Doctors are professionals doing a serious job. They hold lives in their hand on a daily basis. However, between all the life or death situations they sometimes encounter some duds. There are some patients that have landed in the hospital for the weirdest, most ridiculous reasons. The Doctors in the following stories share the cases that made them laugh, left them confused, and sometimes made them angry.
(Stories have been edited for clarity.)
Leave It To The Professionals
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Sure enough, the guy on the top floor missed a beam, fires the way over-powered tool into plywood, it goes through the weaker first layer of flooring, shoots the guy on the bottom floor in the head. They know the nail missed the beam (there is a hole to prove it) but can not locate the nail.
Oddly enough, the patient was fine. The nail grazed his skull and entered the skin, then settled behind his ear. It was a very sore bump. He assumed the nail had hit him on the way by and initially, didn’t want to come in, but the friend insisted on it since they could not find the missing nail.
Great x rays, couldn’t keep them.”
She’s Got Some Part Of That RIght At Least
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“There was a patient who was upset to find out that she was pregnant again because she’d used her diaphragm EXACTLY as she’d been told. She carefully inspected it for holes, applied the spermicide, placed it, wore it at night, then took it out, cleaned it and put it away each morning… and then her husband arrived home from his night-shift.”
One Wild Night
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“In the wee hours of the morning, a doctor friend of mine got called to see a trauma consult. It was a guy who reportedly wandered into the ER stating he’d just come from a bus stop across the street from the hospital.
He had just woken up there and realized that he was missing his wallet… as well as all of his clothing from the waist down.
What, you ask, would prompt an indecently-clothed man to march barefoot across a busy downtown road, in a big city, by the dawn’s early light to seek assistance in the ER?
Shame be condemned… his butt hurt.
My friend did an appropriate workup and discovered a large chunk of broken-off concrete lodged in this gentleman’s rectum. It required an operation to retrieve it. However, before they whisked him off to the OR, the patient confessed the rest of the story:
He’d hooked up with two strange men off of Craigslist, and they’d gone out in one guy’s awesome sports car, used copious amounts of illicit substances, and done… well, at that point, he wasn’t too sure just what they’d done. All he remembered was waking up at the bus station with no pants and a rock up his butt.
While my friend was still in the ER with the guy getting consent for the operation… the patient’s very worried wife walked in.”
Never Google Your Symptoms
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“I am an ER doctor and recently had a young male patient who came in for about the fifth time complaining of abdominal pain and vomiting. Looking over his records from past visits, I could see that his symptoms had previously been attributed to either acid reflux and gastritis or cyclic vomiting syndrome due to daily heavy substance use. Anyway, he’d been told to take Nexium twice a day and cut back on the drinking, as well as follow up with a GI doctor, but he had done none of those things. Instead, he tells me, ‘Doc, I Googled my symptoms and I’m sure I have stomach cancer. My mom has cancer too, so she gave me some of her chemo-therapy pills and I started taking those.’
So, yeah, guy ignored the medical diagnoses and recommendations he was given and instead decided he had stomach cancer and treated himself by taking his mother’s chemotherapy pills. He wasn’t sure what kind of cancer his mom had. I tried to explain that different cancers require different medications, that chemotherapies are the most toxic medications we made and might kill him. He was very unlikely at his age to have stomach cancer and much more likely to have over-production of stomach acid for which he should take the medicines he was prescribed the last several times he came to the ER.”
That’s Not How That Works
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“I still remember a guy coming to the hospital with his girlfriend and asking for the morning after pill. I asked them when did the intercourse happen and he says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t call it exactly intercourse, but my girlfriend would feel much more relaxed if she took the pill.’
I asked, ‘Could you define the nature of your contact?’