Sometimes, being ignorant of things is quite normal but if it’s something that even a kid should know, as an adult you should start questioning yourself and educate yourself at best. Because if one of these things concerns your health, that is one thing that you should never take for granted.
These stories will shock you with how some people could be clueless about their situation. That’s why salute I these medical professionals who kept their calm about some people who lack common sense. Come check these out!
1. Identity Mix-Up
I work in home health. At my last job, I had a lady call saying she was returning my call specifically. I don't recall her at all and when I check for anything on her, it shows we have never received a referral or anything for her. Which I tell her.
She gets mad and starts screaming at me, won't let me get a word in to tell her to call the discharge planner at the hospital. Like a good 8 minutes of her screaming at me, calling me heartless, an idiot, you name it. Whatever, it's slow and these calls are usually good for a laugh.
She takes a breath, and I say "Ma'am, I'm not sure who called you, especially since we haven't heard of you before now." She interrupts with "No, it was you, you said your name was Shelliton and you were calling from Advanced Home Health!"
We have detected the problem! I tell her "I see what's going on, you accidentally called Ambercare Home Health, let me get you Advanced's number." Then she says "I have it. They didn't pick up the phone, so I called you guys."
I was not expecting that one.
Shelliton
2. Hilarious Misunderstanding
I was a former microbiologist a long time ago.
I found myself all over the clinical lab at times, not just infectious diseases. So, one day, this 20-year-old guy (wife and mom in tow) walks in with a paper request for specimen analysis, pre-computer era.
Not the most comfortable encounter, but I'm a professional and have done this drill many times. He had not been briefed by the doctor and had no idea how establishing infertility in males was done.
I took him aside and using standard medical terminology told him how a diagnosis is made and what he needed to do to provide a specimen. He couldn't believe that I was asking him to pleasure himself in that container. Astonished!
Then he played dumb as if the word was unfamiliar to him. We looped through the medical terms and procedure again, and I eventually resorted to every word I knew to describe the "act."
It was like a George Carlin bit! A half-hour later, he emerged from the toilet with two inches of urine in the cup. God Almighty. The report went back to "patient provided improper specimen.”
BrunoGerace
3. Thirsty For A Solution
I was a paramedic. One day while on duty, an elderly woman started to complain that her mouth was dry and she felt a bit dizzy climbing the stairs earlier.
I went through the whole rigamarole of getting a medical history, vitals, and more details on her symptoms. I asked her what she's had to drink today. Then she answered, “A cup of tea, ten hours ago.” I asked her, “Did you drink any water?” Then she answered, “No.”
Guess what fixed it within five minutes.
SpatchcockMcGuffin
4. Lawnmower Rage
I had a buddy who was working as an EMT. One time, he was called out to a location for a gunshot wound.
It was kind of an unfortunate incident. Apparently what happened was a father was mowing his lawn when he accidentally touched part of the mower near the engine and burned his hand. He got mad at the lawnmower, pulled out his pistol, and shot it.
The bullet ricocheted and hit his son in the leg.
Kretuhtuh
5. Medication Needs A Lunch Box Too
I am a pharmacist.
I had a woman bring in a literal sandwich bag unseperated which she kept all her meds in. She needed help seeing which meds she was low or out on and asking different questions about the medications.
When she pointed to an opaque stating it was her blood pressure medicine I immediately became concerned as to why pet medicine was in her bag only to find out that she had been throwing her pet's medicine inside her bag of medicine. So Lord knows what she's been giving her dog or taking herself.
I immediately stressed how important it is to keep medicine in its original container to protect the medicine and herself and to know the directions of how to take it. I've seen her a few times since then and am glad to see she has since taken my advice. But how any pharmacist or doctor hasn't advised her on this before is beyond me.
DigbickDandit
6. Farm-Focused Physiotherapy
I was a physiotherapist. For those that don't know, after a total knee replacement, you have a 6-week window after the surgery to regain the range of motion. If you don't regain the range in those first 6 weeks, it ain't coming back.
