The Weirdest Hospital Cases from Doctors and Patients
It isn’t always intense stares and neat storylines that wrap up after forty-five minutes. Sometimes they take a lot longer. Sometimes they are a lot messier. Sometimes they’re just way too weird to include inside a bit of network television. Here are some tales from both sides of the doctor/patient divide.
Caterpillars Have Spikes?
Ah, brothers messing with each other – the reason behind approximately fifty percent of the times people have to go to the hospital or see a doctor. It doesn’t matter what these little hellions are getting up to, there’s a chance that somebody will need medical help. This little kid just thought it would be funny to put a bug down his brother’s diaper, and it resulted in a trip to the hospital. It’s the kind of thing that every kid has to learn – actions can have dangerous consequences.
Hopefully the reaction wasn’t all that bad, but we know that a two-year-old won’t remember anything that happens. He might be a little afraid of caterpillars for a reason he doesn’t fully understand, but he should get out of it with no lasting damage.
The Good Kind of Rainwater
We’re told that this man was so definitely not drunk enough to rip the IV out of his arm. That’s very not drunk. Of course, alcohol is one of the main reasons that people show up in hospitals, even if they swear up and down the white walls that they didn’t have anything to drink.
It doesn’t matter how obvious it is, or how many times the doctor has heard people say the exact same thing that week (or even that day) or how many people are having to hold a person down to keep him or her from being a danger, that person will never admit to alcohol until the craziness has passed. Did you get that rainwater from a bottle inside the store?
Punched the Wrong Place
It’s a good thing that surgery isn’t really, really complicated or something like that, or this sort of thing might happen a little more often than we think it does. One good thing is that people have been operating on each other and studying the body for so long that they know pretty much how everything works in conjunction with all the other parts and yet they can still sometimes accidentally cut open a blood vessel.
Thankfully, everybody was all right in this story, but this person had to stay longer in the hospital than expected (always a great thing to discover) and deal with a very uncommon bathroom situation. When it comes to stuff doctors say, “oh shoot” might be up there as one of the worst.
It’s Okay, We Didn’t Want to Sleep Anyway
Are there reasonable explanations for these two events? Sure. Maybe the old lady was imagining her husband at a much younger age, and her mind was a little too far gone to realize who she was picturing. Maybe she wasn’t even seeing anybody, and she was just saying things. People with Alzheimer’s disease do that sometimes. They’ll talk, and it won’t even be communication, just their mouths moving and making words. But what about the first part of the story?
What about the feeling of a hand upon a worker’s shoulder, even though the door was closed and the room was empty? Are there explanations? Yes. Are they a little hard to reach, and sometimes easily dismissed? Also yes. Who even knows if these two stories are actually related? Hospitals can seem creepy a lot of the time.
Fastest Baby in the West
We’re not going to go ahead and say that it’s normal practice, but childbirth is a messy, noisy, hectic process for everyone involved. If you’re trying to get a little life out of another human being, you do whatever you can to make sure that it goes well. Being in labor for hours is no big joy to remember. This quick event ended with no injuries, but it’s only thanks to the reg, who was quick enough to snag that baby before it hit anything else.
Like the floor or a table or a different person. Even the mother and father didn’t think there was anything strange about it, but we imagine the woman was just relieved that it was over. The dad was probably thinking the same thing, even if the delivery didn’t look like how it normally looks.
There’s a Reasonable Explanation, I Swear
First off, those are some mighty big pockets if they’re able to hold thirty-plus condoms. Maybe he was wearing cargo pants. Did your parents ever tell you to always wear clean underwear, just in case you get into a car accident and the doctors and nurses have to look at your dirty, dirty clothes?
This is like a much more adult version of that same kind of word of warning. Don’t stuff your pockets with more than thirty condoms or you might have to pull them out in front of a nurse and your girlfriend. We admit, it’s not advice that will be helpful all that often, but it could come in handy if you’re that specific kind of unlucky that this guy was.
One Bad Mother
This one isn’t a fun story, but at least it’s clear that the young man was able to figure out why he was so sick. Munchausen syndrome is a mental disorder that has a person pretend they’re sick – there are a number of reasons why. Sometimes it’s to get drugs, sometimes it’s to get sympathy, sometimes it’s because they just want attention in general. Munchausen by proxy is worse, since it has a person usually pretending that another person is sick in order to get attention, sympathy, etc.
Sometimes, such as in this case, the first person is actually MAKING the second person sick. It’s an unfortunate way that human evil can manifest. Since the stomach pain was coming from the meals the young man ate, we’re surprised a hospital didn’t try that right away.
Bring Everybody in to Look at This
Thankfully, this gross-sounding disease didn’t last too long, but there had to be no scratching whatsoever or it would get a lot grosser. Doctors and other medical professionals are often at their core scientists, and if somebody comes in with a disease that they’ve never seen before or one that they’ve only read about, that person is going to get put on display for everyone in the building to marvel at. And getting to see those patches on your skin glowing under a black light must have been pretty cool, too.
When you have a diagnosis like that one, you have to take the small victories wherever they might come from. About two hundred thousand people get this a year, but we guess not everyone has seen it yet.
Not Great for the Heart
Most people who have to go through defibrillation are usually too out of it to say no, but we guess there are all sorts of stories in the medical establishment. Defibrillation occurs when the heart has achieved (for lack of a better word) arrhythmia, or when the heartbeat is erratic and abnormal. It isn’t used on people who are flatlining, because that wouldn’t actually do anything. So of course there are times when people are still awake and unsedated when a defibrillator has to be used.
Unfortunately, the idea of one of those big machines being used on you isn’t going to help you calm down. Calming down might not help your heart go back to the way it’s supposed to be, but it would help the doctors do what they’re supposed to do, at least.
