40 Chilling Things Patients Said Or Did That Still Haunt Medical Workers

Not a Doctor or a Nurse.

One of my Uncles had stage 4 Pancreatic cancer. He was a tough guy and didn’t trust hospitals so he didn’t see a Doctor until it was way too late, despite being in debilitating pain. When he did, the prognosis was grim, he had maybe six weeks left and Pancreatic cancer is a painful way to die. He decided to get MAiD instead. Medical Assistance in Dying, which is legal in Canada.

On the day we were all gathered around his bed, all the paperwork and permissions were sorted out and the syringe of d***s was connected to his IV. He was heavily sedated, but he has to be the one to push the plunger, which he did with the help of his wife. He closed his eyes and his breathing got very shallow and slowed down. After a few minutes we thought he had passed.

We were all standing around him, some saying goodbye, a lot of people were crying. About 10 minutes passed and people started to leave when suddenly, in a strong clear voice he said, *”Russell, wait for me”*, then he was gone. Nobody knew who Russell was, and it was kind of a mystery we talked about from time to time.

Years later his wife passed and when his kids were going through her things they found a very old photograph of him when he was maybe 5 years old. He was in a sandbox with a small dog, on the back of the picture in faded ink it read ‘Russell, 1944’.

The thought that our pets that have gone before us meet us to help us cross over fills me with comfort. I hope it isn’t just a mind trying to make sense of a crazy time.

Not a doctor, but a nurse. Once a psychotic schizophrenic patient got me. And it was because of how "normal" she said it.
Screaming_threatening to k**l me and then sitting on the commode......and then calmly looking at me and says in the most normal and monotone voice "I'm sorry, I know I'm not well and being mean to you. I'm in h**l, and I don't know how to get out"
I will never forget that or how it made me feel. It's like she had a 10 second lapse of her manic episode to apologize and tell me how she felt. Made me super empathetic to my psych patients.

Doctor here. First one that sticks to mind isn't so much what the patient said, but more her body language that clued into what was going wrong.

Story: I was a medical student at the time and the city my school was in is a hub for human trafficking. I noticed a patient in the ER who had a pretty bad injury to her face was with a sketchy looking guy who was not related to her. She wasn't my patient, but I brought my gut feeling up to her doctor who then made up some excuse to talk to the patient alone and got her to help. Turns out she was a victim of human trafficking.

I never talked to her myself, but I couldn't shake the vibe I got from looking at her and the man she was with.

The scariest thing I ever heard working in healthcare was not from a patient, but a nurse who called me to report an outbreak of rabies at one of the nursing homes I worked in senior management for.


I managed to stop myself freaking out for long enough to ask her the necessary questions. Thank goodness, English wasn't her first language and she'd got two words confused.


Scabies. She meant *scabies.*.

“Doc, I can’t wait to have this baby! We’ll finally have our baby girl! Now we can stop trying.”

When I was doing my final year of hospital rotations, I got called in to one of the OB ultrasound rooms by the attending. I was just about to leave since my shift had just ended, but decided to see the one last patient since we had such a good shift and I didn’t mind making another patient’s day.

The attending points to the ultrasound and asks if I can see the heartbeat. I thought she was just quizzing me since I was a med student and I was internally panicking since I couldn’t see it. I apologized for what I assumed was my lack of knowledge.

Turns out, I was called in to confirm lack of heartbeat on this 8 month old baby in utero. They needed two doctors to confirm. I never wanted to be more wrong my whole life.

When I was left alone with the patient, she kept trying to convince herself that she was ok and that she had 3 other children to come home to. But you could tell how devastated she was. Then she said

“I guess I was right. This was gonna be my last baby.”

And then just walked out.

I was on call the next day and ended up seeing her through pre-op, the delivery, and post-op. She’s one of the patients I will never forget.

First month as an intern. At this point I know everything to crush med tests, but nothing to handle a patient. Only doctor covering the night shift at a VA. 'Code green,' which at this location means a patient is hostile.

Jog around a corner. Find Mr. S who I admitted a few hours earlier, now sundowning and holding a piece of broken glass in front of him like a knife.

Sundowning is when an elderly, maybe demented, patient has increased confusion +/- agitation early in the night, especially in an unfamiliar setting, which every hospital is.
He's holding the broken glass towards the charge nurses and screaming nonsense - mainly F bombs and wanting to go home. (Me too man). Two police officers are standing a couple yards in front. One touching his sidearm. Nurses and techs are lining the hallway. Lights are on, TVs are on. Mr. S is not enjoying his stay.

