80 Medical Professionals Share The Diagnoses That Made Their Stomachs Drop

Specific to my field (occupational therapy) when patients get spinal cord injuries and plateau after improvements. It all looks like they’ll recover mobility but you know they won’t, but they still think they will.
Or when you get a post stroke and you know recovery is minimal but they think they’ll recover fine.

Fairly young patient came in with no symptoms after having low hemoglobin caught incidentally on routine bloodwork. Baseball-sized tumour in the stomach... these cases always haunt you.

As a nurse of 11.5 years I’ll have to say yesterday when my husband and I got the news our baby has a rare structural brain abnormality that will never allow him to live a normal life.

Glioblastoma is a pretty bad one.

Also, any time I wake up a patient WAY earlier than they or their family were expecting. That means the cancer (usually something in the belly) was worse and had progressed more than anyone knew and the surgeons couldn’t even attempt to remove it.

Third-degree burns covering 50% of the total body surface. During my general surgery internship, I was on my trauma rotation. We brought in a 75-year-old woman who had fallen into her large fireplace at home. After evaluating her in the trauma bay, where she was alert and oriented, we transferred her to the burn unit. Once the plastic surgeon in charge of the burn unit was briefed and examined her, he immediately ordered intubation and quietly informed our team that she would be gone in 72 hours, regardless of our interventions. She received aggressive resuscitation and serial debridements in the OR. Like clockwork she died almost exactly 72 hours later. I will never forget the pit in my stomach when i heard that prognosis. Her fate was sealed.

Had someone come in to my OCED for a migraine and left with a referral to neurology and oncology once they got back home for a suspected glioblastoma. The look on their partner’s face as they whispered, “but it was just a headache…” as I went over their discharge instructions about broke me. Never heard from them again as they were on a work trip.

It was one of our last before end of shift so it was pretty d**n somber the rest of the night.

Former EMT here. Had a patient who started with shortness of breath that just got worse and worse, and nothing helped. He started panicking as we loaded him up. He was clawing at the oxygen mask.

"Am I going to d*e?!" he asked my partner.

"We're going to do everything we can for you to make sure that doesn't happen," my partner replied after a pause. And in the end, we did.

But so did he.

About 15 minutes after we got him to the hospital, he died. Pulmonary embolism.

That pause, though... I don't know if he noticed it, but I did. I mean, you're never supposed to tell them they're going to be fine cause you can't know, but my partner really didn't know if the patient was going to make it. That pause was carefully selecting the right words. And I knew it.

6yo boy comes in with limping. MRI done - aggressive brain cancer. The surgeon and pediatrician explained it was inoperable - that he would start having issues swallowing, and he might need a nasogastric for nutrition. The parents stood up, grabbed the child and just left. It didn’t make sense to them and they were in complete denial and even anger. They said we were quacks and we must be wrong and were quite aggressive.

The child and his family represented 2 weeks later. He died soon after.

My neighbor was babysitting my then 11 month old for the day. Her dad was my last patient of the day. Coming in for “sternal pain.” Initially suspected costochondritis as he told me he does 500 crunches and 100 pushups a day. Very well known legend in our town, the fittest of fit, non smoker. Chest Xray showed advanced incredibly rare type of lung cancer. No known successful treatment. She walked in to drop my son off right as I was pulling up the X-rays. My heart has never sunk that low. He [passed away] within 3 months.

Arriving on the scene of an accident and you can’t tell what kind of vehicle you’re looking at.

Any time someone tells me they are just glad their cancer didn’t come back and the scan says “the cancer is back and it’s everywhere.”

I can still feel the sinking feeling I had when I read the results.

Not a diagnosing professional, but a first responder.

There have been many, many instances of responding to 911 calls where family is like “help!” and the patient is clearly not salvageable. The sinking feeling in your stomach when you know you’re gonna do your best, but the outcome isn’t going to be good, and the family is in denial - it’s awful.

