Medical conditions can be embarrassing. Doctors have seen it all, though, so it’s best to tell your doctor the truth about your habits and medical concerns – cause without the truth, they can’t make an accurate diagnosis. And then you stay ill, or injured.
Or you could try the other, less honest approach, like these folks did. Things may not go well, though.
10. Pregnancy tests for everyone!
When I was an intern I was doing my ER rotation and a woman in her late 30s or so came in complaining of nausea and lower abdominal discomfort for the last few days. I did the dilligent history taking and of course, asked her about the possibility of her being pregnant.
She lost her shit and went off on me…said she was a lesbian woman and had not been with a man for 10 plus years. Yelled at me to get my boss and let an “adult” treat her.
I reported back to my attending and delineated the tests I wanted done. He was like…”I didn’t hear a plan for a pregnancy test.” and I was like: “I don’t think that’s needed…she’s a lesbian and hasn’t been with a man in 10 years.”. My attending smiled and said: “Humor me.”
Bitch was pregnant as fuck. Went back to her room and there were two dudes mean mugging one another about to fight. She couldn’t even look me in the eye.
9. Sure, your friends did it
Not a doctor but I was an ER scribe. I would follow the doctors around with a laptop and do all of their electronic charting, ordering tests, note taking and stuff like that.
Had a patient, probably around 18-20 year old male. Complaining of a foreign object in his…male organ. He had a set of iPhone headphones stuck up his penis. And when I say stuck up there, I mean all the way to where the single cord splits in two for the two earbuds. Out of precaution we did an x-ray and sure enough, you could see the knotted up cord in his lower abdomen and it was going to require surgery to remove due to it being tangled.
He said that he was at a party with some friends and that he got drunk and passed out and his friends shoved it up there as a joke while he was passed out. Luckily the doctor I was working with had seen this guy for the same thing not long ago except before it was a wire coat hanger. She recognized there was a bigger issue and convinced him to have an inpatient psych consult in the ER after surgery so they could get him the help he needed.
Not a single person in that exam room bought his story that his friends did it to him though.
8. Well, there was a shooting
As a Paramedic,
A woman was shot. We arrive on scene and she has a single gun shot wound in her right thigh, minimal bleeding, and she is standing up and limping while talking to the police. She is very polite and nice and thanks us for coming to help her.
She said she was walking in the parking lot of a restaurant when she saw a blue car drive by and someone leaned out with a pistol and started shooting and she felt something hit her leg. We help her to truck and I bandage her wound and give her some pain medicine and on the to the hospital we go. She jokes about she’s in the wrong place and the wrong time and is having an unlucky day. Answers questions with “yes sir/no sir” even though I told her she didn’t have to. We arrive at the ER and Im giving my report to the trauma team when an officer on scene quietly comes into the room. I’m telling the patient’s story to the docs when the cop gets this huge grin on his face then nods at me to come outside.
He told me that a blue car pulled up just when we left scene and told them to go check the restaurant cameras. The cops checked the camera to find my patient inside the restaurant and suddenly starts to yell at the other person (driver of the blue car). The other person leaves the restaurant trying to get away, and my patient is chasing her. The video from the parking lot then shows my patient going to her vehicle and getting a pistol out. She then starts to run after the other person. There’s a flash on the camera and the patient starts limping. She shot herself in her leg.
7. Definitely not a smoker
A few years ago, a man came in complaining of a terrible cough, chest pain, and fatigue. I asked him if he had a history of smoking. Naturally he said no. Around an hour later, on my way home, I stopped to get some food and there he was, smoking outside McDonalds.
6. The placebo effect
We had a teenager admitted with unexplained “seizure” activity. Her mom & boyfriend were beyond concerned & stayed at her bedside. How she was even admitted in the first place is a mystery. Anyway she started “seizing” & her family called a rapid response (basically it’s an emergency but not a code blue).
The rapid team responds & the on call physician was a delightful asshole. The situation was explained as we’re going down the hall & he says “someone give me a flush”.
We get in the room & he says in a soothing tone “it’s okay Jane. I’m going to give you some medicine to help. It should work pretty quickly.” That saline quelled her seizure pretty much immediately.
