45 Of The Worst Things Patients Had To Go Through, As Per Hospital Workers Who Have Seen It All

Basically anytime a patient (especially elderly) is hanging on with every possible form of life support (vent, dialysis, repetitive coding) and the family refuses to make them a DNR. I know it is a hard decision to make. I know you don’t want to see them [go]. You also don’t want to be in the room when they code. You don’t want to be in the room the third time they code, wondering if we will be able to bring your loved one back again, just to see his chest rise and fall mechanically. To see him being turned every hour and leaving the room so that your modest dad can have some privacy while we clean him up because he can’t control his bowels. Please think about what the person would have wanted.

Not exactly something I saw the patient go through, but I saw the sweetest old lady who was suffering with chronic kidney problems because, when she was younger, she worked as a maid for some evil twisted people who forbade her from using the toilet at work (ie 9-5 not including travel). So she had to force herself to hold a full bladder daily for hours at a time. This is a great way to get stones, which in turn can cause obstruction and damage the kidneys.

She was so sweet and lovely, and it just really got to me that people could be so needlessly maleficent.

In clinical on a Burn/Trauma unit: guy had 3rd degree burns on 80% of his body. He had very little skin left, I could actually see part of his tibia, finger tips were necrotic...he was heavily medicated but still, I can’t even fathom the pain. Idk if he made it bc he was quite septic last time I was there.

I now work in the NICU. Most of the babies end up doing pretty well and going home eventually, but some aren’t so lucky. I could go on about the medical stuff, but really the worst is when their parents don’t [care] about them. Some parents live far away and have other kids to take care of so it’s understandable if they aren’t there every day, but then there are others who never call, never visit, and no one can track them down, so the kid ends up being discharged to foster care. It just burns deep in my soul sometimes. One day I might hand a perfectly nice couple their baby to hold one last time while we withdraw life support, and the next day I’ll be trying to soothe a baby withdrawing.

Despite the challenges, I still love my job, though 🙂❤️.

Had a patient 1 yrs old. Suspected meningitis. Unresolved fever for 10 days. Parents refused to do a spinal tap and refused medication. Says that after admission for 3 days the medication is not working and wants to be discharged. We tried convincing them not to but they left anyway.

To me, the worst is that children pay for their parents stupidity.

A guy got in a car accident and broke his back and was told that he’d never walk again. When they tried doing therapy he started wiggling his toes so some hope came back into the picture ... the Transport dropped him when transferring him from the bed to the stretcher and broke his back all over again. That was twenty years ago now and he has never moved a toe again. Don’t forget to lock the bed or brace the stretcher kids.

Edit - bonus points I also forgot about the little boy whose brother jumped off the top of the bunk bed to help him do the splits ... screams I will never forget.

I was a patient in a hospital for a heart issue when I was 22. They kept me for 3 days in the cardiac ward and I shared a room with an older gentleman who I believe was around 80-85 based off his visitors. I never saw him behind the privacy curtain. I was completely okay and sitting up in bed working on schoolwork most of my visit. When his family came in I could tell the situation was bad. His whole extended family came, everyone from his wife to his grandchildren. He was also on a ventilator that was keeping his breathing up. I’m not a medical person but as I understand this tube is down/in your throat. On the same night after they all visited he tried to pull everything off and it set off an alarm and a nurse rushed in. All I could hear from a very muffled voice as the nurse tried to tell him he needed this equipment to live was “what kind of life is this....” it made me question my own issues and cry in the dark next to him.

Seeing a 24 year old (the same age as me at the time) come in with difficulty swallowing, then being told he had end stage oesophageal cancer and had weeks to live, whilst his wife was about to give birth, I was there when he was told, and I still to this day don’t know how I turned up for work the next day.

Having worked there for 5 years already, I’d never experienced anything so awful, he managed a few months, met his son. Something that will stick with me forever I think.

I’m a children’s nurse, I worked on a ward that specialises in brain and spinal tumours in children, amongst other specialities. The worst thing I can think of was a little boy, I think he was 3 or 4 years old. He’d been in a different hospital for two weeks with a weakness to his legs that was seeping up his body, eventually causing incontinence. The other hospital hadn’t scanned him, which was the first thing we did and we found his brain and spine were covered in tumours, there was literally nothing we could do. He had weeks if not days left. On my shift he was incredibly poorly and I was trying to push for him to get moved to the ICU. He was barely conscious. Being with his poor parents as they went through this, watching their typical, previously healthy child fade away with no information was the worst. The Mum asking ‘will he live? Please save my baby.’ It was truly awful.

A dude in his thirties who was playing with his kid on a trampoline. Fell off, broken neck, wheelchair, tetraplegic, minimal use of his hands. From fitness, independence, career etc to complete, permanent disability in one second. Bang.

Just, you know, what the [hell] do you say to that guy? It won’t get better. It’s not like he’s 80 and nearing the end anyway. And it’s not even like he was drunk driving or tombstoning or whatever, he was just really, really, *really* unlucky.

Mother backed out of her driveway and didn’t notice her toddler had crawled into the culvert under the road. The culvert collapsed and crushed her daughter. We tried to keep the daughter alive while the mother was hysterical and the father was in shock. That was the worst.

I’ve seen worse graphically but not emotionally.

A woman got flesh eating bacteria on her c section wound. All of her limbs had to be amputated and her kidneys failed. Our staff rarely get upset but our nurses would cry after caring for her since it was so heartbreaking.