I had a patient who was a farmer, who was very enthusiastic about regaining the range because he needed to be mobile for his work. I saw him the first time about 5 days after surgery, showed him all the basic exercises, told him to not do any farm work for at least 6 weeks, and told him to come back to see me once a week for the first 6 weeks.
He disappeared and came back about 8 weeks later. His range was non-existent, maybe 30 degrees of range in total. He was visibly mad at me as if it was my fault, actually shouting and calling me incompetent. I asked him if he had been doing the exercises, and he said no.
I asked him again, "How often are you doing farm work?" then he answered, "Every day.” This time, I was confused as to why he was blaming me, "Why haven't you come back since the first appointment 8 weeks ago?" and he replied, "Too busy with farm work.
To end the conversation, I asked him, "So to summarize here, you did absolutely nothing that I told you to, and this is somehow my fault?" After that, I never saw him again.
VeryAttractive
7. Bee-gusting Emergency
I was a rural emergency room doctor.
One day, a 35-year-old female walks in with right-sided jaw and neck swelling. She started to explain what happened, “I think it happened because I ate some meat yesterday that my body is reacting to.”
10 minutes later, she started saying another thing, “Oh yeah, and I accidentally swallowed a bee and it stung me in my mouth right before this happened. Sorry, I forgot to mention that.”
Shoeflinger
8. Labor And Delivery Surprises
Not me but my mother would pick up shifts as a nurse sometimes in Labour and Delivery. It always shocks her how she had met a handful of women who didn’t know the baby was going to be coming out of their lady parts. Like they have no clue at all.
My mom usually said something like, “How you got it in is how it’s coming out honey.“ This was the late 90s or early 2000s. Women in those years couldn’t be that clueless right?
QuailPuzzled1286
9. Tales From Vet Office
As someone who worked at a veterinary office. I am completely unsurprised. We once had to explain what smegma was to very embarrassed owners of a new puppy who brought him in for "discharge around his male organ."
Not to mention the countless people who bring their cats in asking about a lump only to be told it's a nipple and then you occasionally get the inevitable "But he's a boy!" We have to explain that male mammals have nipples too. Like ma'am, you are married. Have you never noticed your husband’s before?
I miss working there.
SorrySeptember
10. Pregnancy Confusion
We had an 18 or 19-year-old girl come into my ER with some complaint that required an X-ray. It’s standard that we do a urine pregnancy test before imaging any female of childbearing years.
She insisted she had never had physical intimacy with anyone and there was zero possibility of pregnancy. We did the test anyway and it showed that she was pregnant.
We did a blood pregnancy test to confirm the result since she insisted she couldn’t possibly be pregnant because she’d never had physical intimacy. That was positive too.
We gave her a few minutes to figure out what the heck happened, and when I returned to check on her a short time later she asked me if she could get pregnant even though her boyfriend said, “It didn’t go all the way in.”
She 100% believed that as long as his male organ wasn’t entirely in her it didn’t count as physical intimacy. It took nearly a half hour of explaining reproduction to her for her to understand whether it was halfway in or in sperm travel.
NAMomx3
11. Bizarre Bra Chronicles
Not a personal experience, but one from a colleague of mine.
So this 60-year-old suffers from an acute complication and gets a Pacemaker to solve the problem. Everything goes normally and as planned, he recovers, every care and meds that he needs to take are prescribed, and explained and medical appointments with a cardiologist are scheduled so that he may get the follow-up he needs.
The man then proceeds to never show up to any appointment and never answer any calls from the hospital to know of him and reschedule. This went on for around 3 years. Until he shows up without former warning and asks to talk with the doctor who did the procedure to put in his pacemaker.
People are weirded out but seeing that on that day the doctor was present and this patient was in clear distress, they talked to him and managed a couple of minutes to have the doctor check on him.
Inside the appointment room, the doctor takes notice that this man is wearing a bra inside his shirt. The man explains he has been wearing his daughter's bra for 3 months after his "problem" got worse.
The shirt is asked to be taken off and there he stands, the shirtless man wearing his daughter's bra, showing off the pacemaker, that should have been kept inside his body, dangling outside of it, being held by the left bra cup, with a big infected open wound above it with the pacemaker leads still inserted onto his veins and connected to his heart.