Everyone looks at me.. the youngest, least experienced. Why not? So.. what do you do?

First thing, greet Mr. S. I admitted him so I knew he was a good guy in a confused state. I never mentioned the situation, just started random polite conversation. Next, motioned for the cops to leave, the extra nurses and techs to leave, turn off the TVs, turn off the overhead music, turn off some lights. De-escalate everything. And then with just the charge nurses and I in the hallway, minimal stimulation , we waited him out. Eventually he forgot about what he was holding as we talked about his wife, and fishing outside the city.

We did end up giving him a sedative once the danger passed. Not sure if I should have. And the next day we got him home.

Not a doctor, but before my grandfather passed of pancreatitis, I'll never forget when he looked up at me and told me that "don't worry, they’re already here, all of them" before dying... not really sure what that means... but it creeped me tf out for a few years

On a lighter note, my other grandpa died a little bit after I walked into the room with a new moustache I was trying to sport. He laughed at it, and I like to think about that sometimes. The very last thing he did after a full life of ups and downs, was laugh at my stupid moustache.

During my med school trauma surgery rotation, our 16-year-old patient said “my stomach hurts” right before he was intubated for an exploratory laparotomy. He had gotten shot in his abdomen. Intra-op, we noted that the bullet tore a hole in his aorta. He didn’t make it.

Such innocent last words to hear a kid say. He fully didn’t grasp his fate at the time. And understandably so. I will never forget it.

A patient once looked at me with a completely calm face and said, ‘I know you’re trying to help me, but I’m going to die today. I’ve made peace with it, and you can’t stop it.’

One of the most gut wrenching moments in my career was when I was treating a 9-year old boy who was the victim of significant blunt force trauma. He was unstable but awake and talking. With terror in his eyes he started thrashing around in his bed and screaming, “Don’t let me die! I don’t want to die!”. It made us all nervous and tense. He went to the OR and survived but that was 5 years ago and I can still see his face.

I'm not a doctor but a nurse. This happened when I was still a CNA.

Young women brought into the ER for behavioral issues. Family says she hasn't slept in weeks. She's weirdly quiet for a while, then starts biting herself on the wrist.

We get violent restraints, and she goes ballistic. Like possession screaming, no words just growling and agony. Well, this goes on for a while, and she calms back down again. Even weirder negative for everything except CT.

All of a sudden, the sitter screams, "She got out!" This lady ripped off violent restraints, pulling at her skin until it bleed. She immediately starts slamming her head into the ground. RN pulls her up and gets a sparta kick to the chest, and he falls backward through the door (tall dude). I get scratched, the Dr gets punched, and the security gets it bit. Dr. knocks her out with a shot of the good stuff.

We assume she's out for a while, so we breathe while we start the paperwork for injuries, but not even 5 minutes later, she wakes back up and starts screaming again. She does this all night, and she's too messed up to go to behavioral, so until she's stable, she's inpatient. Longest night of my life.

Come in tomorrow she's still there. She's too violent to go up to a unit even if there was room (covid times), and they still have no idea whats actually wrong with her beyond not sleeping, psychosis, and generally wasting away. After a few days of screaming and violence, she just goes glass eyed. We get a feeding tube, but she just keeps wasting and after 9 days dies.

I took 8 months for our pathologist to figure out what she had. It was a rare prion disorder that can happen in an astronomically small percentage of synthetic o****d users can sometimes get. This is the closest thing I've ever seen to possession.

When I was a CNA working hospice, I got called to go assist a nurse who was assisting a rather volatile patient (the woman was an alcoholic and chronic smoker who got lung cancer while fighting renal and liver failure). She had had a close call recently while in the hospital and coded very briefly. After that, she was very adamant that no man be let into her room.

When I got there, the nurse gave me a heads up that it wasn't just any man she didn't want in her room. It was a particular one, and nobody could figure out who it was. Her son hadn't spoken to her in a decade or more (with the exception of one visit before her close call in the hospital) bc of her sexual, mental, and physical a***e, her father was long gone, she had no brothers or uncles, and her husband had died tragically a couple decades earlier. And yet she kept insisting we not "let him in."

She developed the tale-tell death rattle, and so we waited. The room went still, and the nurse and I looked to each other, knowing that she had just taken her last breath when suddenly she sat up and started screaming. "He's here! You've let him in! He's here!" Her eyes were wide, her skin pale, and she trembled all over, staring intently at the corner of the ceiling.

