Entering a hospital gives us a different perspective on other people’s lives. Some of us are lucky enough that we are only a witness to these situations because one way or another, you won’t be wishing to be the one sitting on a hospital bed.
These Redditors share their experience of how the patients from the hospital endure the worst of all situations. Come and read these eye-opener stories that will make you live your life to the fullest.
1. A Student’s Reflection
I was in my second clinical rotation as a nursing student. We were assigned patients and the patient I was assigned to was a grumpy old guy who was 79. He had a good sense of humour but you had to tread carefully around him.
He had chronic pain and was diagnosed with colon cancer. His son would visit in the mornings just in time to talk to the doctors doing their morning rounds. His wife had passed a few years earlier.
I was helping him get ready for breakfast when the doctor walked in. This was pretty typical, but he was anxious to see the doctor today as he just had a bunch of tests done and was hoping to hear some results so he could be discharged to go home. I usually just finish up whatever I am doing and leave so that the patient and doctor can talk privately.
That morning his son could not make it in and my patient asked if I could stay in the room with him to hear everything. In case he missed something. I said sure no problem as long as the doctor is also okay with it. Some doctors don’t like dealing with students.
The doctor just got right to the point. The cancer had spread and there was nothing more they could do. The palliative team would meet with him this afternoon to discuss where he could be transferred to during his final days. My patient thought the doctor was joking and started to laugh and then just sat there with a completely blank look.
As a student, I was not prepared to know how to comfort someone in that situation as it was something I didn’t have experience with. I felt awful because 10 minutes before he got this news he was telling me he couldn’t wait to see his cat once he got home. For the next week, he did not get out of bed and refused to eat take medication, or shower. And then I came in one day and he was transferred out.
Jaxsonpuglock
2. Heartbreaking Rejection
One of the most difficult things I saw a patient experience is hearing the news that their newly transplanted heart is being rejected by their body. It’s like their hope just ended.
Early stages are treatable and the protocol for testing is there for a reason, but even knowing all of that, it’s scary as heck to be given another chance at life and then have it all hanging in the balance again so soon.
Andherewestand
3. A Little Girl’s Tale Of Loss
This isn't from me but from my mother. She is an ER surgeon. This little girl, probably 6 or 7 years old had some form of Spinal Cancer. My mother had met and talked to her a couple of times. On this particular day, she was excited because her Dad was coming home from a business trip to Bali.
This little girl was so happy because he was bringing her back a toy. The next day was the Bali Bombings, and then her father passed away. She was distraught and spent the next 4 days just crying with little bits of sleep in between. Her mother spent most of that time with her daughter.
About 2 months later the mother passed away in a car accident while driving to the hospital to visit her daughter. So her grandparents got the duty of care for her but she passed away 2 weeks later from cancer. The poor girl suffered worse than I could think in her last 2 1/2 months of life.
Losing most of what was important to her before passing away. I hope no one goes through anything like that again. My Mother thinks she just gave up after her mother passed, this little girl lost everything just by some form of bad luck.
My mother does leave flowers on her and her parent's graves every year on the anniversary of her death. Sometimes, I really do not understand how my mother deals with being in ER. She is quite possibly the strongest person I know just because of that.
CeboMcDebo
4. Trauma Bay, A Trauma Case
I witnessed a 19-year-old who was 38 weeks pregnant injured 9 times in the chest. An emergency c-section was done in the trauma bay to save the pregnant mom. The doctors were losing their sanity. There was blood everywhere.
Everyone was losing their sanity. Unfortunately, the mom passed away a few days later and I am not sure if the baby made it. Last I heard about it the baby was in NICU having frequent seizures.
m4rceline
5. A Miracle After A Loss
One of my nursing lecturers had a similar story. The mother was only a few weeks off giving birth and had suddenly become unconscious and rushed to the ER by her husband. Apparently, my lecturer and the other nurse on duty were on the mother's bed, either side, taking turns giving her CPR as they were being pushed to surgery.
They explained to the father that neither of them would make it, or only the baby would. This was their first child together, I can't imagine how the father felt. just yesterday he was excited to have a family with the love of his life and the next he was likely going to be all alone.
They finished the surgery and the mother had unfortunately passed, but the baby was alive and well. I can't imagine the pain the father went through but I'm so happy his baby was okay. He apparently named the baby after the mother.
Lilbeechbaby
6. Shutting Off Life
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 on his visitors. I never saw him behind the privacy curtain.