The Case of the Mysterious Seizures
It’s incredible how intricate and interconnected the different pieces of our body can be. And it’s amazing how depression and anxiety can come together to create seizures, something that can cause a real amount of danger without much trouble. Yet it wasn’t a physical thing that was causing it, it was a mental thing. Yes, we know it’s all sort of physical when you get right down to it, but we can ignore that for now.
Therapy can do a lot of things, but we didn’t expect one of those things to be curing seizures. In case you want to know, conversion disorder is when a psychiatric disorder affects sensory or motor function and significantly affects a patient’s ability to function. We guess some teens really do have it rough.
Midnight Shocks
It’s just the way this one was written originally (we cut the stories down to save space), but this one legit seems like a medical mystery story that you would find in an old book in the library that nobody else has ever read. It’s not though – we doubt a story like that one would have the answer be a smartwatch that is giving the girl shocks. More likely it would be the spirit of her dead grandmother that is keeping her awake all night or something like that.
We’re amazed that the girl wasn’t able to figure this out, since it couldn’t have been all that hard to figure out the shocks were coming from the watch. Then again, electricity can do some weird stuff based on voltage, amps, watts, etc.
A Doctor Who Didn’t Believe
Yes, sadly there are doctors or other medical professionals out there who might not be great at their jobs. Maybe they’ve just been doing it too long to care anymore, or they got into the business for the wrong reasons in the first place. We also suspect that there are a good number of people who go to the doctor even though they don’t have any problems, so we aren’t going to put all the blame on the doctor here.
Well, obviously, yes, he did mess up and didn’t believe this girl when she said that she was losing her hearing, but he might have heard it before. Ha. By the way, we looked up CSF leak, and found out it’s when some of your cerebrospinal fluid escapes its confines. Not fun.
Keep Your Hands Off Yourself
Some combination of having a drug habit and having a big open wound on his arm set this guy off, and we guess we can’t blame him. Maybe the drugs kept him from being put unconscious for long enough, and in his half-asleep state, his brain figured the best thing to do would be to try and keep his arm from falling apart.
Amazing what our brains can do when we don’t even really have control. It’s like how if infant babies are placed in water, they automatically try to keep their heads above water. We bet someone who has worked in surgery will tell us all the details of this story, about why exactly everybody freaked out, other than just trying to keep things sanitary.
Red Is a Warning
Maybe the red-haired nurse saw someone running around frantically. Maybe she had a walkie-talkie or a pager on her. Or maybe she’s a ghost of a nurse who used to work on the floor, and there’s no way she’s going to let any mothers OR babies join her before it’s their time. Or, you know…one of the more likely options.
We didn’t expect so many of these stories to deal with what could be ghosts hanging around hospitals. They’re spooky places sometimes – all that death and disease and people trying to stop those things from succeeding. Maybe this respiratory therapist had been working long enough that she realized something had gone wrong, and her brain made up a nurse to help her realize she needed to go back. That’s a really Hollywood version of the story but maybe it could be true.
Surgery Through a Mirror
Why didn’t the patient come in and say lots of pain on the right side? If you come in with pain on your right side, every doctor and even a bunch of people who aren’t doctors will guess that you’re suffering from appendix trouble, but the right side? That would seem a lot more serious. But instead of telling the panicking doctor what the issue was, the nurses who were there to help just decided to laugh at him. He did just cut into a guy, nurses.
That’s not usually the kind of thing that you should laugh about. Thankfully, those cuts are pretty small and heal easily, but “the nurses were laughing at me” isn’t a good explanation for why you have two incisions instead of one.
Fungus from the Same Family
A bunch of people are in the hospital for a specific type of fungal outbreak, and even though they’re all in different rooms, they end up having the same kinds of hallucinations before the fungus is able to work its way out of their bodies. The number of things that hospital workers have to go through that could become part of some kind of horror movie must number in the dozens in the first year alone.
Imagining religious music and children hiding in the corners of their rooms are both pretty specific, and the kind of thing that someone could easily make a bad horror movie out of. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already something that fits.
Worming to the Truth
People who go to hospitals can be kind of stupid. If you’ve ever watched “House M.D.” you will know that everybody lies, but this seems less like lying and more like just not being very good at thinking critically. This nurse asked questions about what the boy was producing over and over, and we’re told that the nurse even specifically asked about worms, but the dad didn’t think to mention it until right before they were about to leave.
Were they just trying to get some drugs out of the situation? Maybe. Maybe they were dumb. It just took a little bit of deworming medicine for the kid to be right as rain. In the meantime, they took up hours of precious time and probably wasted a whole bunch of money in the meantime.
You Get Him, Kid
As scary and frightening as this story can be, especially if you know someone who suffers from dementia, it’s hilarious knowing that this little boy stepped into the room, realized that there was an unkind spirit of some nature hanging out and making fun of the great grandmother, and his very first thought was to put up his dukes and take the ghost out the way you deal with corporeal bullies. That kid is going to go far in life.
We’re imagining something a little bit like the Ghostbusters, but it’s just a kid who has boxing gloves and punches ghosts until they run away. You don’t get stuck in a ghost trap, buddy, you’re gonna get a hurting. You think you’re the scary one around here? Kid, you don’t know scary yet.
Brawl in the Examination Room
It’s not often we read a story about a doctor that includes the words “grabbing me by the shoulders and pinning me down” and we end up laughing about it, but here we are. Kids that don’t want to get shots are hard to appease – think about it. You have a big, sharp needle that is GOING to hurt when it goes into the skin and muscle.
That’s almost the entire point. To pierce inside their body. It’s a foreign object that is important, but it’s still a foreign object, and a lot of people aren’t too keen on having one of those getting jammed into their skin. This kid reacted the way we’re sure a lot of people feel like reacting when the doc tells them it’s time for a shot.
Life Imitating Art
Don’t ask us why a virtual clinic had an actress acting out a disease that, we think, doesn’t come with a whole lot of moves to follow. Yet it was still able to get that very same actress to realize what she was coming down with before it became a much bigger problem. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma appears in less than two hundred thousand Americans a year, so it’s not the most common thing to see.