We tried to assure her no one was there, but she just whispered, "He knows. He's smiling cuz he knows." as we got her to lie back down. She closed her eyes and within minutes gave one last rattling breath and was gone.

I worked with that nurse again a few months later and she told me that when she called the son to inform him his mother had passed he told her that he'd told his mother the last time they spoke that he'd prayed the devil would come and take her since she'd spent her last exchange with him trying to use God to shame him into caring for her in her old age. So whether the woman was hallucinating her fear or was actually seeing something sinister coming for her, idk but the nurse seemed to think it was really the devil. She swore she was gonna go back to work in a hospital. Said she'd seen enough end of life care.

Not really a patient who said it:

I was on a trauma shift (trauma surgeon), and got called in for a bad car accident. When I got there, they were doing CPR, and eventually we got her back, stable enough for a CT.

Another trauma comes in during all this, turns out to be the husband of the trauma patient. My PA went to go survey the new patient. She came back white as a ghost.

(Names changed) “John just came in next door as the new trauma. I…I think that’s Emily.” I looked at our patient who we just did CPR on, and almost fainted. I don’t recognize her until I smelled her perfume (she was so banged up she didn’t look like herself). I almost threw up. Emily was another PA on our trauma team. She ended up passing a few days later from severe brain injury.

“I think that’s Emily” will be forever burned on my brain, and among the top 3 reasons I don’t do trauma surgery anymore….

Before I (NP, worked in the ER as a tech>RN>NP) begin, I'll preface with what I tell everyone outside of healthcare who asks something like this: You realize that you're asking me to flip through a filing cabinet of nightmares and select the ones that stand out the *most*, right?

Bloody woman brought in my EMS, wrapped in a blanket. Found lying on the side of the road. They left her wrapped because she wailed every time they tried to unwrap her and figured it would be faster to just get her to us rather than wrestle her out there. She was clearly bludgeoned. Hard to tell the difference between her bloody clothes and the blanket. After getting vitals and trying to build rapport, she was still partially covered and just says, "him," while glancing to her side. I slowly pull the blanket back to find a bloody child. I don't remember what happened next. I think I suppressed that memory.

There's the eerie, smiling glare of a large psych patient who was incredibly calm while I got him settled. After a few moments he made a threat I barely heard, started to move, then was restrained by a few cops while I sedated him. Found out after that he was with me because they found him laying with his mother, but her head was in the other room with his machete.

Last one that comes to mind was an o******e patient who was supposedly very sick and hooked up to everything. I was doing my assessment on the sleeping patient while alone in my trauma room. Another nurse was on the other side of the curtain. I was doing my assessment in peace when the patient opened their eyes, said sorry, and started to strangle me with the wires. The other nurse heard the quiet fuss and ran over to save me. She was an old nurse, but the way she could hog tie a violent patient with the sheets convinced me she was ex-CIA.

Those are the three I can't really pick between for this question.

Edit to include this response since I think I'll be hitting copy+paste a lot if not:

It's a helluva job, but horrors will happen. Someone has to be there to help. I don't do it any more. I am in primary care which has its own set of horrors, but they tend to read more like Hemingway than the ER stories.

Be nice to your EMS/First responder folks. PTSD is prevalent but under reported because the culture is to accept it and move on. I'm certain that after any of these cases I simply sipped my room temperature coffee that I poured hours ago and moved on to the next patient. That's what we do.

I had a patient in my icu, who wasn’t unknown to us, she first came to us, then went to a skilled nursing facility, where she’d get sick, come back to my icu, get better enough to go back to her SNF, a few months later get sick and come back to us, rinse and repeat.

(I want to be very clear, it was not at any fault of the SNF (skilled nursing facility/ long term acute care facility), it was her disease process and was expected and unavoidable)

And one day she’s my patient and the doctor has already arranged her discharge back to the SNF again, she’s decently with it, a lil pleasantly confused but still can tell me where she is, why she’s here, what year it is, all the things, but still gets a lil confused.

I’m chatting with her and she says “I’m going home today.” And I clarify that she isn’t going to her house, she’s going back to the SNF, and she waves me off and says “no, I’m going HOME. Not back there, I’m going HOME.”

Her family comes in and it’s the same convo, they’re trying to make her understand that she isn’t going back to her house, and she’s like “yeah I’m not going to my house, I’m going HOME.”