I was completely okay and sitting up in bed working on schoolwork for most of my visit. When his family came in I could tell the situation was bad. His whole extended family came, every one 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.
tri_adam
7. Waking Up After A Nightmare
I still remember this experience vividly. I was still a student back then when it happened. A family was hit by an 18-wheeler vehicle. Right at that moment, both of the children and wife passed away at the scene of the accident.
The husband battled for his life but managed to wake up 2 weeks later. The first thing he asked the moment he recovered was about his family. Watching them break the news to this poor guy feels devastating.
Flbudskis
8. Tragic Consequence Of Bathroom Mishap
I am a doctor. I saw a previously very well-old lad in A&E who had fallen in his small bathroom and become trapped between the toilet and wall with his knees flexed, his thighs pressed against the edge of the bowl, and his feet squeezed up behind him. Paramedics found him after about 48 hours in that position.
He came to the hospital with two completely black legs, rhabdomyolysis (muscle breakdown), and renal failure. Vascular surgery wouldn’t amputate, ITU wouldn’t take him, and he passed away about 2 hours late
[deleted]
9. Crushed Hopes
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.
Programmerbadgerlock
10. Operating Room Blunders
I was in the hospital after a car wreck many years ago. It was a pretty bad one, the first few days I wasn't expected to live. They finally decided that I might and maybe they should attempt to save my leg and put my face back together.
They came in to transfer me to surgery and somehow dropped me between the bed and the gurney. Scraped me up and took me down in the elevator to surgery. As we were leaving the elevator they started pushing the gurney and left the stand with my catheter bag in the elevator!
Luckily someone had just got in the elevator and yelled “Hey!” I was hyperventilating badly after all this when I got into surgery so they put me out right away. The doctor mentioned it later when he came in to talk to me.
I told him about getting dropped and he said that I must have imagined it, they would never have dropped me. The patient in the next bed said “Crap!” and told him all about it. He stormed out and I think a couple of people may have gotten fired.
Nor_Wester
11. Tragic Struggles In The ICU
It was in ICU. There was a lady who was roughly 40 years old, paralyzed from the chest down due to a 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 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.
cooljeopardyson
12. Glimpse Into FInal Moments
I cleaned the rooms of the ER in my local hospital as a summer job. This woman in her 40s was close to passing away from cancer and she had a room in the ER for a couple of days to wait for another room in another service. She looked fine for someone who was dying, I mean she was bald and looked ill but she was nice and lovely to be around and cheerful.
One time I was cleaning the corridor when I heard cries from her room. I opened the door and there she was on the floor. She fell from her bed after trying to walk to the bathroom. I helped her to the bathroom as she was crying, in pain, and in fear because she realized she could not walk anymore and that her end was coming. She broke my heart, it was the first I realized where I was really working.
ItsChlowey
13. Hitting Emotional Toll
I helped clean up a cancer patient’s room after an unfortunate bowel movement ended up all over her room and bathroom. I did my best to assure the patient that it was no big deal, but I could tell she was embarrassed but too tired to say much. She thanked me afterward when I was getting ready to leave her room.
I could see in her eyes how much it meant to her that I’d been so caring and understanding. I’m very empathetic, so feeling what she felt and feeling what she was going through just about broke me. I left her room and took care of my cleaning supplies and as soon as I was alone I just busted out sobbing.
I saw the courage in her eyes and knew she was a tough lady, but that in and of itself made me cry too for some reason. Idk I’d seen that same tough courage in my mom’s eyes when she was battling cancer so it really hit home for me. I heard afterward that the patient whose room I’d cleaned up had passed away and I cried my eyes out then too.
Working at a hospital is tough. People sometimes don’t understand the clinical detachment that providers can have, but if you don’t have it to some extent then your emotions can break you. Provider burnout is a real thing.
WreakingHavoc640
14. A Hopeless Plea
I had a 94-year-old woman who had been hurt by her niece so horribly that she was intubated and in the ICU. This woman was in pure agony and her family wanted to “do everything” for her. Come to find out they were keeping her alive and collecting her social security check.
While cleaning her up she grabs my arm and holds it tight. Huge tears well up in her eyes, she looks at me and mouths over the ET tube, “I want it to end, please, let me go.” That night I sobbed the entire way home.
