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

Pharmacist here not a doctor, a girl was getting the morning after pill, very young 17 yo, and had lots of questions etc because she was scared I presume, but told me it was her first time having s*x and that she'd done vaginal then a**l and back to vaginal and would that be more or less likely to result pregnancy etc

It made me despair because I realised this generation is raised on p**n, with all the ridiculous expectations for real s*x that would bring.

Not a doctor, but had a hospital stay a couple of years back when my Crohn's disease was flaring up.

I offhandedly mentioned to the first year doctor while he was checking me that I'd had this weird feeling that I couldn't shake, like something was going to go wrong, this heavy feeling deep in my chest.

I've never seen someone's head snap up that quick.

Turns out that an 'impending sense of doom' is an actual symptom, and can be a sign that you're about to have a heart attack or go into anaphylaxis.

I was fine, and that 'feeling of doom' went away as soon as I was put on biologic medication. Wild.

I’m a speech language pathologist so not a doctor, but figured this could be contributed. It is astounding the number of children I’ve worked with that have been diagnosed with severe PTSD due to sexual a*****t and trauma from a parent or family member. Which is a separate story from the infants and toddlers that were d**g addicted from the birth mothers. Most of these kids had told me, in detail without prompting, what had happened to them and their siblings like it was chatting about the weather on a normal Tuesday afternoon.

The oldest patient was 10, the youngest was 2yo but most had been repeatedly assaulted and a****d since birth or most of their lives by one or more people, all family members. I can’t ever forget all of those kids and what they told me during sessions.

Again, nurse here.

Plenty of times I have had patients with psychosis tell me they see a person in their room. This is never scary to me— I don’t attend to where their vision is (because it makes the hallucination more real to them), I just do a full assessment (figure out if they hear voices, if the voices are telling them to harm themselves or others), encourage them to engage in distractions, talk to them if that’s what they need at the moment, and give them whatever meds necessary. Freaks out other nurses tho.

Have had many dying patients say they see family members or “angels” in the room. The patients in those instances never seen scared— more like comforted. I actually encourage them to focus on those family members that they see if it brings them comfort. They usually pass shortly afterwards.

Not a doctor but had a nurse nearly beaten to death in a hospital I used to work in. The patient was known to be violent but they didn’t take any preventative measures. A nurse went into the room to give the patient meds and the patient jumped on her and was repeatedly smashing her head into the floor. One of the other staff members heard a scream and thought he had k****d her with the amount of blood everywhere. She ran in and kicked him in the head as hard as she could and dragged the unconscious nurse out of the room. I can’t remember what happened after but she survived with permanent damage.

When I was a first year nursing student I was working in the hospital as a nursing extern (nurses aid pretty much), we had a patient who had some sort of mental disorder. Very odd guy but he was sweet.

I remember a couple mornings going into his room to do his vitals for his nurse and him telling me “you’re the only one who’s nice to me… everyone doesn’t like me here”. I knew this was happening as I would hear the nurses talking s**t about this man, sometimes for good reason but nonetheless not nice.

Anyways, this patient had an ostomy (Google if u don’t know) and I as a first year nursing student I knew absolutely NOTHING about them. We were literally learning how to wash our hands in school at this point. I did however notice that his ostomy pouch was always empty and never collected waste. I thought this was odd. I would feel his stomach and look and he was extremely distended. I told his nurse multiple times throughout the week and was always made to feel stupid because they were “already checking it”.

Long story short. I come in my next shift, he had a blockage, the waste built up so much that he was puking it out of his mouth and ultimately chocked and suffocated on his own waste. He was a DNR and was very sick to begin with but it was not supposed to be this way.

I think about him often and feel deep sadness when I think about how he felt abandoned at the hospital and this was the outcome.

As a resident, a patient was super angry and signing his papers to leave Against Medical Advice. He looked at me and said, “I know what time you sign out, and I know where you all leave the hospital”

Looked over my shoulder the entire walk home.

Had a patient who had just had a major surgery throw himself out of bed because Freddy Krueger told him to do so. He was on a ketamine drip for pain management at the time.

Nurse here. Had a patient going through o****d withdrawal. Asked if I could give him an injection of a certain blood thinner— he said yes.

He didn’t like that the injection hurt.

He leapt out of bed, backed me into a corner, and threatened to “smash in [my] skull.” He reiterated he once k****d a police officer by beating him to death, and he wanted to do the same to me.

He was 6’2”. I am 5’0”.

I managed to deescalate the best I could (gave him his opioids, encouraged him to go for a walk off unit to let off some steam). It worked. But before he walked off unit he told our charge nurse he was going to k**l me.

Management, security, and the doctor did f**k all. Had to spent the next few shifts worried I was about to get my a*s beat.

During the first year of my psych residency I came across this patient 19/M, he struggled with depression and was admitted in my ward a couple of times. Post that he started coming for regular follow ups and was doing well. One fine day he came to the ward to meet us and gave us sweets and thanked us for everything, it was a very proud moment for me as he was one of my first patients in the field of Psychiatry. The same night, I was on call and at about 3am I went up to the main entrance to collect my food parcel. I saw a car going towards ER and legs were sticking out of it.I felt like I recognised those pants so I walked up to the ER to see who it could be. He had hung himself that night, nobody suspected it, not his family, not us. Still haunts me at times.

