“A young woman came in clutching her eye. She was followed in by her friends, who were covering their mouths. It turns out that she had stood behind someone while they were fishing. The hook got caught in her eye! Luckily for everyone involved, it was just hooked through her eyelid and the doctor was able to numb her and pull it through.”

“A man came into the ER claiming his arm had come off in a farming accident. The nurses didn’t believe him since the man was only a little ‘out of it’ and not in terrible pain. When he removed the blanket covering up his arm, the arm came right with it; he said, ‘Told you so.'”

“ER Nurse here. Was doing CPR on a lady whose heart had stopped. They initially rolled her into the room unconscious and not breathing. This lady is pretty much dead. However, in the middle of doing chest compressions, her hands reach up and grasp my wrists and then fall back to hanging off the table. We never got her back.”

“The very last patient I saw in my internship came in with a cyst in her pubic area… Think to myself “ok, seen plenty of these.. No big deal”.. I walk in to find a cyst the size of a jawbreaker… It was purple and practically had a face. We had to lance it, so we needed to give local anesthetic. When the syringe touched the cyst, the whole thing blew open with pus. The smell in the room was terrible. Upon pushing on it further, the cyst made a sound as it released more pus. It sounded like basketball shoes on a freshly waxed floor. The core of the cyst was about the size of a dime. Love this kind of stuff and considering going into dermatology.”

“I used to work in an Alzheimer’s ward. There was one woman who used to be a police officer and would go around ‘writing tickets’ and ‘investigating.’ She thought I was her partner and would always come up to me saying things like ‘we’re gonna take em downtown aren’t we? Did you finish those reports?’ So she was pretty far gone. She was really rude to everyone except me. One day I found her wandering around, and I could smell her. She hadn’t been changed in hours. I brought her to her room, and it was so bad I had to give her a shower. While I was scrubbing her she looked me right in the eyes and said ‘Thank you for always taking such good care of me, and for being so kind. I’ve never had a nurse like you. I love you.’ That was the most coherent thing she’d ever said to me. I tucked her into bed, turned her tv on for her and told her goodnight. When I got to work the next day, I found out she passed away in her sleep.”

“A patient came in with such bad breath, his wife had forced him to come in. Under the man’s tongue was a small bump, which the patient said would come and go. The bump looked like a small white head and told of an infection. However, when the doctor went to make the incision to let it drain, no puss came out. Instead he was met with something rock hard. He then grabbed a small pair of forceps and pulled on the small white bump…and ended up pulling out a 23 mm salivary duct stone! Most salivary duct stones are smaller than 10 mm.”

“One man came into the ER complaining about having pain in his bottom and not being able to sit down. He said he had some kind of “foreign body” in his anus. When they examined him, they found he had a stool leg up there. He said he had accidentally fallen on it, and it had gotten stuck. He told the nurses not to tell his wife.”

“One memorable day, a young lady arrived in the department weeping bitterly. She had, she told me, something in her bottom. Expecting a minor lump or spot, I asked her to lower her trousers. As I bent down to peer at the offending object, the offending object reared up to look back at me (it was a very large worm!) I vomited, my colleague fainted!”

“Paramedics bring a 500lbs female into the ED, passed out and flopped onto her bed so all of the linens came with her. She eventually makes it down to the cath lab for a cardiac workup, and either during the procedure or soon afterwards expires. While being cleaned up in the morgue they find a cat (also expired) in one of her folds; the prevailing theory being that it must have been squished and absorbed when she passed out. Cath lab was renamed cat lab until HR got wind of it.”

“We received a ‘red phone’ pre-alert that we would be receiving the victim of a road accident who had collided with a fence. Sure enough, he arrived. Unfortunately, so did the fence. There was a fence post, probably 5 inches across, which entered his body just below the right side ribs and exited through the left shoulder. All well and good had he been unconscious. He looked at us, we looked at him. In a very English way he said, ‘I seem to have a splinter, I think that you might need to remove it’. He spent three to four weeks on the intensive care unit but lived to tell the tale.”

“My dad is going to school for nursing and he had to stand some shifts in a hospital. He told me one story where they brought in a mentally disturbed woman who was… behaving violently? I’m not sure how to put it. Anyway, she kept on flailing about and then started attacking herself. At one point he said she literally clawed out her eyeball. It was dangling out of the socket by the optic nerve and everyone is trying to restrain her so they can help but one of her arms breaks free so she reaches up, grabs her eyeball and squishes it.”

“I worked in the dementia unit of a nursing home for 6 months. My first day there was a woman there who had previously been in a mental hospital, and when I went to go talk to her, she points out the window and says ‘See those kids out there? Aren’t they beautiful?’ There were no kids, but I went along with it. Then she goes ‘I didn’t mean to burn them. I didn’t mean to kill my children.'”

“An elderly female we regularly treated chewed her lips off before being admitted one night. We pumped her stomach, as she had ingested anti-freeze along with her lip tissue.”

“Medical student. While on my Psych rotation, came across an individual who was a chemistry graduate student. Apparently he had been taking astronomical amounts of ketamine, and he was just continuously disassociated. For the entire time I was on this portion of the rotation (3 weeks) I never heard him speak a word. 95% of the time we was wrapped up in his sheets like a mummy and he would just periodically laugh, a crazy soft chuckle, from under his covers if you tried to talk to him. The creepiest laugh I’ve ever heard, I’ll never forget that.”

“There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast. We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the imaginary bugs out.”

“This one patient I had was extremely overweight and diabetic. No matter how much insulin we gave her, no matter how much we kept a sharp eye on her diet, we could not get her blood sugar levels to stabilize. It remained a mystery until I helped the woman to change her hospital gown. That’s when bits of fried rice and chicken wings began to fall out of crevices between her thighs and stomach. It turned out her son had been sneaking food in for her, and she’d been hiding it in the folds of her skin.”