That was one of my last days in the ICU, I was a young nurse and emotionally I could not handle working there and this was the last straw. I had nightmares about being at work and trying to take care of patients, I would wake up and see my husband lying next to me and it took me a minute to realize he was snoring and not a patient who was on a ventilator.
It sounds silly but it’s horrifying if you actually think you're in that situation. I wish as nurses we were able to talk about what we experience on a daily basis. Years later I am now an ER nurse and I love it! I see awful things quite often but, I have a better way of coping with those experiences.
Katecyi
15. Heart-Wrenching Tragedy
This was one of the most unfortunate incidents I witnessed. The mother backed out of her driveway and didn’t notice her toddler had crawled into the culvert under the road. The culvert collapsed and her daughter was overly injured.
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.
Fudd_Dizzle
16. A Close-Range Close Call
I was doing a clinical rotation in the ER, and the ambulance called and said they were about ten minutes out with a 19-year-old male with a close-range gunshot wound to his upper left chest area (think, the front of your shoulder, just below the collarbone).
He came home early and some guys were robbing his house, so they took a fire at him and took off. His parents had to wait in the lobby for the police to finish up with him before they could see him. The angry look on his father's face and the wailing sound that his mother was making are not things I will soon forget. The kid made a full recovery. He’s got a small scar and a story to tell
alexmunse
17. Grim Consequence Of Alcoholism
I have seen many people pass away but the worst one by far was a man with active bleeding and hemorrhaging from his esophagus due to long-term alcoholism. This was many years ago and there are better ways to treat it now, but at the time the treatment for this kind of hemorrhaging was putting an inflatable tube down the throat into the stomach.
It was attached to some kind of helmet that you had to put on the patient afterward, which was tough. You would inflate the tube to stop the bleeding but also aspirate the blood out of the stomach with a huge syringe.
Just putting it in was horrible, the patient was so scared, there was blood everywhere, he was vomiting and excreting blood, and he could hardly talk due to the bleeding. This was in the ER. We got IVs in him and started transfusions pouring into him as fast as they'd go.
We worked on him for a long long time but he didn't make it. What I remember is how hard he fought, how scared he was, and how much blood there was. And this was before rubber gloves were worn for everything.
I just threw out my uniform. Everyone's shoes were soaked. I never saw anything like it, before or since. Don't become an alcoholic. Don't get cirrhosis or esophageal varices. It's a bad way to go.
Neverdoneneverready
18. Unseen Pain
Not exactly something I saw the patient go through. I saw the sweetest old lady who was suffering from 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.
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 to the kidneys. She was so sweet and lovely, and it just really got to me that people could be so needlessly
Sabmo
19. Isolation In Healing
I volunteered in a Children's Hospital throughout high school. There was a 16-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 the year before social media networks really became a thing that everybody had. Happy ending though, he eventually did recover from MRSA after spending around 6 months in the hospital.
ConneryFTW
20. Heartfelt Remembrance Of A Beloved Figure
I worked at the hospital in high school. I delivered food trays to hospital rooms so it was a very easy job. We were encouraged to have brief conversations with the patients to try and cheer them up a bit.
The hardest one to deal with was our high school principal. Our principal dealt with 2,700 students but was beloved by all. Not often you find a person like that. Well, one day she got really sick and had to go to the hospital.
I walked into her room and saw her in there. Somehow she remembered my name after I had only met her maybe twice. I saw her every day I worked and saw her degrading and degrading for months. All during this time people in school had their rumors that she was getting better. Somebody's mom saw her shopping, people heard she was coming back next week, etc.
I couldn't say anything. But it was very hard to deal with watching so many people have hope and me knowing that this truly wasn't looking good. She passed away about 3 months into being in the hospital. The school was devastated.
Economy_Cactus
21. A Mother And A Wife’s Grief
I used to work in an orthopedic clinic and we had a woman come in to have her shoulder replaced. It was horrible. She was pregnant. The things she had gone through while carrying a baby were traumatic.
A man broke into her house with a weapon, ended her husband, took fire at her in the shoulder, and then ended himself. I don't know the reason, all I know is that she was now a future single mother with a dominant arm that was basically non-functional.
Shdwrnr
22. Unheard Wishes
Basically, anytime a patient (especially the 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 pass away.
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.
ChasingHarper
23. Elderly Struggles In The ER
Two of them, both senior citizens. They both haunt me, years later, because I don't know what happened to either of them.