Nobody has any idea how the man let that situation come to be or how he didn't pass away from sepsis or any other health problem that may appear for that matter.
MonkBigT
12. Awkward Interventions
We had a patient who was an adult male patient who needed a Foley catheter. His mother was in the room, and they both lived together in the backwoods of Tennessee.
I informed them both of the order for a catheter, how it works, and why it was needed. His mother stated, “Well he’s still a virgin and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with his virginity being taken in a hospital.”
Blue_monkeys
13. Perils Of Pet Care
I work in veterinary medicine and clients are absolute idiots who are convinced that they are the smartest people in the world. Amazingly, pets manage to stay alive.
People will believe just about anyone else over the advice of their veterinarian. Their breeder, their relatives, their lawn mower, the person bagging their groceries. I had a client blind their cat with tea tree oil because they read about it on the internet.
Clients change their pet's medication dose for whatever reason. That's fun when it is insulin. Not follow post-op instructions causing their pet to pet to eviscerate itself or blow the knee we just repaired. Feed their dog pot roast with garlic and onions as their "bland diet" for gi upset.
Heck, last week I had a client scream at me because we didn't give her an exam room with a view. We don't have exam rooms with outside windows.
Dragonkin08
14. Sweet Tooth Struggles
I was an EMS. Had a diabetic in his 30s-40s who refused to take insulin since 2012, it was 2020 at the time. When I took his blood sugar it only read as “HI” meaning it was over 700 for glucometer to not read it. Upon seeing this, he asked me if that was high and then went “Is this cause of all the Ice cream I ate?”
He played a video with his girlfriend the entire time. I met him later in the parking lot after he got discharged, and it took this man less than fifty paces from the ER door to rip off the bandage covering his IV and play with the IV wound until it started bleeding all over the place again.
I knocked on our ambulance door and asked for a bandaid to fix it. We had to walk him back into the ER and bandaged his entire arm with gauze so that, hopefully, by the time he got it off it would’ve clotted enough for him to not end up exsanguinating himself.
TaTenk
15. Suppository Surprise
I was a pharmacist. I don't even know where I would begin for some of the ridiculous situations I have had.
Up there however has to be whenever I had a lady swallow a full box of suppositories and come in to complain that the issue had not cleared up and the medication tasted bad and was hard to swallow.
Do sometimes wonder how people put one foot in front of the other.
Personality_Optimal
16. Dad-To-Be
This was one of the funniest yet cutest ones, I was a student doing a shift in Andrology/reproductive health
The doctor asked his patient, “So you’re trying to have kids but not managing to. So do you have any other kids? The patient answered that they have 1 kid. The doctor explained the process to be done and the patient agreed.
Then he proceeds to visit him and stuff, after which he goes away. After a couple of seconds, he knocked on the door again saying, “Hello Doc, my wife told me that it would be relevant to you that the son I have is adopted, but that makes no difference to me I always considered my son!”
Albablu
17. Salty Saga
My sister told me a story of a woman who was their patient. The woman had chronic blisters and lesions on her lips. They couldn’t figure out what it was for weeks. It would heal and come back. Heal and come back.
Turns out she would jam out on like three bags of salt and vinegar chips a day for weeks at a time until the sores hurt too bad to continue then she’d go to the doctor.
The-disgracist
18. Look-A-Like
This happened in medical school during my OB/GYN rotation.
We had a patient who visited us for a check-up. I was taken aback by this lady’s question, “Who’s the baby gonna look like?” I thought I heard her wrong so I asked, “What do you mean?”
I had the most absurd response I ever heard from a patient, “Well is it gonna look like the dude who got me pregnant or the guy who’s been nutting in me the last few months?” I cannot take the situation seriously but I tried my best to answer in a straight face, “The baby should look like the people who conceived it.”
That person is now a parent.
Trisomy__21
19. Lung Purifier Technique
Not a medical professional, but I used to volunteer at a free medical clinic to take vitals and histories. A woman came in with pneumonia and wanted to know why her normal treatment of drinking half a bottle of mouthwash and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day wasn't working.