As the story even tells us, many people would probably just think it’s the flu. It’s a lot more serious than the flu, but this woman managed to figure it out before it got too far. At the very least, it’s one of the “better” forms of cancer, in that it’s more treatable than some of the others.
My Pounding Head
This person had to go through the nightmarish event known as anesthesia awareness. Usually, this just creates a certain dreamlike quality to the surroundings, but it’s clear that this time it was a lot worse. Getting your wisdom teeth removed is something a lot of people have to go through, and when they’re impacted, that can make it even worse – the teeth won’t even be visible, so the dentist and tech have to get all the way in there to get them out. It’s pretty rough.
Imagine being awake for it! Thankfully, the assistant did notice that this poor person was begging for a bigger hit of the sleepytime juice, and that’s the last thing to be remembered before it was all over.
No. Of Course Not. NO!
Why did this very dumb family think that their baby had all these problems? They thought the child had anxiety because it cried. They thought it had autism because it couldn’t maintain eye contact. And they thought it had bipolar disorder because it would be content one moment, and then angry the next. Even to people who don’t have a background in any of these things, it’s clear that these people were off their rockers.
They wanted psych meds for their two-WEEK-old! That’s crazy! How could they have thought that their child had all those problems, despite it being a literal newborn? Had they done so much research they’d worried themselves into a hole? Were they ultra-schooled in those things but had forgotten to pick up any common sense? It happens a lot these days.
Does He Have Green Hair, Too?
This one isn’t too hard to explain – it was a couple of hours later. Maybe the two patients (both of them had dementia) had heard each other talking, and they had heard each other talking. Both of their minds were going or had gone, so it isn’t too big of a leap for them to both have the same thought if they hear the same words.
Or maybe there was staff talking about the first lady, and how she was seeing a man in a black-and-white striped shirt, and they just carried the information to the second lady somehow. She never saw a man with that kind of shirt, so she asked where he had gone. Even someone without dementia might have thought that there actually was a man wandering around wearing a black-and-white striped shirt.
Good Form
Everybody has to do some weird stuff while going through even a standard physical. Guys have to be inspected to make sure there are no issues – issues that could easily turn into something a lot more important. It doesn’t seem like there were any here, but it’s still a story to remember. For some reason, doctors love to golf, so they were probably able to talk about the sport after everything was said and done, but going through a golf swing wasn’t going to help the doctor find any problems.
Doctors who have been practicing for a little while have seen a whole lot of weird stuff, but we’re going to guess that this story might have been a first for the doc. We wonder how long the stilted silence went on after the patient made the swing.
Working Is Kind of Important, Doc
This seems like the kind of story that is missing some context. The doctor seemed to be really upset that the mother of the child (we think) would be leaving to go work while the father stayed at home to take care of the son, and that really threw the doctor for a loop. It’s clear that the doctor is a woman, so we’re not sure where the confusion is coming from.
Sometimes people have to go off and work. That means the kids have to be taken care of, and we guess that means the dads can step up and show off how good they are with kids. We honestly feel like something is missing from the original story. Maybe the doctor was just having a bad day? Maybe she had recently gotten divorced, and didn’t think men could be trusted.
Caught a Lucky Break
Getting a tooth removed is a pretty violent event, which is why dentists have to make sure that they get the proper tooth out the first time. And they should take special care not to accidentally remove a tooth that wasn’t on the chopping block, because we bet that’s grounds for a lawsuit. We as humans need a good collection of our teeth unless we want to get used to sucking down nothing but liquids for the rest of our lives, and this dentist was almost in a whole lot of trouble.
By some stroke of luck, he or she found out that the accidental removal was also a tooth that should have gone – but whether it was one slated for removal or one that was diseased without any knowledge is unknown.
I Just Love Being Sick
Some people seem to think that the best thing for themselves is to be sick. This is some sort of mental dysfunction they have. Maybe they do it to try and get drugs, maybe they do it because they want people to pay attention to them. Maybe they just really want to be at the hospital. This woman went so far as to drink the water right out of her fish tank because she wanted to be sick.
Amoebiasis is a common parasitic enteral infection, but it’s not the sort of thing that pops up in suburban United States. The drinking water in those places doesn’t have that stuff. You could still get it from ponds or the like, or you could pick it up purposefully by drinking the water out of your fish tank.
Yeah, It Kinda Hurts
The story goes on to say that the injury wasn’t life-threatening, just pretty gnarly to look at. Somehow this guy had chopped into himself with one of the most dangerous tools around and was just able to take himself to the hospital with a couple of towels. Maybe the person who told the story originally was keeping it low on details in order to avoid legal trouble or something like that, but it seems like the patient wasn’t really all that bothered by what seems like a bad cut.
You have to be careful while using chainsaws, you really do. We’re amazed that the guy was able to shut off the chainsaw after it had struck him, but maybe there was some kind of safety shut-off in case of just such an event.
And He Knows That, Too
Fun piece of trivia – if a mother continues to breastfeed, her body will keep producing milk. It has to be an intentional end to the procedure for her body to eventually go “Oh, we can stop this.” And it will, quite quickly, since it’s a whole lot of energy that isn’t going anywhere. Well, in this case, it was going somewhere. Our guess is the husband was a fan of the change that lactation causes in the mother, and didn’t want it to come to a stop that quickly.
He…went about it in a way that we wouldn’t encourage, but we’re also coming to the conclusion that there were a few other things that this guy was keeping secret from his wife. He could have at least asked.
You Don’t Have to Shout It
If you know a nurse, or a doctor, or someone else who even sort of works in the medical field, you’ll find that person won’t have many qualms about saying certain things in public. The names of body parts, for example. You can also get some gross diseases (a friend of ours once said the phrase “boggy prostate”) or bad injuries from them, but they’ll talk about them like they’re nothing.