The first came in as a homeless woman in the winter. She was fine, medically. But homeless because her husband passed away, and her absolute wicked children took the family home out from under her, leaving her on the street. Somehow ended up in my city. They put her on a psychiatric hold, just so she had somewhere to sleep while they figured out where she could go. She was in her 80s. Her entire life was in a grocery bag.
24. Silent Suffering
I work in a mental health hospital. Awful dementia. A horrible, horrible disease that affects the people you love more than you because, on the good days, you don’t know you have it. I’ve seen people screaming out for their wife/husband who passed away years ago.
I don’t even know how to respond. Am I going to tell them, “They have already passed away?” Why put them through that again? Do you lie, and say they’re on their way/our shopping or something else, knowing that will placate them for 10-15 minutes until they ask again? I hate dementia, I don’t think there’s an illness worse
Blastfromthepast89
25. Betrayal In The Nursing Home
It was the worst part of working in the nursing home. I had one lady. Max, and man was she just the sweetest. But her mind was going. She lived there with her husband and he passed away first.
Max was 96 years old and always asking where he was. She was happiest to be told he was bringing flowers or candies or something and he'd see her soon. We would sneak those items into her room at meal times so she would think he came and she just forgot about seeing him. She was happy and it was working well.
Until she got a new CNA, Heather. Heather deserves to be in a fiery agonising pit. She got pissed that Max asked about her husband. So Heather told Max that her husband passed away 10 years ago and was never coming back. She said, "Get over it already you overgrown toddler.”
The sound that came out of Max will haunt me for the rest of my life. Max was strangely lucid afterward. Even when she was out of it she was sullen and depressed and would say she didn't understand why. After that day, Max stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped playing Dominos, and stopped walking around the halls.
She never leaves her room or socializes. She stopped asking about her husband. She got very sickly and was declining fast. It was at this stage that I left that home. I filed a formal complaint against Heather and left for other reasons. I don't know if Max ever came out of it or if she wasted away in there. It was the most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen.
RealAbstractSquidII
26. Turning Dementia Into Delight
I knew a girl in college whose grandma had dementia. The family visited her weekly and it stressed them out that she couldn't enjoy her own life. Anyway, one day they visited the grandma and she said, "Who are you?" to the granddaughter. GD remembers that the grandma always loved writing and books. GD says, "I'm your granddaughter. Don't you remember me, I'm a famous writer!"
The grandma perks up and says, "You're a writer? Wow, my granddaughter is a writer!" They spent the rest of the visit talking about books, stories, and how the girl had won a Nobel Peace Prize award for one of her books. Completely changed the whole tone of that visit and the visits after.
Now the family had a mission, to create stories and characters that the grandma loved. Most of the things revolved around things the grandma enjoyed (for instance once the daughter said she was the first female astronaut because the grandma liked space and astronomy).
The grandma was so proud to have family members so accomplished and doing amazing things, and the family was able to focus on more than just the illness. The girl said when her grandma passed away no one felt sad because they knew she passed away happy and proud of what her legacy was.
DreamGirl3
27. Face Of Pain And Resilience
I wasn’t employed by the hospital but worked as an inter-facility transport EMT at the time. We had one patient who had terminal bone cancer and was morbidly obese. I was transporting her from the hospital to a radiation appointment.
I developed a rapport with her and she opened up and told me how she is just buying, maybe, 6 months by treating cancer otherwise she would have passed away already. Well as some of you may know, bone cancer is one of the most painful and terrible ways to pass away so for her to extend that misery for just a little longer so she could experience life and see her family a little longer was very inspirational.
We get to the facility to do the radiation treatment and are told it should only take about 45 minutes. Then we get to the room where the magic happens and the table she’s supposed to lay on is the same size a small adult would use. They have no modified version for morbidly obese adults, the only way to keep her on are extra straps they use to tie her down to the table.
They constantly have to stop the procedure to adjust her for comfort. 2 hours of the fentanyl She was given at the hospital has completely worn off and the facility isn’t authorized to administer medicines like that. The appointment ended up taking about 4 hours longer than it should have and she was just miserable but still so sweet and apologetic the whole time.
I felt awful for her and after it was done there was a huge sense of relief in her voice. I told her how inspirational she was to me to see how resilient she was being.
JayDeezy14
28. Trauma To Tender Moments
In clinical on a Burn/Trauma unit, a guy had 3rd degree burns on 80% of his body. He had very little skin left, I could actually see part of his tibia and fingertips were necrotic. he was heavily medicated but still, I can’t even fathom the pain. I don’t know if he made it because he was quite septic the 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 others never call, never visit, and no one can track them down.
