Medical horror stories!

[Jacquetta]

Not me (I've had a pretty pain free existence except for the time I got what I think was a compression fracture in my back in a really fucking awful car accident as a really little kid) but my dad has a real good one.

My dad has (as he found out in his 40s) some weird, super rare mutation shit going on with the nerves in his jaw. The mutation prevents his jaw from going numb no matter how much novocaine you shoot him with. No one else in the family has the mutation so we're not quite sure where it came from, but he's sure got it.

Toward the start of high school my dad was told his teeth were utterly fucked and he needed braces by the family dentist. I've always called him Dr Crusty Old Asshole, DDS. My grandparents can't afford braces. Fair enough, says Dr Crusty Old Asshole, DDS. There's a cheaper alternative!

That alternative was to pull out dear old dad's eye teeth and hope that sorted shit out.

The good news: it did, more or less.

The bad news: Dr Crusty Old Asshole, DDS didn't believe my dad when he said the anesthetic wasn't taking and insisted he was making shit up. Despite the screams and the tears and the vomiting from the pain after the first tooth got torn out with no pain relief whatsoever, my dad was totally a fucking liar who lied. So the old fuck ripped the second one out too!

The day he told me that was the first day I have ever been truly grateful that I was adopted, because it means I know for an absolute fact that I didn't inherit that nerve from him.

(tl;dr: my dad has a mutated nerve that prevents injected anesthetic from working on his jaw. He needed two tooth extractions at ~fifteen, the complete fuckhole of a dentist didn't believe him and tore the teeth out raw.)

 

[Postal Dude]

Well, I work as an embalmer. Naturally, being in this line of work means I’m definitely exposed to plenty of sickening stuff, because every patient has their own set of shit wrong with them. This case was particularly strange but by far isn’t the nastiest - I’ve dealt with much worse shit, like fatasses whose organs are swimming in grease and adipose tissue or kidney failure patients with limbs bloated by edema, car crashes, drownings… you get the picture.

Anyway, a few days ago we received a jar supposedly containing a fetus. It had been spontaneously aborted at 16 weeks and looked a little something like liquid diarrhea and smelled about the same. Damn thing seemed to have been completely obliterated. After draining half of the jar we couldn’t find the fetus and eventually one of our guys just dumped it in the sink. At the time we had no idea why it was there.

Apparently, as we found out later, the parents of the late fetus were some crazy fundamentalist Christians who wanted cast fingerprints of their unborn child. (for those who aren’t in the know, you can obtain cast fingerprints of a dead loved one from the funeral home in charge of their body, least most of the homes that I know of) Before sending it to us they’d taken pictures of their dead fetus and made them into bookmarks. As for the fingerprints, we just let the director know that we weren’t able to obtain a fingerprint cast from a jar of mud… and that’s all there was to that.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Outside of getting seven stitches, tubes in my ears (twice), and my wisdom teeth removed, I have nothing that happened to me. Now almost ten years ago my mother had heart surgery for a valve replacement (she went with a pig valve, so she's on no blood thinners). I'm not sure if it was because of her weight at the time, but she apparently has hard-to-find or small/deep veins in her arms, and so they had to hook her up to a vein in the inner thigh. They also had to freeze her brain briefly during the surgery, so she now describes her once-amazing memory as Swiss cheese.

Although the surgery went well, she got either staph infection from the IV, or it became an abscess/tunneling wound, if not the staph infection turning into an abscess (I can't remember which). So on top of recovering from heart surgery, she had to get that gaping wound treated. Someone had recommended to her one of those portable wound vacuums, so a nurse would come by at least once a week to get the bags of pus and check things out. It worked out nicely, so Mom likes to laugh about it. But time will tell if history will repeat, since the pig valve is good for like 20-25 years.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

About two months ago I dropped a barbell on my toe. I went to the ER and had it x-rayed. They told me it was just bruised, so I went back to my exercise routines after a week of ice and pain pills.

