Nurses Say These 40 Cases Are The Most Mysterious Things They Saw During Their Career

I have a resident who has down-syndrome and severe dementia and he is 74 years old! He never used to speak at all up untill about 2 years ago. He suddenly started talking more and more to the point where he just won't shut up anymore. Instead of the steady decline we were expecting, he seems to be blossoming up!

Also had a resident who had been in a wheelchair for over 2 years after a severe stroke, who suddenly had the urge to get up and walk again. He now has physical therapy and is walking with a walker. This man is also mentally disabled and turned 80 last year.

Identical twin brothers roughly 70 years old.

Both usually fit and well. Lived separate lives in different parts of England.

Both had to have aortic valve replacement within 6 months of each other due to infective endocarditis (infection of the main heart valve).

(They both had structurally normal hearts, not bicuspid).

My partner dropped his pH up to 6.3, had 75 units of blood in 48 hours, dropped his systolic BP to 14, lost half his pelvis, had his aortic artery clamped by hand, and survived. He was talking when his BP was 14 and only lost consciousness when they tubed him.

I'm an ICU/ER nurse, and have never seen someone that close to dying not die. If he was my patient I wouldn't have given him a chance (not that i wouldn't have tried).

Not a doctor, just the family of a patient, but this is something we still talk about and no one has ever really explained.

My uncle was completely fine one day, then within hours he started having severe neurological symptoms: confusion, loss of speech, and then full paralysis on one side. We rushed him in thinking stroke, but scans, blood work, everything came back normal. The doctors kept repeating that nothing matched what they were seeing.

What stuck with us was one specialist literally saying they’d “never seen a presentation like this with completely clean imaging.” They treated symptoms, but never found a cause. He slowly improved over weeks, but even now there’s no official diagnosis that fully explains what happened.

Had a 2 year old admitted for observation because although he had been run over by a UPS truck, he had no apparent injuries found in the ER. Mother witnessed it and truck driver felt the bounce. Happy ending - baby boy was fine. Devastated, unbelieving driver was invited to hospital to see for himself before discharge.

My uncle walked into the ER complaining about "weird indigestion" and they found a tumor the size of a grapefruit just chilling in his abdomen. dude had been playing tennis that morning. bodies are absolutely unhinged.

EMT. Had a call yesterday. A woman had left her 64 yo totally not demented husband home and went to work. She told us he had some diarrhea over the past few days. She arrived home that evening to find him in cardiac arrest and called 911.

We got there, and there is s**t literally everywhere. The bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen. It's on the floor, the walls, the doors, the windows. He was stone cold d**d.

I can't imagine what his last hours were like. What was he doing?

Had a patient who had a traumatic brain injury, lost half of his brain, and yet was still conscious; walking, talking etc.

Since then, i no longer believe consciousness exists or arises in the brain.

17 year old boy with catatonia. Would just lay there and stare at the ceiling. If he did move, it was in slow motion (and then all the nurses would freak out and call a code M (manpower needed) as if slowly sitting up was somehow dangerous). Unresponsive to benzos. Responded to ECT and it was AMAZING. By the time he transferred (turned 18) he was sitting up in bed, reading a book. Truly it was like a miracle.

I was a CNA, a sweet woman went to hospice.
We all thought she was going to pass with in a few hours. Staff that loved her were all upset the process took so long. We wanted her to go peacefully!

She was there for 5 weeks. They sent her back to us. She said those people were nice but an angel told her not yet. She lived several more years with us in the nursing home.

I had a teenaged patient crash his car, rolled over a few times and wasn’t wearing a seat belt. Not only was he not dead, he was totally fine. I told him people don’t survive that kind of accident and his life must have been preserved for a reason, and he’d better figure out what it was.

My grandmother had a TIA at one point that prevented her from recalling human names while she was having it. *Only* human names. Me, my mother, the family that made barbecue sauce she ate since she was young? She could recognize all of them, but couldn’t actually name them. The dog? Named right away without difficulty.

Not in medical but my family is apparently destined to live long, painful lives.

My grandmother has had 8 different types of cancer. She pulls through every time through any stage. What’s finally going to take her out is Parkinson’s.

My dad went into septic shock after gallbladder surgery. Died twice, medical coma, he was already an unhealthy T2D and his kidneys got worse with the sepsis. He should be dead. He’s completely normal a year and some change later. After the hospital stay, he switched to the carnivore diet and it took him from stage 5 kidney failure to stage 3. None of his doctors can explain it, one of them is writing a paper to publish about him.

Obviously left out a ton of detail but that’s the gist.

My dad was a Maine farmer. When he had lung x-rays they asked about his broken back when they saw healed bone. He said it was “sore” once after he fell off a truck but he’d kept working!

Had a patient who started talking perfect Japanese while in a comatose state

When they woke up they had no recollection of it at all, they were white.

Not as interesting as the others, but one time one of my patients coughed up what looked like a bite of chewed-up steak. He was NPO/ tube feeds so it wasn’t anything he’d eaten. I was like maybe it’s something from inside his mouth? Like he bit off a chunk of his cheek or something? Went crazy looking in his mouth with the pen light and it looked like a normal old man mouth.

So I saved it in a specimen cup and showed it to the providers and they were like 🤷‍♀️ who cares? I CARED I WANT TO KNOW what the meat chunk was and where it came from.

I managed to walk on a broken ankle for over two years without knowing. Seriously.

The orthopaedic doc who finally spotted the fracture told me that this sort of thing is surprisingly common.

My mother and her sister had a stroke on the same day. January 3 2000. Both survived and were at rehab hospital together. They were both paralyzed on one side. They had to have speech and intense physical therapy to walk and do daily functions.

I dont have a specific case but I do have a nasty aunt that was and continues to be terrible to her kids and most everyone else. Has mobility issues and keeps falling and breaking bones, making life even harder for my cousin/cousin-in-law to care for her. Is 86 and shows no sign of slowing down.

Everyone says that God doesn't want her yet.

I had a friend who had a terrible headache and drove herself from work to the nearest urgent care. They immediately put her in an ambulance and raced her to the nearest hospital with a stroke unit. She barely made it. Everyone was stunned that she managed to drive herself to the urgent care. Fun fact: she was peri menopausal and on birth control pills to alleviate symptoms...after lying to her doctor about having no family history of stroke.