The nurse who was in charge of this meeting really wanted to scream it from the rooftops, didn’t she (or he)? It’s clear the nurse knew what the perineum was – and now you do too – so maybe the nurse just wanted to free this person from his or her inhibitions. It’s okay, bud, you’re in a doctor’s office. You can call it a taint.
Skipping Out on the Bill
This isn’t a fun thing to think about, but it seems like this guy wasn’t suffering that much from the intrusion of a wire coat hanger inside his body. Instead, it was all a ploy just to get out of the cold and get some good food inside his belly, even if there was already something in there. People make jokes about hospital food, but it isn’t really all that bad.
People who work or spend a lot of time at the hospital need to be able to eat some good food, too. Having a nice cup of coffee and a healthy meal will keep these people working better and keeping people healthy with fewer issues. We don’t really know if that food is worth doing this kind of thing to yourself, but if someone is homeless we suppose there are only so many options.
What Are the Odds?
An insane anesthesiologist is a hair-raising thing to imagine. What are the odds of this patient landing with the anesthesiologist who was his ex? There are a lot of patients and a lot of people working out there, so pretty darn low. Thankfully, this woman was caught and imprisoned for what is very clearly a criminal act, and the guy is fine, so we’re okay talking about it.
Having to go through what seems like a pretty intense surgery without being put under doesn’t seem like fun. And that’s a very simplified way of putting it. We almost want to know what this guy did to get such a response, but it seems more likely that the woman was just a little bit off her rocker. You know. A little bit.
Usually? What Do You Mean Usually?
So let us get this straight. There’s a hospital where these sorts of odd occurrences and ghostly movements and disembodied sounds come with a certain amount of regularity, and everybody is just…okay with it? It, in fact, usually happens after somebody passes? How has this not been investigated yet?
It’s likely that it’s the sort of story that has already gone through a couple of people, like one of those emails that your aunt sends you that has a dozen Re: and fwd: in front of it, and it’s some urban legend about the Mothman or something like that. But it’s still creepy. If there was actually a hospital that had repeated ghostly encounters like these, it would be the most famous hospital in the world thanks to ghost-hunting television shows.
What a Wonderful Image
Stubbornness can be a good quality in some instances, but being stubborn about not going to the doctor when you clearly have a need to go isn’t going to win you any favors. We’re sorry if your toes or feet hurt after reading this story – just know that you aren’t the only ones. It’s a little amazing that the doctor asked what was going on, and the wife said that his foot smells, but that’s all the information that the couple was prepared to give.
Maybe they didn’t have the best eyesight, but they still have their noses, and the guy still has nerves down there, doesn’t he? Maybe not, if this story is to be believed. This kind of thing seems like it could have happened in an episode of “The Munsters” or something like that. A body part just falling off.
Hopefully Doing a Better Job
Robert Diaz was a nurse who went by the name “Angel of Death.” Hopefully you won’t force us to say exactly why he was called that. The man who kept all his documents from every single hospital stay managed to get through his time with Diaz – looking at the info, he might have been too young for Diaz to take notice and offer his immoral ministrations.
This run-in with a notorious serial killer might actually be the reason why this guy kept every single piece of information. Nurses and doctors and all the other experts have to sign off on treatments and things like that, so if something did happen, this man wanted to have all the facts possible. Thankfully, the rest of the nurses he got actually tried to keep him alive.
Not Safe for Kids
Yeah, uh, don’t use that sort of stuff on kids. That’s kind of a no-no. In fact, it was such a no-no to the people who were at this hospital that social workers were called to make sure there was nothing else going on. Even if something is safe to use on dogs, like a flea or tick spray, that doesn’t mean that it should go on kids. They aren’t the same kind of animal, not everything will work the same way.
Also, and we can’t believe it’s up to us to point this out, but flea and tick spray won’t work on lice. Once again, they aren’t the same kind of animal. Hopefully the parents got an earful about not using dangerous chemicals, the lice got removed from the kids, and everybody got to go home.
The Watchers
It’s hard not to get a little creeped out by this one. Such a specific image, “voodoo people,” whatever that means, that more than one person in the nursing home reported seeing. As we can tell from this collection of tales, elderly patients who might not have some weird things going on in their heads have a tendency to have hallucinations and see or hear things that aren’t there, but more than one person seeing the same, specific thing is a little different.
It was even a lady who was noted as rarely speaking. There is always the chance that she just heard the other resident explain what she was seeing, and the image got stuck in her head, too. The second woman isn’t described as having dementia or anything like that, so it’s hard to say.
Even Doctors Can be Wrong
Everyone is very happy that this unconcerned doctor was wrong. Doctors have to see a lot of very tough stuff frequently, so it comes as no surprise that some of them can forget that their patients are people too – people with feelings and emotions, and maybe people who won’t want to hear that their unborn child hasn’t survived. Also, he was entirely wrong.
Maybe he was a newer doctor who was all sure of himself and puffed up with his fancy degree and everything, and he wanted to show off his knowledge in a way that made it seem like he knew what he was doing. But it turns out he didn’t, and the baby was fine. Once again, thank goodness. Maybe that doctor needs to sit in on a few more classes.
The Eye of the Beholder
It doesn’t matter how many of these stories we’ll ever read, we imagine there’s no way for us to read or understand everything that a doctor or medical professional can go through. Think about it: if you work in an office, you’re on spreadsheets or in meetings or working on proposals all day. If you work in construction, you’re digging holes or filling holes or paving roads. There are differences, yes, but you know what you’ll be doing.
When it comes to a doctor, though, every day is going to throw you some kind of curve ball. Like frantically trying to stitch a new cornea onto a patient that is throwing up. Remember, readers, if you’re having surgery and the doctors tell you not to eat anything before going in, see that you don’t.
Just Tell Them the Truth
Yes, a lot of embarrassing secrets get revealed when people go to the hospital, but that’s going to be the best option if those people want to make sure they get better. Like this person. Now, the story doesn’t say, but we get the distinct impression that the patient was a guy. Shot himself in the heart with a nail gun. That’s a guy thing to do, all right. Also, shot himself in the heart with a nail gun?!?