I asked why she thought smoking was a good treatment for a lung infection and she said, "Indians used to purify the ground by burning all the weeds away before planting, so I'm smoking to purify my lungs."
I left that one to the doctor.
MicturitionSyncope
20. Medical Wonderland
My wife is an anesthesiologist.
When training junior doctors, one of the things she has to reinforce over and over again is that you never leave drugs unattended in an unsecured area in a hospital, even for a moment, because some people see drugs and think "Hmm, fun" and take them even if they don't know what they are and they just raided a trolley or picked up a syringe off a bedside table.
And then, because the drugs used for anesthetics in hospitals are quite serious, those people quite likely end up passing away or vegetables. And this has happened more than once in hospitals she has worked in.
BobBobBobBobBobDave
21. Up In Smoke
I had a patient whom we helped get access to home oxygen privately because his respiratory specialist wouldn't sign off on it because he wouldn't quit smoking, the patient was very indignant about it because he insisted that he had quit smoking for real and hadn't smoked for 4 months.
I got a call from a nurse in an emergency a few weeks after letting me know he had come in with facial burns under similar circumstances.
[deleted]
22. Fiery Consequence
When I worked in forensics one of the saddest scenes I went to was a grandmother who ended herself and her two young grandchildren because she refused to stop smoking on oxygen. She burned the entire house down. The only survivor was the son and father of the two children.
She had to jump from the second-story window, injured both legs in the fall, and still suffered 2nd and 3rd-degree burns.
Zaexyr
23. Medicine Mirage
I was a veterinary med. We get a lot of patients who need to go on medications for a wide array of persistent problems, and these medications keep them under control.
So we often get ones with thyroid, diabetes, and heart issues and start them on medications.
The patient starts to do great, comes in for another recheck, and is awful. We asked the owner if they were still giving the medicine and nope they stopped it cause they were all better.
We fully educate the owner, go over medications, and give notes on what to do, and they still do this.
Rhodri_Suojelija
24. Consequences From Vaccine Refusal
I was a former vet tech. We had a woman scream at me and my vet for telling her it's the law to have your dog vaccinated against rabies. She said the rabies vaccine causes autism in dogs and makes puppies stupid.
3 weeks later her puppy passed away from parvo. She got another one immediately after and did not clean her home. 2 more passed away in the following months. Animal control and the city had to get involved.
angels_exist_666
25. Twin-Switch Scheme
I have heard a story about a patient who was impressed that she couldn't miss her fractions of radiotherapy if she was busy, and to inform us if she couldn't make the appointment.
She couldn't make it. So she sent her twin sister to receive the radiation therapy in her place. She answered yes to all the ID Questions. She had the same birthday etc. It was noticed when radiographers had trouble matching her to the CT. Because the CT was of a person who had undergone a mastectomy. Whilst the "patient,” still had both breasts.
This, many years later, is told to new staff during training about the importance of ensuring correct identification because you would be stunned by the number of people who try to skip the queue. The number isn't high. But it isn't zero.
Kenobi_01
26. Hairy Priorities
I was an emergency room nurse with 7 years of experience. The list is nearly endless. People with massive burns, because they smoked in bed, are not as rare as you'd think.
But the one that got me the most was a guy who came in for chest pain and fatigue. EKG revealed he was having a really bad heart attack. Activated or cath lab for emergency stents to hopefully save the guy's life.
They almost always access the patient through the groin for the procedure so one of our jobs in the ER is to shave the patient's groin to prep them for cath lab. We got the clippers out (we don't use actual razors anymore) and informed the guy we needed to shave him.
He refused. No problem, we will let the cath lab do it once he's knocked out. Nope, the guy refuses to sign the consent for the stents because he doesn't want his pubes shaved.
After trying to educate him, pleading with him, and contacting every lawyer the hospital has, The guy signed himself out of AMA and went home. He would rather pass away than have his curlies shaved. We looked up his address and we weren't the closest hospital so if he died at home, medics would take him to a different hospital. Doubt he survived the day.
ChaplnGrillSgt
27. Oxygen Tango
I used to be a medical oxygen tech, mostly doing in-home work.