Was working on the open heart team in a pediatric hospital when we had a teen come in with an enlarged heart and infectious processes going on. We opened his chest to remove fluid from around the heart and do something else that I just cannot recall after so many years. However, what I do recall is what this child’s heart looked like once we got in there.. it was like wet tissue paper and incredibly friable. There was nothing we could do. This poor kid was beyond saving and the whole team knew it. In my experience, there is such a sense of somberness and quiet that blankets the OR in times like this. In the OR, we are fixers… and we just couldn’t fix this. We were able to close the chest and whisk the teen back to the ICU for their parents to be with them when they passed away. Sigh….

Neurologist here. Seeing patchy muscle wasting, fasciculations in the tongue, asymmetric weakness onset over a couple of months and brisk reflexes in a young healthy, usually very friendly and lovely person.

(ALS).

Older guy came in with a lump on his back that his wife told him to get checked out 6 months prior. He being the typical 50s rural male patient decided to wait until it was the size of a golf ball. He finally comes into clinic, we can see his chief complaint is the mass and swelling in his armpit in the EMR. 

I was a resident at the time, my attending and I both knew it'd be bad before we went in the room. I watched my attending do a shave biopsy and the underlying tissue was just gray and black with pigment, obviously melanoma without even sending off for pathology.

Guy was a d**d man walking at that point. We basically told him so in the room before even sending it off for pathology. He no showed his follow up appointment.

I rotated in a pediatric PM&R clinic during my training. We had a young family come in with their two boys age 2 and 4. The attending physician (who already knew what their diagnosis was) asked me to observe the kiddos and tell him what I thought was going on.

I start watching the older one playing and oof it hit me hard. Positive Gower's sign.

For the non-medical people here, it basically means the kid was moving from sitting to standing like an old man which is seen in neuromuscular diseases.

I talked with the attending and yep, both boys had Duchenne's. The older one was showing symptoms but the younger one hadn't yet. It's weird looking at 2 perfect-looking kiddos giggling and playing when you know they'll be lucky to live into their 40s.

My patient who had only delivered her baby (vaginally, but had prior c section) started having severe shoulder pain. Immediate red flag. She looked pale and clammy which is common with people in shock. I let the OBs know, immediately did an ultrasound, and she was back in the OR STAT. Her previous c section scar had ruptured and she ended up needing a ton of blood. The rupture had led to her abdomen filling with blood which is what made her have shoulder pain. As soon as she said shoulder pain it was red flags all around. If that had been ignored or minimized she could have definitely died.

I work as a radiology tech, and there are so many moments that stick with me. You talk to patients, joke with them, hear them make plans for vacations, family gatherings, all while you are staring at their scan and realizing something is terribly wrong.
One case still haunts me. A middle‑aged guy came in just for persistent back pain, convinced it was just muscle strain from work. He told me he was going to take his kids camping the next weekend. Pulling up his CT scan, I saw his lungs were covered in metastatic lesions. He had absolutely no clue.
The worst part is we cannot break the news directly. We just hand the report over to the doctor, and send the patient home, knowing their whole world is about to fall apart in a day or two.
Healthy young adults, active parents, kids with tiny, harmless‑seeming symptoms. Nothing prepares you for seeing a life‑ending diagnosis pop up on screen out of nowhere. You learn to hide your shock on your face, but that heavy, sinking feeling in your stomach never really goes away.

The first covid patient we intubated in the ICU I worked at... we were all watching that point where bipap was failing and we would need to go in there for a more advanced airway. Knowing we were also at risk of contracting covid was pretty terrifying early days.  My unit had seen one of the first cases of H1N1 and lost staff to it many years earlier, I think there was a lot of dread and PTSD with covid.

As a medical laboratory scientist, seeing blasts (immature cells) in a pediatric spinal fluid. This generally means that treatment is going to have to be altered/more intense for those kids that have already gone through leukemia treatments.