That’s the kind of thing that should produce a swift, sudden end to life, not a wound that was “not bleeding nor really noticeable.” Maybe this guy got lucky, or maybe human hearts are a little more durable than we at first thought. We’re going to go with the first option. All it took was a little bit of surgery to make this guy right as rain.
Keep Those Kids Quiet
One room in particular where a bunch of patients (at different times, mind you) report hearing children playing. Noisy children, not just distant sounds. Could it be a squeaking fan, a rattling vent, or a banging pipe? Maybe. But for patients to regularly claim that they hear children playing, with only one other room next to the room that they’re in, when there shouldn’t be any noises coming out of there at all, it does…raise our interest.
We’re sure there’s some kind of rational explanation for this kind of repeated event, but why do so many hospitals go through these odd events (at least compared to other places)? Is it the constant use? The creepy feelings? The people who are hallucinating because of fevers or fungal infections? It could be a lot of things.
Tiny Hammers for Tiny Problems
This story tells us a couple of things that we weren’t aware of. The first thing is that you can dislocate your earbone. We guess it makes just as much sense as any other bone in the body getting dislocated, but it’s still strange to hear. Those bones seem a little separated from the rest of the body – you don’t hear about those little guys in the bones song. The ear bones connected to the…well, nothing. Shame, too. They seem left out.
The other thing we learned from this story is if the ear bones get disconnected, you use a tiny rod and a tiny hammer to slam them back into place. We’re going to guess that it was majorly loud, since this guy was getting his hearing bones hit directly with a hammer, but at least he could hear again.
The Perfect Opportunity
When you are handed the chance to say something like this on a silver platter, you must take it. Otherwise, literally everybody around you will wonder how you could have gone so wrong. The guy literally set his pants on fire, and then he came into the hospital to get treated for burns and lied right to your face. If he had missed this opportunity, then it would have haunted him. HAUNTED HIM until the end of his life.
He would have gone to his deathbed wondering why he hadn’t pulled this line on the guy who was clearly lying. But he did it. He handled it the way it should have been handled. He stuck the landing. The story tells us the patient didn’t get it, but people had to run out of the room because they were laughing so hard.
All the Information
Apparently, the whole ward cracked up hearing this exchange. This guy knows how to make the best of a bad situation, and in this case, the bad situation was schizophrenia. It’s nice to find that someone is able to face down the dark parts of life with a smile and a little bit of a joke, even if it is in the hospital and there are probably some people around that don’t really feel like laughing. But this guy had a plan.
He was going to make sure that everyone who could hear him was going to have a smile for at least a little part of the day. It seems like he had the delivery down pretty well, too. We wonder how many times he’s had the opportunity to tell this joke? Funniest thing is, he kind of has to be in the right mind to tell it properly.
Asking the Tough Questions
We know it probably seems weird to have this kind of question asked to you, but we actually know some people who have worked with people who are a little abnormal in the head, and this is the kind of thing you get used to dealing with. Dementia, Alzheimers, and other diseases can make it hard to understand social mores, proper etiquette, etc. This person didn’t know what he or she was saying.
The thought appeared that the worker was very pretty, and then the very obvious next question was…also asked. We all have these thoughts. Well, maybe not that one in particular, that one’s a little out there, but we think weird things and then we keep them to ourselves. We ALL do it. Most of us just have to keep those things inside.
Hugs Make Everything Better
Yeah, honestly that sounds pretty nice right now to us, too. A big hug does a whole lot of good for a person, and there are lots of reasons to give and get more of them. They build trust and a sense of safety, they boost oxytocin levels (scientists call it the cuddle hormone) which can get rid of feelings like loneliness, isolation, and anger.
They strengthen the immune system by putting a little bit of pressure on the thymus gland, which regulates and balances the body’s production of white blood cells. They boost self-esteem, they release tension, they boost heart health, including reduction in blood pressure levels and heart rate. The guy woke up from a procedure, and all he wanted was a hug well, one hero stepped up to do what was needed.
Well, How About That
You might be trying to figure out which woman it was from “The Wizard of Oz,” but the story doesn’t have any information about it – that would be a HIPAA violation and might get the person who told the story slapped with a big fine and maybe even jail time. Personal information is some serious business.
But, as long as this person isn’t lying, he or she actually got to meet somebody from one of the most classic and beloved movies of all time. We doubt it was someone like Judy Garland or Margaret Hamilton, but it could have been one of the munchkins or something like that. Were the flying monkeys played by humans or were they just monkeys? It makes the most sense for the patient to have been a child in the movie based on the ages.
A Good Way to Remember
It’s probably not all that proper to call someone a German…or call them the entire country of Germany…just because they’re tough and won’t take any guff, but to a woman that probably has a hard time remembering much of anything, it makes just as much sense as anything else. Frenchie was the one that didn’t put up any trouble, German was the tough one…What else is there?
Maybe Italy brings all the best food? Greece tells the funniest jokes? Iceland is the depressed one? England is the happy one? We’d love to know more about all of these, but it’s impossible for us to figure out exactly how this woman would have named everybody. Trust us, when it comes to people who work in elderly mental care, you need to have a German around.
The Last Son of Krypton
The elderly who find themselves in a mental ward come in two general varieties. There are the ones that are a little freaky to be around and make you work to keep them safe, and there are the ones that have great stories and are happy and good-natured even if they don’t really know what’s going on. The first group makes you want to quit, but the second group keeps you around.
Such a kind old Superman, who doesn’t want to mess up all that fancy equipment with his incredibly strong body. But he wasn’t actually saying he was Superman, was he? No, he was just saying that his body was made of metal. Like the Terminator, we suppose. But much nicer than the Terminator, thankfully.