In the end, 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 from the substance his missing-in-action mom took. Despite the challenges, I still love my job, though
Melobi
29. Unpleasant Challenges In Post-Op
Not one particular patient, but a common occurrence. I work in the post-operation unit, and often people have an NG tube. The purpose of these is the remove fluids from their stomach due to having a bowel obstruction.
Often patients become confused due to medicines, age, or whatever. Often they pull it out and somehow, end up vomiting diarrhea. That must be one of the most awful things to experience.
dmartism
30. Race Against Time
I’m a children’s nurse, I worked on a ward that specializes in brain and spinal tumors in children, amongst other specialties. 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 in 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 tumors, 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 and there were a few times whilst I was waiting for the medical team I thought he’d passed away in front of me. 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 Mom asks “Will he live? Please save my baby.” It was truly awful.
Happy_Kat
31. Lonely Farewell
When I was in high school I took a CNA course, we did our clinicals at a state-run nursing home. There was one patient who was 89 years old and had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and Dementia. She was married at one point, but her husband had passed away. They had 8 children, all of whom had passed away.
All of her siblings, friends, and close relations were deceased. She first entered the home about 4 years before she passed away once she realized she really couldn't care for herself anymore because of age/general health problems that accompany living for 85 years, and later developed other ailments.
By the time I got there, Most days she didn't know where she was, but would have days where she was lucid, she would remember her cancer and that she was alone. Those days she would cry a lot. As the lucid days got further and further apart as her physical health declined, she got to where she would only eat if I was the one feeding her.
I went in on weekends and after school to try and get her to eat and drink something. Watching that poor woman have to face the reality of her cancer over and over again, and then realize she was alone in the world was horrible.
The day she passed away, I walked by her room as they were cleaning out her things, and saw a picture of her sister. We didn't look identical to one another, but we favored each other. I think she thought I was her sister. People imagine horrible ways to pass away, but dementia is by far the worst way to go.
[deleted]
32. A Nurse's Heart-Wrenching ICU Experience
I'd been a nurse for a few years and thought I was pretty awesome. A patient in the ICU was unstable with a heart problem, but with meds, was pretty stable when my shift started. She was a DNR with heart failure.
The family had been there for days. Husband, adult sons, daughter-in-law. They were the nicest folks. They were contemplating going home for a few hours to shower, eat, and rest. I told them her heart rhythm looked good, to go home, and get some rest. I took their cell phone numbers and told them if anything changed I would call right away.
Well, they traveled at last an hour through a dead zone because as soon as they walked out the door I was struggling to keep her alive. Her heart was all over the place. The pressure kept dropping and dropping.
I got them on the phone an hour later and told them to come back. I spent 2 hours desperately trying to keep her alive, and they ran back in the door 5 minutes after she was gone. I couldn't stop crying I felt so bad.
There was no professional boundary there at all. We all knew a young stupid nurse took their last moments with their mother, and mom passed away alone, with a few scattered staff doing what they could, but without her family by her side.
That family comforted me more than I comforted them. I was beside myself. They told me I did my best, and it was okay. The grace and kindness they showed me were incredible and affect the way I treat every family now.
Throwawaypoop098765
33. Deafening Screams Of Survival
In residency, I took care of a young boy, 8 years old, with E. coli. No one knows where he got it and it wasn't part of a bigger outbreak. I'll never forget the screams of pain from the severe abdominal pain and diarrhea, but then I'd go in the room to check on him and when I asked him how he was, he'd just say in a weak little voice "I'm okay" even when doubled over.
He was such a tough kid. There's no treatment besides supportive treatments (fluids, pain relief) because antibiotics make renal failure more likely. Unfortunately, he did go into renal failure anyway and he passed away before dialysis could be started.
In medical school, I took care of a middle-aged woman with advanced uterine cancer. She was extremely obese so it was too difficult to do her hysterectomy without first doing a panniculectomy (basically removing her pannus, which is excess abdominal fat).
This involved an incision in a circle around her entire abdomen which was extremely painful as it healed since her whole abdomen was involved so she was essentially bed-ridden post-op. Because she didn't move, she developed terrible pressure ulcers in her back, a couple of which ulcerated her bone.
