I’m the type of person that passes out when a nurse has to do that little finger prick and get a fraction of an ounce of blood, so the medical field was never a consideration for me. The things people working in hospitals and ambulances see must be completely insane. A Reddit thread asked workers to reveal the craziest things they’ve ever seen, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Here are some of the wildest stories:
1. V-8
I had this one patient who refused to have his blood drawn unless I brought him blood to replenish the sample I had taken. So with the help of the nursing staff we gave him V-8 and warmed it up and told him that it was fresh O+ blood. He let me draw his blood, still yelled at me about how the devil could see what I was doing and how he knew I was going to hell, and when we gave him the V-8 he acted like it was actually bringing parts of him back to life.
2. Makeshift Bathroom
I had a guy in the ED who kept peeing in the corner of his room. He was told several times to let us know if he needed to go and we would happily help him to the bathroom. He said he was going to keep doing it because he was going to tell everyone I was the one peeing in his room so I would be fired. He told everyone, and I didn’t even get to go home.
3. Hand Sanitizer Goes Down Easy
I had a man with history of alcohol abuse arrive intoxicated to ED. We measured his blood alcohol level, then we remeasured 2 hours later and it doubled despite being isolated in his room and having been thoroughly searched for alcohol containers. No one could figure out where this guy was getting the booze from. A resident decides to check the multi-hospital system to try and get more info on the guy and sees an old note from another hospital mentioning having to remove the alcohol hand sanitizer dispensers from the patient’s room. We go into the patient’s room and see a hand sanitizer dispenser on the wall. Upon close inspection its been visibly tampered with, and completely empty.
4. Self-Harm
I treated a man who ate things to hurt and punish himself whenever he felt bad. And he felt bad very often, to the extent, for example, if you gave him a glass of water he would feel he was putting you out and would feel the need to self-punish. He would eat coins, nails, buttons, string … he got brought into the hospital because he had eaten a battery. After a while, most psych patients fit into a category of expectations. He always stands out in my memories of patients.
5. The Cat Lady
One patient I had didn’t have people voices in her head; she had cat voices. She would just sit there and talk to all these cats. And then yell at me for not letting them come inside because they were freezing to death. I’m terrified of cats so the whole thing just weirded me out.
6. Mmmm Skin
I work as a psychometric in a psychiatry clinic. Just had a patient the other day that peeled the dead skin off her feet and chewed it. She liked the texture.
7. Don’t You Hate When Demons Eat Your Soul?
Mine would either be the lady who said her headache was from demons eating her soul, or the guy with dementia that pulled out a fully inflated Foley catheter.
8. Quite the Misunderstanding
Sent a male patient into the bathroom to collect a urine sample. Took him much longer than expected. He misunderstood and gave a semen sample.
9. That’s Not Contagious
I’m a receptionist at a doctors’ clinic. During my second week, a very distressed guy approached the counter and told me in a whisper that he had just found out his housemate was homosexual and that he needed to see a doctor right away to get the “appropriate tests” done. He said that he’d moved out already but was worried because he’d used the same cutlery and light switches as his housemate. I don’t know what he thought he’d caught. I was speechless!
10. Mickey Mouse
We picked up a guy from a local McDonald’s. The very obese guy had tripped and lacerated his arm on a parking block, and was bleeding everywhere. Thing was, he was hardcore tripping on some sort of hallucinogen. The whole time he wouldn’t stop yelling at me. Normally, I would NOT put up with that, but this time I couldn’t stop laughing because the guy was talking in a squeaky Mickey-Mouse type voice. The cop I grabbed to go along nearly peed himself laughing.
11. Fake Cancer
I had a fake cancer patient. He would go around claiming he pancreatic cancer and blood clots all over his body and that he had a rare genetic disorder that made him resistant to coumadin. He would come with stacks of medical records. The guy had me convinced; he had chemo port surgically implanted in the his chest. He did however, trip my radar for crazy and I googled him … bringing up an article about how he scammed many hospitals and even convinced physicians to give him chemo.
12. “How did that get there?”
Anyone who shove things up inside themselves and then pretend they have no idea how it got there. And believe me, it happens more than people realize.
13. Oh Mickey You’re So Fine!
Not super gross or anything, but still weird. I had a 70-ish paranoid schizophrenic try to convince me to sing “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine” with her for an entire hour.
14. The Eye Globe
I had an old lady who fell on the edge of a table and ruptured her eye globe. She had dementia and didn’t understand why she couldn’t see out of that eye. That was pretty weird.