I’ve Tried Everything
Hiccups are a rough part of life. They come, they’re extremely painful for a little while, and then they disappear as mysteriously as they first showed up. They usually hurt, and even if they don’t, they’re really annoying. They don’t really do anything for you. They aren’t like coughs, which get rid of things in your lungs. They could be caused by irritated nerves, low levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, and a million other things.
Usually, they don’t last that long…but this time was different. A guy in the army had them for four weeks, and there’s no cure. But that’s nothing – the longest recorded case of an attack of hiccups is Charles Osborne, who was born in 1894 and died in 1991, ninety-seven years, and had hiccups for sixty-eight of them.
What Do You Mean “It’s Gone”
This is a worrying prospect, to be sure. You’re saying that there’s a disease that makes a bone just…disappear? This is like something out of the second “Harry Potter” book. You know, the one where the bone in his arm disappears. But the bone doesn’t just vanish, right? Indeed, no, the bone absorbs the bone. Obviously that’s still not great, but there’s nothing magical going on.
This disease is extremely rare – there have been, like, two hundred reported cases in the entire world. Doctors aren’t sure how it happens, which isn’t helped by the fact that it’s so shatteringly rare. It comes out of nowhere, too – sometimes a bone just disappears. Most of the cases aren’t caused by a fracture, as in this case. A bone just decides it’s had enough.
I’d Like a Second Opinion
As tumor sizes go, golf-ball-sized seems like it’s pretty big. Indeed, it is pretty big. And a tumor of that size in the brain is going to muck things up no matter where it is. This dad is probably just lucky that the only thing it did was affect the growth of a couple of bones.
A brain tumor is one of the things that is up there on the “we need to fix this immediately” list when it comes to medical problems. It’s easy to point at the doctors who didn’t think there was anything wrong with it and blame them, but it’s more likely that the new doctor had a little more experience in something like that – brain tumors and bone growth and that sort of thing.
Yes, Dear
People who got married to the love of their life young and stayed that way their entire lives are a little different from others. They might always be together, or they might have lives a little more separate, but you can’t really have one without the other. Like, there are plenty of stories out there about one-half of a marriage succumbing to old age, and then the other half succumbs not too much longer, simply because that was the only thing left to do.
If the honey goes, then they have to go, too. This story is a little different. The woman berates her husband into staying alive until both of them are able to get to the hospital and get him a new heart.
In the Nick of Time
A lucky scan reveals a big issue, and everybody was lucky enough for it to turn out all right for everybody involved. Things were touch and go for a little while, but by some miracle, the changes made were able to keep the baby healthy. If the scan had been one day in either direction, it’s likely that this problem wouldn’t have been found, and the woman would have had a second IUFD – another miscarriage, put simply.
Our hats off to the hardworking members of the medical community who save the day like this on a literal daily basis – that’s what all those scans and checkups are for while Mom is still working on the baby. Despite all the hard work we’ve put into these things, issues can still pop up.
A Picture of Herself
Nobody is perfect. Certainly not the people that we pay far too much money to keep us alive on the operating table. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you make a mistake as a writer, a word gets spelled incorrectly. If you make a mistake as a geologist, a rock falls on the ground. If you make a mistake as an anesthesiologist, there’s a regular chance that the person you’re being paid to keep alive won’t last much longer.
And this woman got to see it all with an out-of-body experience. We hear about them every once in a while, and there are a few different explanations for them, but they can still get people to think there might be something more than just the natural, physical world out there waiting for them.
A Thousand Miles Away
We wonder if this family had spent a lot of their time picking blueberries when the kids were young and the mom was still around. Every once in a while we hear about these shared memories, or a brother or sister knowing when a sibling is in trouble. Sometimes it’s a twin.
It doesn’t seem to matter what the ages are, since it could be anything from four-year-olds to people old enough to have failing hearts and kids of their own. Was it just a dream that the man had? Or did he see what was coming? How long did it take before the family realized the similarities? What kind of blueberries did they have? We bet they were pretty good.
The Dangly Thing in the Back of Your Mouth
The uvula is an oft-misunderstood piece of the body that actually has some important uses. It has a lot of racemose glands and serous glands, which help to produce a thin saliva. Did you know that the uvula is unique to humans? Apparently, no other animals in the entire world have it. During swallowing, it and the soft palate move together to keep food from entering the nasal cavity.
It also has a function in speech, and the kind of sounds it helps to produce are used in Arabic, Hebrew, and French. Finally, stimulation of the uvula can also cause the gag reflex to take control. This is a common way to induce vomiting if you can do it, but not everyone has the stomach to just reach in there.
Sure Would Suck if He Started Dancing
A whole lot of people will do some really silly things in order to get the chemicals they think they need. This guy needs to work on his acting skills, as the people who showed up to care for him weren’t fooled for even a single instant when they got to his place. We wonder how long this little pantomime went on?
Did they say it would be terrible if the patient woke up and made them grilled cheese sandwiches? No, not the ones with cheddar, the ones with American cheese. It melts the best. And it would be a big shame if he put a little bit of the garlic salt on the cheese, too. And if he made us some tomato soup to go with it.
We’re Not Buying It
We might have to check the medical books on this one, but we don’t really think that’s how the disease goes. Yes indeed, the whooping cough, from the bordetella pertussis bacteria, can cause severe coughing spells that sometimes end with a whooping sound when the patient breathes in to get some much-needed oxygen. However, the people who most commonly have this disease are children younger than six months who aren’t fully immunized yet.
There are also sometimes preteens or teenagers that might get it if their immunity has begun fading. Adults over the age of eighteen rarely get it, and, thankfully, nobody in this story has it either. She was just looking for a cushy stay in a hospital bed or some drugs or something like that, but she didn’t know what she was getting into.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
We’d say this guy did a good deed, but it’s a lot more like he was just balancing out the scales after doing the initial bad deed. On the other hand, he probably didn’t mean to hit the squirrel while mowing the lawn, it just happened accidentally. We’re surprised that the squirrel didn’t make a break for it as soon as possible – rodents and lawn care equipment don’t usually get along that well.
