Patients/Doctors/Nurses of Reddit were asked: “What are your craziest/weirdest/most NSFW hospital stories?” These are some of the best answers.
1/21 A WTF moment was a young boy that decided to walk around with a flare gun shoved in the front waistband of his shorts. The gun went off, and the flare damn near burned his penis off. Took lots of skin grafts, and it still won’t ever be right.
groundrush
2/21 A drunk abusive woman in her mid 40s stripped herself naked and masturbated in our emergency department. When the police were arresting her they all jumped back as she wiped her vulva with a pair of gloves and threw them. The gloves went splat on my chest and stuck to me, the stink was horrific. I couldn’t bring myself to lift my top off and cut it off with scissors rather than lift the dank over my face, good times
rotund_adonis
3/21 18-month old intact male Dalmatian, living with an intact female (show home). The dog was clinically normal until the female came into season, at which point he became suddenly paraplegic. As soon as the female was out of season, he was back to normal. Clinical and neurological exam was unremarkable. We decided to expose him to another female in heat, and lo and behold, he became paraplegic within a few minutes, with the neurological exam indicating a lesion in the lumbar chord. Took the female away, and he was back to normal within a couple hours.
We did a myelogram (dating the story here) and found a small mass at the right place, but nowhere near big enough to explain the symptoms. The owner insisted on surgery anyway, so the mass was removed, and the dog was cured after that. The mass was then sent in for pathology, and it came back as an ectopic piece of Corpus spongiosum (that is, a piece of penis where there shouldn’t be any).
Basically, the dog was getting erections inside his spinal canal, and the pressure on the spinal chord caused the symptoms, which were reversible when the stimulus went away. Truly one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.
Urgullibl
4/21 Psych patient went off his meds, set himself on fire. The surgeon cleaned up his wounds, and stapled cadaver skin to him, harvested from organ donors. I walked in on the patient peeling off, and sucking down the cadaver grafts like slimy potato chips.
DeLaNope
5/21 OB rotation in a urban hospital. Walked in on a new mother sitting crosslegged in the bed, infant draped facedown across her lap, screaming. Mom is eating Doritos, covering the kid in a fine dust of cheese crap, and smoking a crack pipe. The nurse waspissed, apparently they were waiting on social services/DFACs to show up.
DeLaNope
6/21 Was doing wound care in a nursing home. Patient was super noncompliant with anything, and his lower legs were covered in weeping, infected ulcerations. They drained constantly, to the point where I had to implement some heavy duty, specialty dressings to contain the drainage between dressing changes. The smell was horrible, you could tell where he was in the facility by the smell, and his room reeked.
At any rate, he wouldn’t get in the bed so I could do his dressings, so I had to squat on the floor and do it while he was in the wheelchair. Anyway, I’m about 15 minutes into this dressing change, when my hair tie decides to be a useless f*ck, and snaps. My hair acts like it’s in a goddamn Pantene commercial for once in its life, and bounces in a golden cascade all over this guy’s ulcers… and just stuck. Alllll up and down his legs.
And that’s how my director found me washing my hair with surgical scrub in the break room.
DeLaNope
7/21 A female patient came into the ER with profuse rectal bleeding, her boyfriend in tow, covered in her blood and poop all up his front. Turns out that in a bid to get higher off of nitrous oxide than from its normal inhalation route, they decided to use a homemade whipped cream maker to blow N2O up her rear end. He overinflated her colon, and she had a blowout. Patient required a temporary colostomy, and fortunately this was later reversed. The worst part was having to break the news that there is no possible way to get high that way, should have just stuck to huffing it.
groundrush
8/21 Seriously obese patient, only in the nursing home because obese as shit and unwilling to do anything by herself. Famous for making incredibly rapey comments towards male staff. At any rate, she started “dating” a little frail guy, or at least, he was spotted making countless trips from the snack machines to her room.
A few weeks into the relationship, Chunky’s sister approaches me and demands a private room for the lovebirds so they could get their squish on. However, that’s not all she wanted… she was concerned that the two couldn’t actually consummate their relationship, and wanted us to… “You just gotta, you know, PUT THEM TOGETHER! She can’t hold her legs up so you gotta hold them for her!! Then you gotta help her MOVE! Don’t you know nothin’?”
DeLaNope
9/21 One of the male doctors put a hidden camera in a shampoo bottle, put it in the female showers, got videos of lots of other female doctors and nurses showering. All the staff were horrified when he was exposed seeing as he was quite a senior doctor.
kingofwukong
10/21 Once walked in on a patient getting blow job by girlfriend in his shared room. Guy was only in the hospital for 24 hours. Like, come on guy… Can’t it wait?
cmcewen
11/21 This happened when I was a nursing student. An obese women came back to the hospital after an abdominal operation because her staples had ripped off and she didn’t notice (!?!). She now had a huge v shape gash at least 2 inches deep from her pubis to the diaphragm. We had to clean that gash a couple of times a day. The first student that went into the room fainted at the site of it, so our teacher ask me to do it (I had the reputation of being tough). Imagine a small yellow and green river coming out of her each time she was moving. The smell was so horrible that we had to opened the window (yeah for old hospital with windows you can open) and close the door. I was determine not to faint so I clean her and put some packing in it. Sadly that poor woman died of the infection a couple of days later.
sonia72quebec
12/21 A patient’s extended family physically stopped us from resuscitating a completely limp and unresponsive newborn because helping it breathe “isn’t natural. Labor is natural and requires no intervention.” Baby eventually slowly perked up about 15 minutes later. Needless to say I don’t expect this baby to eventually go to Harvard.