One guy was on such a high concentration that he would have drawn nearly zero oxygen from breathing regular atmosphere. This required 2 heavy-duty machines hooked up in tandem just to keep him barely alive. This was explained ad nauseam to him and his wife with full signed documentation of every conversation.
They'd shut one machine off because they decided it was too loud. He'd take his mask off because he decided it was too cold. She would unplug the hose if she decided it was in the way. So on and so on, literally everything you could think of that would restrict or cut off his oxygen intake.
Then they would panic and call our emergency service when he started to react to no oxygen intake. I lived not even 5 minutes away, right beside our EMS/Fire Station, and the call would always come to me to "fix" the machines at random times of the day and night, 3-7 days a week. They refused to call 911 because they “didn't want to make a scene.”
This went on for ages, well over 18 months, until he was having trouble sleeping one night and shut the machines off before going back to bed. It's been years and I still see the wife around town, she always glares at me as if I'm the one who ended him.
TheAgentLoki
28. A Bloddy Catastrophic Escape
I was maintenance in a hospital. One time I got to work early on a Saturday morning and we immediately received a request for help from the ER and got sent over by my boss.
When I got there the first thing I heard was yelling from this guy behind one of the curtains. He was shouting at the nurses “Don’t touch my pee pee!” and “I didn’t use any drugs!”
Then I smelled iron in the air and then I found out there was blood all over the hallway, hand prints in blood against the wall. Almost the entire floor was covered in blood.
What happened? The guy pulled out his catheter causing arterial bleeding and decided to run away from the nurses who were trying to help him. It seems like he lived through that. I had never seen that much blood before that day or after.
Apprehensive-Emu-570
29. Diabetes Dalmatian
I worked at a vet clinic. We get a lot of this sort of thing, oftentimes with diabetic patients. One of the worst I've seen was an older owner come in with their extremely overweight, diabetic dog. The owner says the dog has been slow, tires easily, and has been "flopping around,” which is odd for her.
The doctor checks her blood glucose and it is so high, it is literally off the charts. Normal blood glucose for a dog is around 100 or so. This dog was beyond 1000. We asked the owners how it got so high. Was she eating? She was because she was obese. Were you giving her the insulin? The owners proceed to say that they think she's probably fine without it, she's a "strong and hardy dog.”
Their 9-year-old 80-pound Dalmatian is currently half alive on the floor because they don't give her the insulin. How they kept that poor dog alive that long was astounding.
Vol-au-vents
30. Biscuits And Betrayal
This is my sibling’s story.
Parents claim their child hasn't eaten anything before surgery, as they were carefully directed. Turns out they thought the surgical team was just being cruel to their child and when she said she was hungry that morning, they detoured on their way to the surgical center and got her a full Southern breakfast. She nearly passed away aspirating biscuits and gravy.
I've rarely seen my brother so angry (and disgusted - somehow biscuits and gravy look even more nauseating the second time around) and he was just recounting what had happened. I have no doubt he tore a strip off the parents once their 5-year-old was stabilized, and they probably still felt justified and angry at the surgeon for telling them what they could and could not feed their child right before anesthesia.
The parents did feel justified and hard done by, although as far as I know, they didn't express anger at my brother (knowing him, they didn't get a word in edgewise). No acknowledgment or realization that they could easily have ended their child or that they'd made a bad decision. I remember they were annoyed by her whining for food.
Andante528
31. Holistic Hesitation To Surgical Amputation
I worked in cancer research/surgery a couple of years ago. There is a good amount of people who will refuse to have a small removal/surgery because they think holistic medicine or praying it away will work.
They always come back and we always have to remove so much more. One time a patient had a melanoma on their calf and the doctor wanted to do a simple wide excision, but they left because they wanted to pray it away.
Came back a couple of months later because it got bigger and we had to amputate their leg. Pretty sure they had positive lymph nodes at that point too.
Green0996
32. Language Mix-Up
I'm in the ER and there are many stories. The one that left me dumbfounded was a woman who was brought in by her sister for pelvic cramps, and amenorrhea for three months. Lo and behold, she's pregnant.