So fast-forward to a month ago, when I tear a tendon on my foot doing a five-mile run. A subsequent x-ray at a different location reveals my toe is broken and has been since I dropped the bar on it. I go get my original x-rays and they also show a break. More than that, the actual x-ray report the ER wrote up said it was broken. By this point there's no treatment for the toe and it'll remain broken forever. Which is apparently a common result of broken big toes, but if I knew it was broken I sure as shit wouldn't have went straight back to doing CrossFit on it.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

Back in August of 2009, I was trying to improve the grip of a Cold Steel Bushman by stretching a couple of pieces of rubber inner tube, aka 'Ranger Bands', over the handle. Like a complete idiot, I forgot to hold the knife blade away from my palm, and my left hand slipped over the handle and down the blade and it was cut to the bone, severing the flexor tendons that controlled my left index finger. I had to get my parents to drive me to the emergency room (they were more upset that I was swearing and bleeding on the carpet than my hand was was cut to the bone) and after a eight-hour surgery the next day, they had to split my left index finger in half to reattach my tendons, which had recoiled like a snapped rubber band. I still can't move my left index finger more than an inch or two downwards after six months of therapy.

 

[Meat_Puppet]

Never had a real serious injury. And child birth stories by now are pretty tame. But I did manage to send myself to the ER once.
I was 15 and mom and I were fighting about the phone. After everything was said and done she righteously had me pissed the fuck off. She took off to have a smoke and i dont know what possed me to do it but i ended up punching the wall. And like an idiot i ended up smashing a couple rings completely into my fingers.
Sure enough I needed my mom there to help me pry the fuckers off. I think she won that argument.

 

[The Dude]

Years ago, when I was training to be an EMT, I had to work a shift in an ER for the "on-the-job experience" portion of my licensing. The night I worked we had two incidents that stuck in my mind. The first was a guy who rear-ended a semi-truck flatbed trailer going 80mph. He hit it at such an angle that the bumper of the truck peeled the roof back on his car and crushed the poor bastard's skull and partially decapitated him. He was DOA, but the paramedics had to keep working on him until a doctor could call the death. So they wheeled this clearly dead guy in with one medic straddling the guy and doing chest compressions on the gurney.

The other guy we had in that stuck in my mind was an obese elderly guy having chest pains. When we got him into a room to examine him he complained that his shoes and socks felt wet. We got them off and discovered he had Pedal Edema, a common symptom of cardiac problems where fluids pool in the lower extremities and has nowhere to go, so it leaks out through the pores. His feet, ankles, and legs were visibly swollen to near bursting below the knees and all this yellowish-clear liquid was flowing down his legs.

My last story happened when I was working at a local aircraft parts factory as a security guard/EMT shortly after I got my license. I was walking a patrol around the production floor on the graveyard shift. There were only about ten people total working that night. As I passed where they cut sheet metal for ailerons and other parts I saw one guy working at a band saw while his coworker was rolling up a hoodie and snapped the guy at the saw in the back like a jock with a wet towel. The guy at the saw jerked in surprise, his hand slipped, and the saw split his left arm in half from between the thumb and forefinger all the way to just before the elbow. I didn't have time to run and grab my jump kit, so I went over, tied one of the hoodie sleeves off above the elbow, wrapped the body of the hoodie around the arm, and tied off the other sleeve at the wrist making a sling. I got the sling/sleeve over his neck, grabbed him at his left bicep to apply pressure to slow the blood flow, and practically carried him to an old van we had in case of emergencies. The van wasn't even licensed and it had bald tires, which wasn't great since it was early January and there was snow on the roads. I drove up to the gatehouse, told my partner what was happening, and took off for the nearest ER. I was driving nearly 70mph and suddenly I see red and blue lights behind me. I pulled over and yelled for the cop to come talk to me. I explained that my patient has cut his arm in half, that he was bleeding out, and to radio ahead to make the ER aware of the situation while he escorted us. He took one glance at the two of us covered in blood and told me to follow him. We drove the rest of the way at 90mph, me with one hand clamped over my patients left bicep and the other on the wheel trying not to lose traction. We pulled up to the ER door and they had a gurney and plasma waiting for him. I filled out paper work, went back to the car, and totally broke down from shock and stress. When I got back to work my boss was there to send me home early. We found out later that the patient required three and a half units of plasma that night and we had gotten him there just in time. They were able to save his arm and all his fingers. The saw blade had missed most of the bones and his Radius and Ulna bones had acted like a guide for the saw blade. The only long term damage was scarring, of course, and a little diminished movement in his wrist and his thumb, with his thumb getting the worst of it and no longer able to touch the palm of his hand or extend fully. For several years I got Christmas cards from him and his family, but I haven't heard from them since I got married.

So those are my medical stories.

