Doctors, nurses, EMTs, and veterinarians see some pretty messed up stuff.
These 14 AskReddit stories, as told by them, just give us a little taste of what they deal with on the reg:
#1. Number One
“I was doing paperwork on a transfer last night. About halfway to the receiving hospital, I heard my patient start grunting.
I looked up from my paperwork just in time to see my patient, pants around the ankles, diaper around the knees, perfectly urinating into his own face.
He wasn’t even a psych patient.
I just waited for him to finish and handed him a towel.”
#2. Feline love
“Vet here. I had this lady bring in her female cat who turned out to be pregnant.
She was adamant that it was impossible, as this was strictly an indoor cat.
Upon further questioning, she admitted that there was an intact tom also living in the same house, but that he couldn’t possibly have done it because he was the female cat’s brother.
Yeah, cats don’t work that way.”
#3. “Good times…”
“A drunk abusive woman in her mid 40s stripped herself naked and masturbated in our emergency department.
When the police were arresting her, they all jumped back as she wiped her vulva with a pair of gloves and threw them at me.
The gloves went ‘splat!’ on my chest and stuck to me, the stink was horrific.
I couldn’t bring myself to lift my top off, so I cut it off with scissors rather than lift the dank over my face.
Good times…”
#4. Hair care
“Was doing wound care in a nursing home. Patient was super non-compliant, and his lower legs were covered in weeping, infected ulcerations.
They drained constantly, to the point where I had to implement some heavy duty, specialty dressings to contain the drainage between dressing changes.
The smell was horrible, you could tell where he was in the facility by the smell, and his room reeked.
At any rate, he wouldn’t get in the bed so I could do his dressings, so I had to squat on the floor and do it while he was in the wheelchair.
Anyway, I’m about 15 minutes into this dressing change, when my hair tie decides to be a useless f*ck, and snaps.
My hair acts like it’s in a goddamn Pantene commercial for once in its life, and bounces in a golden cascade all over this guy’s ulcers…and just stuck…
Alllll up and down his legs.
And, that’s how my director found me washing my hair with surgical scrub in the break room.”
#5. Liquid body
“I work security in a hospital, mostly psych units, but also the ER.
Grossest thing I’ve seen was a body that had been sitting in the morgue for like 5 months.
The body had liquefied.
Security releases the bodies and has to check toe tags, so I had to open the bag.
The guy picking up the body tried to move it before it was secured.
Liquid body everywhere.”
#6. Let’s talk turkey
“Nurse here. Had a patient who was a very nasty lady. Near 300 lbs, 6’2″, unkempt, and rude. She had a catheter in and called someone in to check it out.
While the nurse was begrudgingly looking at it, it got moved a little. She said, ‘Oh that felt good on my clit.’
The nurse then noticed something strange about her vagina. Turns out there was a turkey sandwich stuck in it.
She informed the patient who then responded, ‘Oh, did you want to eat it out of me?’
The same patient on a different admission had received a chest x-ray in the evening. Overnight, the medical resident came flying onto the unit declaring something was majorly wrong on the x-ray, and she needed to be assessed and moved to another floor.
Turns out she had a pork chop under her boob that showed up on x-ray.”
#7. Mother of the year?
“Walked in on a new mother sitting cross-legged in the bed, infant draped face-down across her lap, screaming.
Mom is eating Doritos, covering the kid in a fine dust of cheese crap, and smoking a crack pipe.”