Recently, we coded a baby 8 times in one night. We should have let go after the first code, but unfortunately the epinephrine kicked in... after 40 minutes of CPR.

Parents were unrealistic about the baby's chances of survival. This baby had no chance of survival, but they wanted every thing done. The Attending finally told the parents that we could do this all night, but in the end there was nothing that could be done for this infant's survival.

Working the night shift many years ago at the local children's ER, EMS brings in a 3 month old that was found down in his crib. Parents had him co-sleeping with older brother who was little over 1 yr. Brother in the night crawled on the little one and fell asleep and accidentally suffocated him. Child was long gone before making it to us. The crying scream from the mom when we told her baby son was gone still haunts me.
Don't let anyone co-sleep with your baby :(.

Tiny, frail elderly lady with dementia and the worse case of shingles I've ever seen. Open, weeping blisters everywhere. Half of her face was obliterated by blisters upon blisters, to the point where the eye was swollen and fused shut. Confused and half blind, she tried to crawl over the bed rail and fell onto the side of her face, which basically exploded. The entire side of her head looked like raw hamburger. She did pass away a couple days later.


Elderly man who was still living in his own home, but supported by his son and checked on occasionally. Son deploys and leaves the duty to his wife, who wants nothing to do with the old man, and hires a "caregiver". Caregiver picks up her pay checks, says everything is going fine periodically, but in reality shows up every few days/weeks. Elderly man eventually falls (due to a GI bleed/weakness), and is undiscovered for days. Comes to us in a state of starvation, skin on his back and legs burned off from laying in his own urine, and covered in rat bites. I have never seen anybody as emaciated as that man, except in photos. He made a full recovery after a VERY lengthy rehab. Son got a divorce.

I volunteered in a Children's Hospital throughout high school. There was a sixteen year old patient there who had spina bifida and had no feeling beneath the waist. He had routine surgery, and expected to be in the hospital for about a week. The worst thing I've ever seen was the look on his face when he told me that the doctors had found MRSA on both of his legs, and he wouldn't be leaving the hospital any time soon. Hospital trips are kinda funny, the first week everybody wants to visit you, but after that guests seem to taper off dramatically. I remember him stating that the hardest thing for him was the lack of social support beyond his family (and to a much lesser extent myself), as this was like the year before facebook really being a thing that everybody had. Happy ending though, he eventually did recover from MRSA after spending around 6 months in the hospital.

Emergency room

an old lady came in, I don't know for what but she came in from a nursing home. There is no way to describe accurately how horrific this womans condition was. The patient didn't go through this IN the hospital so idk if it really answers your question but here goes...

Her hair... was so matted and dirty... that it seemed like the bugs who lived in it couldn't even get to the center of the dreadlock... They ended up cutting most of it off

Her skin was just straight up open, infected, oozing sores. Picture like maybe if you took someones skin off and layed it flat then took a hole punch to the entire thing and put it back on... it was HUNDREDS of small round infected smelly gooey painful sores on her entire back and legs.

now ... her mouth... the decaying and missing teeth were nothing... what was something... something that we couldn't figure out... was the mold. Just straight up. Mossy. MOLD. Originally we thought she had a napkin in her mouth or was eating toilet paper... nope just mold. I had to leave the room because I kept throwing up.

This lady smelled worse than a [corpse].

Thank the lord jesus and all of his men for nurses because those people handled the situation like champs ... They cut her hair, patched her up and cleaned her mouth. She looked and smelled and spoke like a new person.

Pediatric oncology

A little girl had stage 4 rhabdomyosarcoma; practically the worst cancer diagnosis you can get as a child odds-wise. There have not been new treatments for this disease in many years and last I heard the 5 year survival rate was under 20%.

This child has many surgeries for her left hip tumor, her primary tumor. She had a fraternal twin sister who was always with her over the course of the 3 years she was treated. You could slowly see a huge difference in their growth and development; this child practically remained physically 7 while her twin sister grew to 10 very normally and healthily.

After long and arduous treatment courses, there were no further options and the child was placed on palliative care (comfort measures/ hospice). We didn’t expect to see her again but she was admitted one night because her hip tumor had grown so large that the skin over it was pulling itself dangerously tight, and her mother was afraid it would burst. They came to the hospital hoping there was something they could do to alleviate the impending disaster, when the tumor actually burst, all over the child, her mother, and her twin sister. These twins had an incredible bond and watching them be parted so the ill one could be rushed to undergo a surgical washout was heartbreaking. You could tell they both weren’t sure they’d see each other again. She made it through surgery but [was gone] a couple weeks later at home. I still see her Facebook updates through some people at works’ pages, and the surviving twin is an absolutely stunning 16 year old girl now. It’s terribly sad to think about what she could have been, especially when you see her other “half”.

Saw a couple lose their baby very suddenly 1 day before the due date.

Hearing the news that their newly transplanted heart is being rejected by their body.

Early stages are treatable and the protocol for testing is there for a reason, but even knowing all of that, it’s scary as [hell] to be given another chance at life and then have it all be hanging in the balance again so soon.

ICU - lady who was roughly 40 paralyzed from the chest down due to car accident years prior, currently on a ventilator through a trach and had a permanent feeding tube inserted in her stomach. When I saw her, she had a bleed in her stomach that was seeping out through the tube and she kept pulling out her trach in an effort to end it all. They ended up having to sedate her pretty heavily to keep her from repeatedly pulling the tube out. Seeing her pulling the tube loose, and watching her actively begin to suffocate with a totally blank look in her eyes was chilling.