 

[MistressCaridad]

I have a shitload of work-related stories (I work in the medical field) but I think I'll relay a weird/gross medical story about myself. In my senior year of high school I was helping a relative clean up some property he owned and haul away some junk... well, in a freak accident (I can't even clearly recall the sequence of events because it happened so fast) I ended up tripping, falling and getting my knee impaled by a piece of rebar that was sticking up out of a piece of concrete. My lovely relative, instead of calling an ambulance right away, opted to try to get me into his vehicle to take me to the ER (at least he didn't pull the rebar out, things could've gotten ugly if he had) After that I don't know what happened because I passed out somewhere along the line because I was in pain and woke up at the hospital after my surgery.

 

[Pepito The Cat]

There's a persistent pimple appearing inside my nose. I pop it maybe once or twice a month but it keeps filling up. It hurts like hell.

 

[Morose_Obesity]

Years ago, when I was training to be an EMT, I had to work a shift in an ER for the "on-the-job experience" portion of my licensing. The night I worked we had two incidents that stuck in my mind. The first was a guy who rear-ended a semi-truck flatbed trailer going 80mph. He hit it at such an angle that the bumper of the truck peeled the roof back on his car and crushed the poor bastard's skull and partially decapitated him. He was DOA, but the paramedics had to keep working on him until a doctor could call the death. So they wheeled this clearly dead guy in with one medic straddling the guy and doing chest compressions on the gurney.

The other guy we had in that stuck in my mind was an obese elderly guy having chest pains. When we got him into a room to examine him he complained that his shoes and socks felt wet. We got them off and discovered he had Pedal Edema, a common symptom of cardiac problems where fluids pool in the lower extremities and has nowhere to go, so it leaks out through the pores. His feet, ankles, and legs were visibly swollen to near bursting below the knees and all this yellowish-clear liquid was flowing down his legs.

My last story happened when I was working at a local aircraft parts factory as a security guard/EMT shortly after I got my license. I was walking a patrol around the production floor on the graveyard shift. There were only about ten people total working that night. As I passed where they cut sheet metal for ailerons and other parts I saw one guy working at a band saw while his coworker was rolling up a hoodie and snapped the guy at the saw in the back like a jock with a wet towel. The guy at the saw jerked in surprise, his hand slipped, and the saw split his left arm in half from between the thumb and forefinger all the way to just before the elbow. I didn't have time to run and grab my jump kit, so I went over, tied one of the hoodie sleeves off above the elbow, wrapped the body of the hoodie around the arm, and tied off the other sleeve at the wrist making a sling. I got the sling/sleeve over his neck, grabbed him at his left bicep to apply pressure to slow the blood flow, and practically carried him to an old van we had in case of emergencies. The van wasn't even licensed and it had bald tires, which wasn't great since it was early January and there was snow on the roads. I drove up to the gatehouse, told my partner what was happening, and took off for the nearest ER. I was driving nearly 70mph and suddenly I see red and blue lights behind me. I pulled over and yelled for the cop to come talk to me. I explained that my patient has cut his arm in half, that he was bleeding out, and to radio ahead to make the ER aware of the situation while he escorted us. He took one glance at the two of us covered in blood and told me to follow him. We drove the rest of the way at 90mph, me with one hand clamped over my patients left bicep and the other on the wheel trying not to lose traction. We pulled up to the ER door and they had a gurney and plasma waiting for him. I filled out paper work, went back to the car, and totally broke down from shock and stress. When I got back to work my boss was there to send me home early. We found out later that the patient required three and a half units of plasma that night and we had gotten him there just in time. They were able to save his arm and all his fingers. The saw blade had missed most of the bones and his Radius and Ulna bones had acted like a guide for the saw blade. The only long term damage was scarring, of course, and a little diminished movement in his wrist and his thumb, with his thumb getting the worst of it and no longer able to touch the palm of his hand or extend fully. For several years I got Christmas cards from him and his family, but I haven't heard from them since I got married.

So those are my medical stories.

Did the asshole towel snapper get fired?

 

[XYZpdq]

"Hello Mr and Mrs XYZpdq I am Dr Pajeet. Please tell me what is wrong with your wife."
Seriously every fucking time it's somebody who graduated from DESIGNATED University they always ask me about her problems instead of asking her.

 

[Aiōn]

Not my story but someone just sent this to me

 

[Cheesegirl78]

I had a kidney stone last fall, don't want to go through that again. Ever.
Got to have laser surgery for that. Damn doctors were VERY stingy with the pain meds.

Had to have my broken nose reset years ago, and that was worse than the kidney stone. If my nose hadn't been pointing at my right ear, I would've left it as it was.
Doctor did a great job resetting it, no problems after.