Strangers walking past her room, she’d wave them down and joyfully tell them she was going HOME today, come say goodbye and give me a hug, I’m going home.

And in the middle of me trying to explain AGAIN that I’m not sending her to her house, but to her SNF, transport is on the way to come take her back to the SNF, and that’s why I’m packing up her things, her eyes just roll back into her head and she goes asystole. She straight up died on me.

I should have known, she was devoutly Christian and growing up in the church, dying was often referred to as being called home. I should have caught that nuance.

She was serious, she went HOME. She knew and was trying to tell us. But she wasn’t scared, she was happy telling everyone and saying her goodbyes, even to strangers, she was done, and made her exit.

As a resident working off-service, looked a woman dead in the eye before we were about to intubate her. She had the saddest look in her eyes and said “don’t let me die”. She had awful esophageal and rectal varices that were never successfully treated and passed away that night in the OR. Still see it in my thoughts from time to time.

Not a dr, but at age 18 I went to Haiti to help with the hurricane crisis that happened, about 6 months after the relief efforts started. We ran a pop up clinic for people in need of medical care for about three weeks.
A patient came in, he was the same age as me. He was on crutches and appeared to have a large shard of dry wood stuck in his shin, which looked green and infected. The doctors set to work removing the wood, only to find out that it was exposed bone from a brutal fracture that had occurred 6-8 MONTHS prior. How he survived I had no idea. I could only speak limited creole, but he told me how much pain he had been in and how he just wanted to run and play kickball with his friends again.
I hope you’re well, Dante. I still think of you.

Not a medical professional, but I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother when one of her sisters had passed. Grandma said she was on the phone with her, and my great aunt starting talking like their late father was there in the room with her. That's when Grandma knew it wouldn't be long. My great aunt passed a few days later.

Then grandma looked me directly in the eye and told me, "That's how you'll know when it's my time. If I ever start talking to your grandfather or your late Aunt Margaret, you'll know I'm about to pass."

Twenty years later, I had moved out of town and was talking to my mother. Grandma had gotten to the point where she needed to stay with someone, and was living with one of my mother's sisters. Mom called me to tell me that Grandma had been admitted to a nursing home that night, as she was starting to hallucinate. She was having a full on conversation with not only her late husband, but several other relatives who had passed.

I felt a chill and said "Mom, it's her time. She won't make it through the night."

Time of death: The exact moment I felt that chill.

I’ve got one. I’m a psychiatrist with a distinct and relatively rare appearance. Because of this, I’ve spent my whole life hearing that I look like anyone with a vaguely similar skin tone or hair color, even when I didn’t see the resemblance.

Fast forward to my intern year. A patient comes into the emergency department after being found severely hypothermic; so much so that he was initially pronounced dead. Miraculously, he was resuscitated, but his identity was unknown, and as he began recovering, he started displaying signs of psychosis. That’s when the primary team called in a psych consult, and I went to assess him.

The moment I stepped into his room, I was taken aback. The man lying in the bed was a spitting image of me, except he looked like an alternate version of myself, one who had gone down a much darker path. His face was weathered, likely from d**g use and homelessness, but the resemblance was unsettling.

As I tried to gather details about his identity and psychiatric history, he locked eyes with me, his stare intense and unshakable, and said, “I am you.” That became his only response whenever he spoke to me. For three days, every time I interacted with him, all he would say was, “I am you.”

Being a sleep-deprived intern, this messed with my head more than I’d like to admit. Seeing someone who looked eerily like me, who had literally been pronounced dead days earlier, repeating that phrase over and over. It freaked me out to say the least.

After a few more days (and as he started coming down from m**h-induced psychosis), I finally got through to him. I explained that he couldn’t be released as a John Doe and that we needed his identification. Eventually, he gave me his Social Security number. When we ran it, we discovered he had multiple out-of-state warrants.

The whole experience shook me, and I definitely lost some sleep over it. Even now, it still sticks with me.

Not scary, but definitely still haunts me and I think of her often.

16yo kid with metastatic relapsed Ewing’s Sarcoma. After telling her parents that we had no cure for her and that we recommend comfort care only, I usually let parents decide if they want to tell their kid or if they’d like me to. This family asked that I break the news since we had a good relationship. After explaining everything, she looked at me with so much terror in her eyes and asked “Am I going to die?”

Hardest day of my career so far. I think of her often. She had a comfortable and peaceful death and I am proud I could at least give her that.