The sister informs me that she sleeps with the Brazilian construction workers building the condo complex next door. I ask if they have any questions. The patient asked me if her baby would come out speaking Spanish.
After a long pause, and her sister staring at the ceiling, I told her, No, because they speak Portuguese in Brazil. The patient seemed relieved and the sister hustled her out of the ER before I could discharge her.
AMostSoberFellow
33. Herbal Healing Standoff
The lady brings her baby into the ER with a rectal temp of 103. The kids are tacky as heck and look like crap.
She refuses all medications. She doesn't believe in them and wonders why her herbal tea (she brought a jug of it) isn't working. She wants us to just check her out, she thinks a children's emergency room just checks them out.
I try to explain why the kid needs an NSAID. She keeps refusing. She doesn't know what's in it. I bring up the fact she had her kid in a hospital, and that she recovered medication herself. She doesn't budge.
She is only concerned for herself, and I told her that when the kid has a seizure or goes unresponsive and you call 911, you can expect the medics to give the kid everything it needs regardless of whether you like it or not.
Only when the doctor threatened to contact social services for child endangerment and abuse did she start to listen. For like 5 whole seconds. She left against medical advice. People like this exist and breed.
CaptAsshat_Savvy
34. Toothpaste Trauma
I was in ED billing at the time so only saw the chart, not the patient but an interesting diagnosis code combo of vomiting blood and broken ribs made me read the chart instead of continuing on autopilot.
The 10-year-old kid swallowed his toothpaste instead of spitting. The mom freaked out and gave him the Heimlich so hard she cracked a rib and kept going until she finally took him to the ER when she saw her kid excreting blood.
I still know I would have made a crappy parent but what the heck.
MaritMonkey
35. Homeopathy vs Antibiotics
As a pharmacist, everyone who comes in to buy homeopathic crap, especially for serious things. Once a lady came in with a prescription from the dentist, for some heavy antibiotics and painkillers due to an infection that threatened to damage the jawbone.
When I asked if she knew how to take them she said, “Oh I’m not gonna take those, they’ll go right into the garbage. But I gotta buy them so that my dentist is happy. I’ll rather stick with homeopathic crap instead of poisoning me with some devilish chemicals!”
Throughout the years I’ve learned to just shrug and accept those Darwin-award candidates instead of arguing with them. Just infuriates me when I see that they’ve got children and pets.
pharma91
36. The 911 Chronicles
A woman called 911 because a cougar attacked her cat. She thought we could help the almost unalive cat.
A man called 911 because a cow bit him. He didn’t want EMS or an assessment or anything.
A man called 911 for an itchy anus. I took him to the ED because we had to. The doctor asked the patient if he had put the cream on the anus that he gave him last time. The patient said no.
The next time patient called us for the itchy anus I offered to put the cream on his anus for him, but he declined. I took him back to the ED.
Sea_Vermicelli7517
37. Wrist Twist
I work in orthopedic rehab. I had a patient with a common fracture of the wrist the doctor sent over since she was inexplicably getting stiffer and stiffer.
I spent 17 sessions with her, 40 minutes each 1-1 time. Instead of just bending her wrist, she would contort her entire body. She had a career, married, raised kids, and seemingly functional adult.
I tried everything to have her actively use her muscles to move her wrist. In front of a mirror, videos of myself doing the exercise, her doing it, and trying to spot the difference between moving your shoulder vs your wrist. The last time I saw her I even strapped her arm to a chair and she didn’t understand she was just trying to move her wrist.
Dumptrucklegend
38. Breaking Bad Choices
I work in clinical research at a hospital. Basically, for patients who have cancer and don't have other standard-of-care options, clinical trials of "experimental treatment" are a viable option for many. Some people have a negative view of research, but it's highly regulated and not as scary as it sounds.
We go through the consent form with this patient, who has a history of drug abuse. We don't know everything about this new medication, but one thing we do know is that using an illegal substance while taking this drug will make your heart explode (in layman's terms).
This patient "promises" they're off the sauce and that they "totally won't do illegal substance while they're on the trial.” Two weeks later they relapse and, well, you can figure out the rest of the story.