GoThirdParty
13/21 A story about a quadriplegic guy who just had an operation. My teacher, another student and I were taken care of it. The teacher took a washcloth and decided to clean his face and that’s when it happened. The guy started to eat the washcloth. Yes, eat it. The more he would eat it the more he would start to choke on it. The other student panicked, my teacher was pulling on the washcloth with her 2 hands her knee on the bed to get some grip. Nothing… the guy was still eating it and chocking. So I had, probably the best idea in my life, and I block his nostrils with my hand. He couldn’t breath so he let go the washcloth. The 3 of us were shaking, sweating and swearing to never put a washcloth near the mouth of someone who just came back from surgery. The funny thing is that I talk to the guy a couple of days later and he didn’t remembered anything.
sonia72quebec
14/21 Worked as a habitation tech. Walked into back room with two patients with CP (cerebral palsy). Another client was in the back with FEMA and mentally disabled. FEMA client was eating one of the CP clients face off. Blood everywhere, and the screaming is enough to stick in my mind forever. A 1/4 of her face was missing after that.
DKatz21
15/21 I had a homeless patient come into the dermatology clinic. He had a filthy bed sheet wrapped around his head, with only part of the left side of his face and left eye exposed. You could see the rancid stink coming off of his head. We got him in the exam room and unwrapped his noggin. Turns out he had a basal cell carcinoma (skin cancer) for which he had refused treatment, for like 15 years. The cancer had eaten away all of the skin on most of his head. There were very large areas of muscle and bone exposed. You could see his parotid gland and blood vessels. The tumor had eaten into his skull and you could see into his skull and the dura (lining surrounding the brain) and could see into his right orbit from the side and see into his sinuses and mastoid air cells. His right ear was long gone. I could watch his muscles move and contract while he spoke. It was literally like watching something from the Walking Dead, except there was not sign of infection or maggots or anything else horrible. It has literally a living dissected skull talking to us like that was totally normal. It was horrifying and amazing to see simultaneously.
rotosound
16/21 Bokchoi in an adult male’s ass. Insisted it just “slipped in”. Removed it, it had a condom on it.
unicornbloods
17/21 Probably the most disgusting time of your medical school career will be your obstetrics and gynecology rotation. You can expect on a daily basis to be splattered with blood/amniotic fluid mixtures, and on a slightly less frequent basis to be covered in vomit, urine and poop.
For me the worst was assisting with C-sections. Mostly as the med student it would be your job to hold the retractor, which means standing there with your hands right in pulling on a big metal thing and staying perfectly still. Once they cut into the uterus, the amniotic fluid and blood all spills out all over your hands and arms and drips onto your gown and down to your feet. It’s warm and there’s a lot of it and you can feel it through your gloves, but you can’t move.
That’s not really a special occurrence, it’s literally every day for the whole month (or more if you decide you like it of course). There’s definitely more disgusting things in medicine, but I thought as a future med student you’d be interested to hear about some of the gross things that are absolutely guaranteed to happen.
leafwater
18/21 Vet here. I had this lady bring in her female cat who turned out to be pregnant. She was adamant that it was impossible, as this was strictly an indoor cat. Upon further questioning, she admitted that there was an intact tom also living in the same house, but that he couldn’t possibly have done it because he was the female cat’s brother. Yeah, cats don’t work that way.
Urgullibl
19/21 Nurse here. Had a patient who was a very nasty lady. Near 300 lbs, 6’2″, unkempt, and rude. She had a catheter in and called someone in to check it out. While the nurse was begrudgingly looking at it it got moved a little. she said, “oh that felt good on my clit.” The nurse then noticed something strange about her vagina. Turns out there was a turkey sandwich stuck in it. One of those shitty little ones the hospital serves overnight. She informed the patient who then responded, “Oh, did you want to eat it out of me?”
The same patient on a different admission had received a chest x-ray in the evening. Overnight the medical resident came flying on the unit declaring something was majorly wrong on the x-ray and she needed to be assessed and moved to another floor. Turns out she had a pork chop under her boob that showed up on x-ray.
RegasKogena
20/21 Last night I was doing paperwork on a transfer. About halfway to the receiving hospital, I heard my medical patient start grunting. I looked up from my paperwork just in time to see my patient, pants around the ankles, diaper around the knees, perfectly urinating into his own face.
He wasn’t even a psych patient. I just waited for him to finish, and handed him a towel.
CejusChrist
21/21 I work security in a hospital mostly psych units but also the ER. Grossest thing I’ve seen was a body that had been sitting in the morgue for like 5 months. The body was liquified. Security releases the bodies and has to check toe tags so I had to open the bag. The guy picking up the body tried to move it before it was secured. Liquid body was everywhere.
Cjwillwin
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