People Who Work In The Medical Field Are Sharing Their Scariest Experiences
As someone who has watched too many medical TV shows and movies, I realize there’s so much that the “University of Grey’s Anatomy” curriculum leaves out. Since I was curious about the more serious aspects of the medical field, I decided to ask doctors, nurses, paramedics, and all other medical professionals about the most terrifying experiences they’ve had while on shift.
And I was NOT expecting what they had to say… Here are 16 of their most heart-pounding stories, as well as some stories from the medical professionals of Reddit.
Note: This post contains mentions of gun violence, death, gore, attempted suicide, and bomb threats.
1.”I once worked as a security guard at a hospital. We had this very old man turn up at the emergency room in an equally old pickup truck driven by what looked like a 12-year-old. The old man opened his door, stepped out, and stood up.”
“There were V-shaped cuts in his jeans that were absolutely blood-soaked from the knees down. He asked for a wheelchair. I ran and got him one. As he was sitting down, he explained that he was working on his lawn mower, and it had started somehow and fell across his knees. He said he needed his kneecaps ‘put back in,’ reached into his pants pocket, and showed them to me. Darndest thing I’ve ever seen!”
—Norton, Yahoo
2.”I worked as a school nurse in California. Two boys were roughhousing during recess and bonked heads. One of the boys developed a headache…unbeknownst to me. It became progressively worse throughout the day.”
“He walked into my office in mid-afternoon, clutching his head and crying in pain. He became incoherent and started projectile vomiting.
It turns out he had a brain bleed…he was flown to the hospital and had emergency surgery. He recovered, and I have never been so terrified in my life.”
3.”I was a new nurse during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. We were sad for the patients and terrified we would be infected and die, as not a lot was known, and there was a lot of misinformation — especially here in the South. Any accidental stick with a patient needle was enough for an all-out panic.”
—Belinda, Facebook
4.”I was an RN in the ER at a hospital in NYC. A patient was brought in with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her head. The major trauma room was filled with surgical and medical doctors, anesthesia, respiratory therapists, and RNs.”
“Everyone was talking loudly and excitedly. Many hands all over the body. While I was unwrapping the blanket she was wrapped in, I discovered the loaded gun they used. I immediately yelled out to get everyone’s attention and had a police officer remove the gun as I refused to touch it for fear of it going off accidentally.”
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5.”Had a nice older gentleman patient who was tachycardic, but all his labs were normal. He seemed like he took fairly good care of himself, he was a little disheveled, but he dressed nicely and had nice shoes. We initially couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he had a peculiar odor that seasoned nurses would get suspicious of.”
“I asked him if he had any infections on his body that he knew of, and he said ‘no,’ but I wanted to do a thorough check, so we took off all his clothes, and he was fine until I got down to his feet.
He was wearing an old pair of socks, and as I peeled them down, literally, the skin around his foot came off with the sock. I was essentially degloving his foot. It was so vile I couldn’t even get down more than a couple of inches. It was raw flesh under those socks. The wound odor was so strong I knew then that his feet were the source. He probably hadn’t changed his socks in several months. He ended up being admitted and given lots of antibiotics and wound care.
The memory of pulling down his socks will haunt me forever.”
6.”When the oxygenator on the ECMO circuit blew off and sprayed blood all over everyone and everything in the room like a hose. It was horrible. It looked like a scene from Dexter.”
Svetikd / Getty Images
7.”Not a nurse, but I work in the Emergency Department. The patient came in and said he hadn’t pooped for a week. The doctor prescribes some stool softeners and decides to send him home…without ensuring that he had a bowel movement before he left.”
“Patient comes back in six hours later and is having severe abdominal pains and is brought in one more time. The patient is put on a bed and scheduled for some type of scan. All of a sudden starts feeling nauseated. Patient then starts throwing up his feces. He was obstructed. The nurse attending and I run into the room. The nurse pushed on the stomach and held his back, trying to get the rest out, then they aspirated and had a heart attack.”
8.”ER RN here. This, so far, is the only death I’ve experienced from work that I’ve lost a significant amount of sleep over. A 24-year-old male walks, again walks, into the ER with complaints of flu-like symptoms for the past three days. He had decided to come in that day because he started to develop a ‘rash’ throughout his body that he was unfamiliar with.”
“Sadly, this rash was actually the result of a failed battle with bacterial meningitis, causing him to bleed internally and externally. By the time we got him back into the ER, he started crying blood, and the terror in his eyes was palpable. He went downhill fast. His lucidity diminished with his blood pressure, and the last thing he said before succumbing to pulseless V-tach was something about his mother that we could not make out.