She had a ton of fat on her back too, so these ulcers were deep and I could get my whole arm up to the elbow inside of them when changing her dressings. She'd scream and sob anytime we moved her. I don't remember anyone ever coming to visit her and I'm pretty sure she eventually passed away alone.
Doctorvictory
34. A Shocking Revelation
I went to see a patient during clinical rounds a few years back when I was a medical student. I think it was for dermatology. The guy was just a year older than I was. Remarkably fit, fairly good-looking, and from what little I got to see of him was also pretty mild-mannered.
Well, so his story was that he loves to play basketball, and he did just so on that fateful day. A quick shower and a wipedown and he finds blood on his towel. Blood came from his scalp, from some weird scab-like growth. No prior symptoms. Freaks out, goes to a neighborhood dermatologist, and is told to go to a bigger hospital, which is where I ended up meeting him.
So apparently he's taken some tests. The professor and I go over to the station to check out the EMR. He grills me a bit on what exams I would have ordered, knowing what I did. One of the answers was a PET-CT, so we checked that out first.
A PET-CT checks the uptake of radioactive glucose that has been injected for the test. The more active the metabolism an organ has, the more radioactivity it shows, meaning it shows up black. Cancer has a lot higher metabolism than normal tissue so it's a pretty neat way to check the entire body for metastasis.
When we loaded this guy's PET-CT, we were both struck momentarily speechless. His whole spine and both hips were fully covered in black. Bones should not be black. The cancer (which the professor later told me was a melanoma, a particularly aggressive type of skin cancer) had spread across his whole body.
The professor gave him about 3 months to live, at best. The guy was just one year older than I was, a lot fitter. It was eye-opening to see that my young age didn't mean I was immortal or invincible. Since then, I've adopted the motto of Memento Mori. I still think about him every once in a while.
Voidwing
35. Fragility Of Health
This is an interesting fact I learned. The head and neck ward has a “carotid blow-out kit.” For people with neck tumors that are invading the carotid artery and can’t be removed. It has towels in it. Nothing else.
I’m glad to say I’ve never seen it used, but I once saw an old woman with a nosebleed that no one could get to stop. Just seemed unbelievable that you could pass away from a nosebleed, but she did.
Dlashxx
36. Decaying Leg
A friend’s stepdad was training to be a nurse so he got all the gross stuff that came in because he was a newbie. A homeless man came in complaining of stomach pains. Unfortunately, he was the one on duty when that man came for help.
When he told the guy to undress he didn't want to take off his jeans no matter how much he convinced him. When asked about it he said, "I can't take them off, my leg will fall off." Sure enough, his leg was rotting and had organisms crawling in and out of it.
SET0H
37. Emergency Room Dilemma
A homeless guy came into the emergency room with a toothache. The infection was making its way to his heart. So we operated on his neck from ear to ear to get as much infection out as we could.
We kept the incision open to monitor the healing. Well, the fun part came when we had to do a CT scan. I had to hold this dude's head as we moved him over. It felt like his head was gonna detach at any second. He ended up passing away.
Thejaypalmershow
38. Ignorance Led To A Risk
We had a patient who was just 1 year old. The case was suspected of meningitis. It started from an unresolved fever for 10 days. The parents refused to do a spinal tap and refused medication.
They say that after admission for 3 days, the medication is not working, and want to be discharged. We tried convincing them not to but they left anyway. To me, the worst is that the children pay for their parent's stupidity.
MegathaS
39. Tragic Persistence
I’m a phlebotomist. I started my job last year, and in my second week, I met this patient who was essentially in a vegetative state. He had brain function but he was pretty severely brain damaged. He was a former substance user and had AIDS.
He kept using instead of going on antiretrovirals and was just all-around a sad person. I felt awful for him. He started young and rotting away at the age of 26. I couldn’t get the veins in his hands or arms so I’d have to use his foot. Then he’d go home.
Over the next year, he’d keep coming in, straight to the ICU, always in worse condition. Eventually, he became entirely brain-dead. He was alive with no brain function. His family refused to take him off life support. Every day I’d have to go in and draw his morning labs.
I was doing blood work and poking more holes in a man who will never recover. His quality of life was awful. One time he opened his eyes and blinked when I was getting a troponin on him and his mom jumped up and screamed “GET THE DOCTOR! HE’S WAKING UP!” I calmly explained I’d get the doctor but blinking doesn’t mean he has brain function.