5. That’s one way to handle a break-up
So this young girl came to the hospital with her boyfriend. She had a stab wound in the abdominal region. She was apparently “cutting an apple while keeping in on her abdomen when the knife slipped and caused the injury.”
Turns out that she was threatening her boyfriend not to break up with her. She thought it’d be cool to try and stab herself to convince him, I guess…..
4. It was purple
My father is a urologist. The amount of patients that come in with a broken or bruised penis is….astonishing, to say the least.
Some are honest. They were trying some new sex thing and they miscalculated or got carried away, then someone turns the wrong way or falls of the bed/pommel horse/tire swing/etc. Or took a “flying leap” to initiate sex and missed.
But some of them are adamant that they woke up like that. These are the same people whose wives are out of town, and a woman who is definitely not her is in the waiting room to see if her boyfriend is okay.
My dad has the potential to nuke so many marriages from orbit, but doctor-patient confidentiality holds him back. I have often dreamed of what would happen if one day he just said “F*ck it” and revealed everything.
Edit: Apparently how [the flying leap] went was he readied himself at the end of the bed while she positioned herself. The he took a few steps back and jumped.
The idea was he would make a perfect landing, slide right in, and they would continue with vigorous, movie-level fornication.
Unfortunately his aim was off. Throw yourself on your bed and try to catch yourself with a fully extended index finger. That happened, but it was his dick.
Dad’s exact words when he came home from work that day were “It was purple. The whole thing was PURPLE.”
3. Sad story, but there’s justice in the end
Surgeon here. A few years back, a 5 year old was brought to the E.D. after a blow to the abdomen so hard that it ripped the jejunum off the duodenum. It looked like it had been that way for about 24 hours, as there was tremendous spillage of GI contents, and the kid was at death’s door.
Anyway, the family situation was as follows… the kid was Korean, and living with his mom, 7 year-old brother, and the mom’s boyfriend, who ran a Tai-Kwan-Do Dojo. The boyfriend was the only one who spoke English well, and the other three always looked scared out of their minds. I immediately suspected the boyfriend, and notified the proper authorities. Although they conducted extensive interviews, the only answer they got was from the boyfriend, who said the injury happened while the two little boys were “sparring”. (I knew that had to be bullshit, since a child was not capable of producing that kind of force, but with no evidence the authorities had to let the case drop.)
Somehow, the kid made a complete and miraculous recovery, and after a few post-op visits I never saw them again.
Fast forward to 2 years later when the school nurse noticed the older one limping in the hallway and examined him. She found both chronic and fresh welts on the back of his legs from caning. An examination of the younger one revealed the same thing. This time, prosecutors were able to get both kids and mom to tell them everything, including the punch to the gut by the scumbag two years prior. Douchenozzle in now sitting in jail with a 30 year sentence.
2. Not sleeping
I work for a medical device company. We sell spine implants (rods and screws used to hold vertebrae together).
An irate patient tried to sue us after one of the screws in his back broke, resulting in him needing another surgery. He claimed it broke while he slept.
I don’t care how restless a sleeper you are, there is no possible way these screws could break that easily. Each screw can easily support your entire body weight and then some, and I’ve got the FEA analysis to prove it. They are tested for 5 million cycles of loading to make sure they can handle any amount of fatigue as well.
Turned out he actually broke it playing football on Thanksgiving. Two months after major spine surgery. The dumbass.
1. Pen caps and braces don’t mix
Not a doctor, but a former patient who once told a weird lie that I was deadass called out on.
I had braces as a kid, and I had a bad habit of chewing on pen caps, which would occasionally result in one of my brackets coming un-cemented from its tooth.
So for the upteenth time, this happened, and my orthodontist got ready to read me the riot act, but then I told him that, actually, I had been at a birthday party at a restaurant that had a dance floor in the back (which was true) and that I tripped and fell and hit my mouth on the wooden railing that lined the perimeter of the dance floor in such a way that I didn’t hurt myself, I just knocked a bracket loose (which was absolutely a lie)
And he was like, so you fell into a wooden rail, and you hit your mouth into it, full force, but you didn’t lose a tooth, or bust your lip, or anything else? Is that what actually happened? And then I looked at the floor and shook my head “no.”