Garden_Circus
39. WWE Fiasco
My brother did a rotation in an ER before med school. Paramedics brought in a man with a lacerated neck. He was drunk and fell into a fish tank. His drunk buddies called 911. When the paramedics arrived they realized his drunk friends had put a very tight tourniquet around his neck to stop the bleeding.
I texted my brother to remind him about it (it happened almost 20 years ago). It was worse than I remembered. The guy and his buddies were doing drunk WWE. He had a 2-inch glass shard stuck in his head, in addition to the neck laceration, the dude came into the ER with no idea the glass was there.
Four different firefighters had to hold him down as he screamed awful remarks at the female doctor. He said when they removed the glass, bloodshot about 10 ft in the air. My brother at that point silently “noped” the hell out of medicine.
He went on to attend Berklee Music School and is living his best life as a musical producer and engineer, and is not arguing with rednecks about whether or not there is a glass shard in their head.
Smelli24u
40. Cleansing Gone Wrong
A family member worked at a hospital and had a patient come in with really strange physical and seemingly neurological issues.
I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. It didn’t match anything he knew of and tests were inconclusive. He asked her to walk him through her day. Turns out she was drinking a cup of bleach a day and bathing in it to keep clean and healthy her whole life. Same with her family, who all passed away very young.
She could not accept that drinking bleach was bad for her health.
Too_Shy_To_Say_Hi
41. A Salty Surprise
We had a patient when I was a pharmacy resident get repeatedly admitted to the hospital due to CHF complications (shortness of breath, fluid overload, etc). She had been advised to follow a low-sodium diet but no one had asked her what she had been eating.
I asked what she usually ate for lunch and she said instant ramen noodles every day, but she only added the seasoning packet and a little salt.
GetKobeonTNT
42. Sleeping Off A Stroke
Someone asked me how you catch a stroke. This is because the partner of said person was on the floor unable to stand due to left-sided weakness/no power. They both thought he could sleep it off overnight and be fine in the morning.
12 hours later they decided they'd phone the doctors to ask if there was anything the doctor could give the person on the floor who was also now incontinent. They didn't even get worried during the previous day when his face drooped on the left side and he was slurring his speech.
I said he had had a stroke, "Oh, how do you catch one of those?"
Justanotherjtad
43. Twin, STDs, And Misunderstanding
I worked in ED for 10 years. Every day people come in and it shocks you how they managed to evade passing away for that long.
One of the worst was we had a guy come in. He was a twin. He told us he needed to get checked for STDs because his sister had just gotten one. We of course had to ask if he had been intimate with her and he said no, but they were twins so what she has, so does he.
After a collective sigh of relief that this wasn’t some weird Alabama your my sister crap, we had to educate him that is not how it worked at all.
Noname_left
44. Comedy Of Errors
I overheard a conversation between a nurse a doctor and a patient in the ER. They were trying to figure out if he was very stupid or had a head injury. It was both hilarious and sad.
He kept telling them that he was there for a hurt leg. He couldn’t explain why his leg was hurt, how it was hurt, how he got there. Nearly anything. I heard them talking in a hallway to each other. The nurse was convinced he hit his head. The doctor said “No, he is just an idiot”
Turns out the doctor was right. They get ahold of the guy's wife. She told them in the hallway he was always this dumb and if she left him he would get lost in his own house and starve.
It sounded like his leg was visibly injured or swollen. But when asked what happened or how does it feel he gave nonsensical idiot answers. Not like slurring but in a regular idiot voice, “It feels hurt,” “ I was talking to Jimmy and we were doing our usual work and my leg hurts.” The doctor asked, “Did something happen? What is the work.?” He then answered, “Something always happens, you know how it goes, I just want my leg fixed.”
MeatJumps
45. Rural Frontlines
I am a physical therapist. I worked up in a rural area deep in heavily forested BFE and we had some patients who were just frustratingly obtuse. Why did Bob have extra back pain today? He went out for a smoke, noticed a lightbulb in his stairwell needed changing, and wound up falling down the stairs, again.
My boss always smiled through it. His secret mantra was "Don't be mean to dumb animals." A bit cruel but you get jaded in that job.
NineInchNips