The code lasted close to an hour. At first, we could still keep his oxygen levels up with mechanical ventilation, defibrillation, and drugs, but blood was filling his airways faster than it could be suctioned out. He was bleeding too fast for any medications or fluids to keep his blood pressure up. We later found out that he was studying neurobiology and had a devoted girlfriend who was, for all intents and purposes, a fiancé, a large family, and many friends. He was an athlete who lived healthily. He had beautiful curly hair. This made the death tragic in a way that you just don’t experience when an 80-year-old dies. It made the unanswered pleas to god for help that had been sent echoing around the room by his family all the more bitter.”
9.”I was friends with a guy who was an ER nurse in a neighborhood with a lot of gang violence. One night, they get a gang member who was shot and in pretty bad shape, but still alive.”
“My friend left the room to go grab something, and when he came back, there was a guy dressed in a clown suit with a shotgun up his sleeve. As he raises his arm to shoot the gang member, security tackled the guy and arrested him.”
—Ted, Yahoo
10.”We had a guy come into the ER from a nursing home. According to the report, he asked the staff for a glass of water…”
“When he didn’t receive it quickly enough, his rational response was to start eating his fingers. By the time he got to us, he had eaten all 10 of his fingertips away. The bone was definitely visible. There was still flesh stuck in his teeth and on his sheets. That’s a sight I won’t forget anytime soon.”
11.”Severely addicted heroin user admitted for sepsis and respiratory failure. About 3 or 4 days into his admission, we find multiple broken needles lodged in his arms while trying to place a PICC line.”
“After a few more days, he codes, which was uneventful until the abscess that was brewing under his left clavicle exploded and sprayed pus everywhere. He survived that and went for an I&D, which left a gaping hole in his chest and neck you could fit 3 fists in. His clavicle had rotted away from osteomyelitis, and he had minimal tissue left connecting his neck to his shoulder on the left side. After 30 days intubated in the ICU, he finally died.”
Ariel Skelley / Getty Images
12.”Not me, but my grandmother used to work at the ER back in the sixties. She saw some horrible stuff, but the worst she’s told me about was about a car mechanic. This was back when, instead of lifting the car up to weld the bottom of it, you just parked it over a ‘hole in the ground.'”
“He’d been welding when the gas tube exploded. Since he’s in a small hole with nowhere for the flames to go, they completely engulf him. The only reason for them bringing him to the ER was to have a doctor legally pronounce him dead. My grandmother saw his remains. He had been crouching down, shielding his face with his arms when it exploded. She could see his watch; it had melted into his flesh. Otherwise, it was all just like a coal statue of a man.”
13.”When I was a junior neurosurgery resident, I was called to the ED for a 30-ish-year-old male who ran his motorcycle head-first into a telephone pole while intoxicated. No helmet.”
“His face was smashed beyond recognition. (I have no idea how the medics got him intubated in the field.) But when I saw him in the trauma bay, he had a frontal open skull fracture down to his orbit. We took him to the OR right away to decompress him. After 2 cranial operations and 3 months in the hospital, he went home.”
Science Photo Library / Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF
14.”Driving away from a bombing with the first patient in my truck, while a ton of my coworkers were still on scene and hearing ‘all units be advised there may be a secondary device. I repeat, ALL UNITS, there may be another device.'”
“Driving away, not knowing if I was going to come back to my friends (and my boyfriend) in pieces or not, was one of the most sickening feelings I’ve ever experienced. It was everything I could do to focus on my patient and not cry, not be able to do anything about it.
There was no secondary device and no casualties. But the bombers got away. It was at a restaurant while a kid’s family birthday party was happening.”
—Sarah Jane, Facebook
15.”A Royal Marine, not long back from Belize, came into Casualty at the hospital I work at. He had a ‘cyst’ swollen on the back of his neck.”
“The guy was in agony. 3 local anesthetic injections later, the doctor attempted to lance the thing, and it moved. He peeled off the top layer of skin to reveal a massive larvae wriggling underneath, about the size of a quarter. It popped out without any problems and was huge when it was unraveled. The hole in the marine’s neck was clean, amazingly. A great example of a host.”
Cavan Images / Getty Images/Cavan Images RF
16.”Lab guy here. Responded to assist in the ER when a 5–6-year-old boy was pulled from the irrigation canal he was swimming in during our first heat wave of the summer. Was unobserved and suspected of being under for a total of 7–9 minutes, completely blue and unresponsive to stimuli.”
“We worked on that kid for about 4 hours and finally got a weak pulse. I kept him on the monitor for the remainder of my shift, and he also got fluids, warming blankets, and oxygen. I left for the night before I knew the final disposition. He came in 2 weeks later with his family, running up and down the hallway, everyone getting big hugs and gratitude for helping to save his life. I am thankful I got to be part of that miracle. I’m pretty secluded back in my department and away from direct patient care, so I know it’s serious if I get called down to assist.”
—Bif, Yahoo
Medical professionals — what was your most heart-pounding on-shift moment? Let us know in the comments below, or if you prefer to answer anonymously, use this Google Form.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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