On a lighter note, Patient told me he was gonna slit my throat and cut my balls off. I’m a female nurse.

A suspected HIV positive Patient who was also suffering from an acute episode of psychosis somehow got hold of his IV cath,pulled it out and stabbed atleast 4 people with it. Created so much panic, we all had to undergo multiple tests and be on preventive meds for a month. The psychological impact was really difficult to deal with. I have never been so scared in my entire life.

Had a Jehovas witness family, the 10 yo son
Had an aggressive cancer. They said they would accept chemo but no transfusions so the chemo was reduced (the Team didn’t want him ostracized from his support network if things went bad- which was more likely than not even with full treatment )
Later that year it relapsed and came to me for palliative radiotherapy,
The dad looked at me and said “I would do anything to save my son….”.

Disclaimer that I am not a medical professional of any sort. But I was a patient in an ER one night after I gave myself a concussion at summer camp. Sitting there with some counselors and a fellow camper who came with me; it's around midnight at this point in a rural small town, and the ER is quiet. Then we hear an eerie voice from the other side of the curtain say "I'm still hereeeeeee."

We didn't realize there was another patient there and we all kind of looked at each other and gasped in surprise. Then the guy says "I can *heaaar* you." Nothing else after that.

Definitely not as scary as some of these other stories, but somehow to my teenage mind, it was very jolting.

Some people don't have to say anything.

I am a nurse now, but this is back when I was a phlepotomist. I went into a patient's emergency room and bent over the bed to introduce myself, and the look in his eyes scared me.

I backed away and walked out of the room and someone noticed I was in there and came rushing over to assist. She quietly told me that he had just bit someone pretty badly.

"I can see death standing behind you"

still haunts me and he passed away 2 days after.

One of the scariest things I’ve heard as a doctor came from a patient who calmly said, “I see the man in the corner again.” There was no one there. The patient was fully alert and oriented, but their vitals were crashing fast. Moments later, they coded.

Another eerie moment was a patient who came in after a traumatic accident. Right before surgery, they grabbed my wrist and said, “Don’t let me die, doc.” Their vitals were stable, but despite our best efforts, they didn’t make it through the operation.

The things patients say, especially in their final moments, can stick with you forever.

Probably not what you are asking, but the thing that I've been most scared to respond to was a 7 year old-ish girl stopping me talking to her mom, and first asking me if I was a doctor, which I responded yes to. And then asking me very frankly if her dad was going to die. Given that he was intubated on two pressors with a multi-d**g resistant infection on top of a hematological malignancy, the real answer was "most likely".

Striking a balance between remaining honest and not adding extra trauma to her experience knowing it could possibly be something she carries with her for her entire life, without preparation (I was on a consulting team, not the primary team - so wasn't on the team 'designated' to discuss goals of care and overall expectations) was terrifying.

So I told her that I didn't know, and her dad was very very sick and it might take us a long time to know what would happen, but a whole team of doctors and nurses were going to keep trying their best to help him get better.

He died several days later.

Nurse, not a doctor. Work on a pediatric cardiac ICU where s**t tends to hit the fan with little to no warning—kids can compensate beautifully until they decide to simply die.

Had a 3 y/o patient come in with a heart rate in the 210s and nothing we did brought her heart rate back into an acceptable range. We’d deliver meds, her HR would normalize, then she’d flip back into SVT/tachycardia. She kept drifting off to slip, then jerking awake suddenly and screaming, clearly terrified, then would fight to stay awake until she nearly passed out from fatigue. This cycle repeated itself over and over. I had a terrible feeling about this patient and elevated my concerns to the team, so we weren’t completely unprepared for what happened. Close to change of shift, she sat up from a dead sleep, screamed, then collapsed. No pulse. Not breathing. Crashed to ECMO.

Another 3- or 4-month-old patient was fussy as soon as I started my shift one morning. Intractably crying, in and out of atrial tachycardia (which had previously been managed with meds), but otherwise doing well clinically. He’d had an IV leak a small amount of irritating fluid into the skin of his arm overnight, so I asked for a dose of pain medicine to make sure he wasn’t experiencing untreated pain. No change. Still screaming. I had two patients that day and remember going into the other patients room and giving meds/doing my checks and assessment as early as I could and warning the parent at the bedside that I might be getting busy next door. Just a gut feeling. Sure enough, as I’m finishing giving my happy, stable patient his meds, I look over and my other patient’s oxygen sats have dropped to the 60%s. Go over, throw oxygen on him, call a provider, and when I listen with a stethoscope, I realize that he’s lost the blood flow to his lungs. Nearly crashed to ECMO, managed to emergently intubate him and get him to the cath lab to stent/prop open structures to get blood to his lungs, and he discharged from the hospital a week later with no residual effects.

Panicky babies make me feel panicky.

Back when I was a med student, one case of severe acute heart failure that wanted to go back to work, didn't listen no matter what I said. Had to go back to work because no one would support their family, even though it was highly likely they would have gone back and died. (Scary to me because, they just wouldn't listen)

Second case was the cry/scream of a mother when their child died, because the day before their condition seemed to improve. Terminal lucidity I guess.