he could call the on-call ENT surgeon for another opinion. We told him that, all due respect, we would like to have a surgeon take a look, just in case.

Good thing we did.

The boy had nearly taken his entire nose off his face. The stick cut up under the nose, and traveled along under the flesh up to the bridge. The entire nose was hanging by a half inch of skin at the top. We just hadn't moved it much.

As soon as the surgeon came in and pulled this little boy's nose off his face, while he's laying on the exam table screaming absolute bloody murder, suddenly I got really hot, things start getting hazy, I realize I'm about to pass out. So I quickly exited the room and sat down, at the exact same time as my girlfriend, who was also a nurse. Neither of us could take it.

Lady came in with possible stroke symptoms (numbness, weakness, difficulty speaking, gail abnormalities). CT Brain unremarkable. Lab work was really odd. We were thinking cancer so we decided to CT her chest and abdomen as well. Turns out she had a dissection the entire length of her abdominal aorta and going into her right femoral artery. Left femoral had an aneurysm and was beginning to dissect as well. She had formed a massive clot throughout her abdomen that was miraculously keeping her alive. Basically all of her organs were ischemic (dead).

About 5 different teams showed up in the ER to see her. After HOURS of discussion, the consensus was that there wasn't a d**n thing anyone could do. We sent her to hospice.