And it turns out that squirrels will ravage you if they have the opportunity and the reason to do so. They might look cuddly, but they will absolutely scratch you all the way up if they feel like they need to do so. They’re dirty little rodents, and they shouldn’t be trusted.
Disease Carriers
No, technically you don’t get diseases from the squirrels themselves – or at least this one – but from the fleas that are hitching a ride on the squirrels. But we feel like that’s not the most important distinction to make. Don’t play with squirrels, and you won’t get the black plague. You might also catch typhus, ringworm, and tularemia.
They can also bite or scratch you, because, for the most part, they aren’t interested in playing with you. There’s a tiny chance that there are squirrels out there that don’t mind being petted or picked up, but in general, it’s not a good idea to get very close to them. Their jaws are strong enough to chew through wood, so a bite from one of them is going to be a bad time.
Please Don’t Touch My Fish
We don’t actually get to find out about what this guy was going through, but based on the fact that he couldn’t handle being parted with his pocket fish, we’re going to guess there was something going on mentally. Or, maybe he just needs to have his security fish around for those scary visits to the doctor’s office. We all need to do things that keep us motivated.
We guess for some people that means packing a fish into his pocket while going to the hospital. Or maybe it was for lunch? Maybe he was hoping to stop at a grill somewhere and have a little fry-up. Ah, we don’t know. All these stories are making it hard to keep track of how normal people act sometimes.
Roundabout Logic
We’re going to guess that he did know that it didn’t make any sense, but he also didn’t want to reveal that he was doing something stupid and/or illegal with the snake, so he just decided to go for the looping answers maneuver. There are tons of stories of people who refuse to tell the medical staff what actually happened because they don’t want to be embarrassed.
Maybe they got the cap of a marker stuck somewhere, and they figured a little white lie was better than the truth for at least one of the people involved. The hospital staff collects all these stories and tells all their friends about them. They don’t really care, they’ve heard it all. Trust us, after looking through these stories, you couldn’t come up with something worse.
Here, Have All My Blood
Our hearts go out to the hard-working janitorial staff at a hospital that had to clean up this and all the other messes that we’re sure accumulate on a daily basis in every corner of a medical facility like this one. Bags of blood as well as far more normal messes mean that those places are probably pretty darn dirty.
There’s a reason that hospital infections can be so bad. This guy apparently demanded that the hospital test his blood for diseases after he dropped the blood everywhere, but that also isn’t necessary. The guy still had plenty of blood inside him, so they probably just tested that. After they gave him a talking-to about not dropping his medical waste all over a public area.
En Garde
You can truly hear about everything if you talk to a doctor. Diseases, accidents, and even swords that have gone straight through a person. Yep, it’s a wonderful world we live in where we can just go online and look up gross stuff like this.
Having something impaled through you isn’t a good way to go through the day, but this guy was belligerent – belligerence usually means that he was okay enough to make it through the event. We assume that there were some things that needed a lot of work, like his skin and muscles and organs, but there’s a good chance he made it out with nothing but a cool scar and a story to tell his kids about being careful with knives. And swords, we guess.
No, You Have the Problem
There are a couple of stories out there of patients being so unthinkably large that they have to go to the zoo to be scanned. The zoo. Where animals like bears and elephants and walruses live. Animals that can reach up to and over a thousand pounds, no foolin’. Sometimes this serves as a wake-up call for the people it happens to. Sadly, there are some people who think they’re still perfectly healthy despite all evidence to the contrary.
This woman refused to come to grips with the reality of the situation. Her “restricted diet” was still two and a half times what a normal patient would consume. She also apparently hit on any guy that came into the room, or even into view, which resulted in a closed door to her room.
Not a Day Over a Hundred
This story is a couple years old, but as long as it was current when it was posted, it easily made this lady over a hundred years old. Also, an omitted detail here, but it also happened to be that patient’s birthday that day. Not everybody can reach such an austere age, but some people not only can, but they can look like they’re still in the prime of their lives.
Okay, well, eighty years old probably isn’t in the prime of life unless you have the most crazy lucky genetics as well as the safest, least dangerous life in the world. And you’ve also honed your body like Batman, training constantly to maintain muscle mass and bone density. The best part is that she was a nice old lady, too – regularly voted as the best people to have small talk with.
Need to Learn Some Politeness
There are people out there raised in a certain section of the United States who are far too polite to ever take the last piece of something. There are also a lot of people out there in the big wide world that would benefit from this little bit of social grace, since it could, for instance, keep them from having to get their thumb reattached. Or, stick with us here, maybe there are some people who shouldn’t cut off a loved one’s thumb if he happens to take the last piece of kimchi.
Lady, there is more kimchi. We have a hard time believing that anybody got this upset about not getting to eat fermented cabbage. We get the distinct feeling they were also doing a little bit of drinking. The guy has a right to be pissed.
Giving a Performance
Written in 1976 for the concept album “Evita” by Julie Covington (lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Webber), “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” is a great song that a lot of people love. That includes a lady who’s had quite a crazy night, and she was more than willing to do her best version of the song for the rest of the people in the Emergency Room.
It’s never truly quiet in a hospital, especially an ER, but we imagine at night even those places settle down a little bit. Or maybe they get even nuttier, we’re not sure. Maybe it depends on how populated the area is. An urban area will be packed all the time, but a more rural spot can probably be downright relaxing. Fewer people means fewer injuries.
Neither the Time Nor the Place
Yes, we imagine that kids who are in a children’s hospital neither need nor want to experience such a sight. Odds are this lady was having a pretty bad day of her own, and she was at a children’s hospital, so we assume that she had a child with her. There’s no information about what happened to the child, or what his or her issue was, but the mother got moved to an adult psych ward. A pretty bad day all around, it seems.