She called me a stupid wench and told me to leave. She then was escorted out by security because she proceeded to get violent with the next two doctors who told her the same thing. I’ve been out of work for a couple of months now since delivering my daughter, but I asked about him at my work conference today. He’s still there. Still being poked and prodded, still suffering, still being kept alive.
[deleted]
40. A Young Man’s Battle
I have seen 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, and passed away at home. Something that will stick with me forever I think.
Pepsiplunge2091
41. Unforgettable Bonds
I'm a dentist and during my studies a couple of years ago, a friend and I were placed at a nursing home. This was to educate us about the challenges of oral care in an aged care facility. The home was divided into 3 sections, low care, high care, and terminal.
On the first day there lot of the residents would approach us and keep doing so throughout the day to become friends with us as they kept forgetting they had met us only hours before. It was very sweet and I became attached to many of them. It's surprising how they will forget you in 1 hour but will never forget "growing up on a farm with a sheep called Gilbert.”
I became closest to a woman called Elsa (who had dementia and another fatal disorder I cannot recall) in the terminal section that was named so due to her long white hair as the Frozen character. Every day I'd feed her, brush her hair, and wash her dentures yet she only ever spoke two words: Jessica and Joel.
She would repeat both names everyday and point to their pictures in her room. They were her children. Speaking to the nurses I found out that they dropped her off 7 years ago and never came and visited again. Every day she would get better at remembering me but never said my name once, always just Jessica and Joel.
I would check up on her during the day and every time I would see her crying in bed and I would offer to bring her some water, she would reply with Jessica and Joel. One morning after a month of first meeting Elsa, I walked into her room and she wasn't in there. She wasn't the kind to walk around and always stayed in her room so I knew something was wrong and I was fearing the worst.
After asking one of the nurses whom I hadn't ever met, she told me she passed away last night after gesturing for water and saying the names Jessica, Joel, and Joseph. My name is Joseph. I cried just writing this story.
[deleted]
42. Mistaken Identity
The hospital I used to work in had an eye clinic with some laser surgery rooms. A patient with a common surname, let's say, Smith, had an eye exam and is told to make a follow-up appointment.
He's waiting in line to make an appointment when, from the other side of the clinic, a nurse calls for Smith. He walks over to her and says he's smith. She leads him to one of the laser rooms. The doctor performs the procedure. When they're done, the patient asks "What did you just do to me?"
babygrenade
43. The Aftermath Of Chemo
I wouldn't say this is the worst but she is one of those patients whose story made me upset. A young lady who just finished chemo for breast cancer came in with behavior changes. She would scratch the staff, and pull out her IV and lines. At one point it got so bad that we had to restrain her.
Whenever we give her an antipsychotic, she calms down and becomes lucid, but when it wears off, she's very aggressive. She's still in the hospital, but very sad because she's so young and was normal before the chemo.
Registered-Nurse
44. Twin Tragedy
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 had many surgeries for her left hip tumor, her primary tumor. She had a fraternal twin sister who was always with her over 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 and she would bleed until she passed away.
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 passed away a couple of weeks later at home. I still see her social media 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.”
BreakingGaga
45. Overmedication and Neglect in Long-Term Care
I don't work in a hospital but my mom does. She worked in long-term care for a minute, she said there is so much that goes on in the hospitals. She said she's had to report several coworkers for overmedicating patients with their heart/seizure medicines, to the point of overdosing and ending the patient.
She found out the patient passed away when she came in the next morning. Nurses were beating the patients if they did something they didn't like. But the one I personally saw was when my great-grandma had hip replacement surgery, she was having trouble using the bathroom.
So, they gave her an enema. Still didn't help. So they gave another and another, and another, but all too close together because they weren't keeping records and it basically caused her bowels to burst.
Iwantmypizzaback
46. Critical Error
We had a patient who needed a central line. For those not in the medical field, this is where they insert a large IV into the jugular (a much larger vein than those in your arms). We only do this for critically ill patients who need specific medications for blood pressure.
The resident performing this procedure was attempting to place the line, and instead of inserting the line in the jugular, he placed it into the aorta (the huge artery that pumps blood away from your heart). This is a potentially fatal mistake.
The patient could have passed away. I still don't know what happened to her, but she was also taking blood thinners, meaning that her ability to clot (and heal) from such a procedure was severely compromised. Everyone makes mistakes, but that was a bad one.
Flamin_Hot_Butthole