There’s a little more to the story – the woman was far too excited to show off what she had to offer, even through the observation window in the room where she was placed. Way, way too excited. Obviously not in her right mind, or she would have picked a different place than a CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL.
Some People Have a Favorite Song
We’d ask why the nurse would be so upset that the patient is singing this song (which is actually called “Diamonds”) if it’s the only thing that will keep the patient cooperative and happy, but then we found out it’s a Rihanna song. If it barely sounds good when she’s singing it, we can only imagine what it sounds like coming out of the pipes of a psych patient.
Still, we bet the people who work on this floor don’t mind hearing it, since at least the patient will be happy and won’t cause any trouble while he’s singing it. It almost seems like this guy has a compulsion to sing the entire song, but maybe he just really, really likes it. Well, whatever works, we suppose. There are certainly worse things he could be singing.
We Can’t Handle That Sort of Thing
Yeah, there are probably lots of nurses out there who can do that sort of thing, but it still wasn’t the best place for this guy to show up with a piece of his finger in his other hand. These things have to be done quickly, lest the finger become impossible to reattach. However, a piece of a finger can survive to be reattached up to about twelve hours in a warm environment, and several days if refrigerated.
Some reports say that it can last for up to four days before being reattached. This guy probably could have actually waited, but it still wasn’t the best decision. Better to go to a place like Urgent Care, which will bring you in immediately. It almost seems like this guy was trying to make an appointment.
We Recommend the Hospital
It’s got to be complicated working in an Emergency Room. Hey, we just won an award for understatement of the year, cool. Now Mom will finally be proud. There are all sorts of rules and regulations and steps that people who work in these high-stress environments have to follow to make sure that people get the help they need in the order it’s needed.
So they have to have an expert in teeth to see if that part of the body will need any attention, but if a guy takes a chainsaw to the face, there are probably a lot of other, much bigger problems that can be addressed. Yeah? Right? There are probably a couple of much more important things than if his winning smile got knocked around.
Working on His Comedy
Folks, this is called making the best of a bad situation. This poor kid had an awful little problem in a place that you generally don’t want to go around showing people, and he even had to deal with this kind of person helping him out at a time in his life when this very well might be the most embarrassing thing he could possibly think of.
Not to mention it hurt a lot and could have caused other issues. We know he probably wanted to be passed out for this, or given something to never remember it, but instead, he leaned into it. He cracked a joke that got the entire room laughing. If you’re looking for a good way to make a bad situation so much better, there’s nothing like a little bit of humor.
Fun Thing to Witness That Young
We have no doubt that the guy was okay after this, since the story doesn’t mention anything else (and you can bet it would go in the story if he died, but maybe the writer doesn’t really know. This was more than twenty years ago, so it can sometimes be hard to tell. The most incredible part of this story is that the guy got in his car and drove himself, even after something that traumatic.
The POV for this story was an eighteen-year-old ER volunteer, and it was only on this person’s second day that this memorable tale took place. There are some more gory details about how things looked, but we’re just going to leave those to the imagination.
Doesn’t Taste Any Worse
A&E stands for accident and emergency, and is basically synonymous with the Emergency Department or the Emergency Room. It’s where people go when they get hurt and aren’t sure how bad it is. This person got to see things from the patient’s perspective when she dragged herself to a chair to wait for a doctor to see her.
We can’t fathom why people would choose to drink from the hand gel dispensers, but we suppose people who love to drink become less and less discerning as time goes on. It’s not like most alcohol actually tastes very good – we’re pretty sure that vodka is just rubbing alcohol that is put into a really fancy bottle and marked up a lot more. Alcohol hand gel won’t really be a problem for these guys.
The Best Trees
This guy seems nice. Weird, but nice. If a guy goes around hugging all of a specific kind of tree he sees during a forty-mile walk, he at least has a little bit of good in him. Plenty of people have a little bit of a psychotic episode even if they aren’t being violent or dangerous – like a guy that walks a marathon and hugs every single walnut tree he sees. That is a long way.
And, depending on where he lived, that’s a whole heck of a lot of trees. And then he just wanted to take a swim, but some people didn’t like that (for good reasons) and it was decided he would need a little bit of medical attention. Hopefully he’s okay, going around hugging trees.
I’m Going to be Barfing Soon
Yes, you did read that correctly. Nine hundred and eighteen pounds. We didn’t realize it was even possible for a person to become that large. Maybe this guy was tall. Like, really, really tall. But even Shaquille O’Neal, at seven feet and one inch, was only around three hundred and twenty-five pounds. Maybe up to three hundred and fifty at some points. This patient weighed more than twice that, and had enough to get close to three times as much.
But that didn’t stop him from throwing his weight around with the ladies, did it? No sir! He did his darndest to make the moves on the on-call nurse. Maybe he figures there’s no reason to not shoot his shot, even if he also knows there’s very little chance of it having an effect.
Have to Try Harder Than That
Talk to any doctor who has been working for a year or two (or even someone who isn’t a full-blown medical doctor yet) who works in a place even near an urban environment, and you’re bound to hear about plenty of people who come in with one thing or another, trying to get as many drugs out of the hospital system as they can.
This guy was running out of ideas, so he tried to go with something that would elicit sympathy from almost anybody: a kidney stone. Except he probably doesn’t know that a kidney stone isn’t a real rock. If you have to pass an actual pebble, they would be way more serious. This guy was turned away at the door without wasting much of the hospital’s time.
Letting it All Out
The story explains that the woman was laughing for a pair of reasons. First, she was finally feeling better, and two: because farts are funny. Try as you might, you can’t deny that they’re funny. However, they can often smell pretty putrid based on the eating habits of the person of origin.
If you eat a lot of protein or a lot of dairy or a lot of really sugary carbs..or broccoli…or bananas. Maybe it’s just that everything you eat makes farts smell really bad. This lady was loving that things were finally clearing up for her, but hopefully one of the people working there was able to give her some pointers on better gut health.
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