If you work in the healthcare field, then you've probably seen the most intimate and disgusting things about human beings that most other people have. You get to know not only their medical and personal histories (because their lives are on the line) but you usually see them at their worst, like when they just "somehow" managed to get something jammed up their butt or after a tragic accident. These physicians took to an Ask Reddit post where they shared some of the most insane things they've ever witnessed while on the job, and they're pretty gnarly. And they were mostly during routine check-ups, too. 1. Not physician, but x-ray tech. Had a patient walk into the urgent care for hip x-rays. Her order said it was for hip pain, which is pretty routine. Turns out she had walked in on not one, but two fractured hips! 2. ED doc so hardly a routine visit but a guy comes up to the triage window with his arms over his head, palms of his hands pressed against his ears. "Eh ... I'm in tremendous pain" he says when asked what's wrong. X-ray'd him and found he'd broken his neck. He'd been walking around with it for 3 days 3. My brother once jumped on the front of my white car, grabbing the front pillars with his hands. I closed the door and caught his finger, which he pulled out quickly (as you do) but there was a tiny chip of paint that had come off the car and got lodged under the skin somehow. He must have spent a week or so chewing on it to try to get the paint out, but it just wasn't working so he went to the doctor to see if he could help. After checking it out, the doctor tells him, "The reason you can't get that out is because it's your bone." Apparently when I shut the door on his finger, I'd broken the tip of his pinkie enough so he could see the bone through the skin and he'd spent the next few days trying to pull his own finger bone out with his teeth. 4.This was not a routine medical exam but.. I was a triage nurse in the ER when a Patient calmly walked up and reported a complaint of pain in my side." He failed to mention the blood and the handle of the butcher knife sticking out of the left lower quadrant of his abdomen. He was a homeless schizophrenic who had been stabbed and had calmly walked into the ER and waited his turn to be seen. I am just glad he came in at All. We also get a lot of people who come in for other things-a sore throat or a cough, and when doing a skin assessing we find huge pressure ulcers or gangrenous feet. I have twice had a patients toe come off when I removed their sock. Neither time had they come to the ER for that issue. 5. First year nursing student in LA and I was at clinicals when a guy who I had to do a physical assessment on (all we could do since we dont know much) tells me he's been hearing strange cracklings and noises in his ear. I check his ear and it is filled with so much wax and what not. Call my RN advisor and she proceeds to clean out the guys ear. What does she find? Fucking fruit fly nest. Yea, the medical field can get pretty rad. Edit: Sorry for making so many of you cringe at the thought of that happening. I'm sure it's not as common as some people mentioned And by "nest" i meant 3 or 4 of those damn things. 6. Junior doctor from Australia here. I had a young lady come in for a Pap smear. She was chatty and relaxed, not nervous at all. She lay on the bed and I got the speculum ready. I opened it up and instead of seeing her cervix I saw a kiwi-fruit sized blob of bloody tissue just hanging out in her vaginal canal. It was one of my first Pap smears I ever did, and I had a sudden bizarre thought that I had broken her vagina. I hadn't though, it was just a big uterine polyp that had emerged and was in her vagina hanging by a thread of tissue. She was mortified although I tried to reassure her. This was in a small town and later that day I went to the bakery to get some lunch and she was behind the counter. The most common "surprise" I see is patients in long term marriages etc who come up positive for chlamydia. EDIT: wow thanks for the replies! My first post I'm a long time reddit lurker but never joined 7. A patient who had a routine check-up at his ophthalmologist (eye doctor) who found a small spot in his retina. Was referred to a university hospital, tests showed it was metastases from a small malignant melanoma he had on his back. Our professor cancelled our lecture because he had to tell this otherwise healthy man, that he probably only had a couple of months left to live. 8. Not a physician, but I was doing medical service in Guatemala and we had an older gentleman come in to our clinic to have a checkup, and the entire time he sat there with us, he was resting his arm on what we thought was a bag or purse on top of his leg. At one point he goes to move, and we see a huge lump underneath his poncho (what we thought was his bag) and ask him about it. Turns out it was a tumor that had been growing for around 10 years on his leg, and he wasn't even going to tell us about it! 9. Mum's a nurse and told me about the time a body builder came in with a "pulled muscle" somewhere in his abdomen that was causing him severe pain. Long story short, the guy was riddled with cancer. It was everywhere. Apparently he was dead within 72 hours. 10. I'm not a doctor but I've worked in a couple hospitals before. One of the physicians was telling me a story about how one of his emergency room patients came in complaining of a headache. As the man also had a runny nose, sore throat, and a slight cough the doctor chalked it up to just being the common cold and a layman's ignorance. As the man was about to be discharged, his wife (who was there the entire time) made a comment about her husband complaining about some foot pain. This prompted the doctor to tell the patient to take off his shoes to examine his foot. His big toe was completely black, indicating necrosis. The man failed to mention he had diabetes and wasn't regularly taking his medication. He had to get his toe amputated. Turns out he did have a cold, but he also had necrosis. Just goes to show anything could be a pertinent detail when it comes to medicine. 11. I was working at Target, lived half a mile away so I walked to work -- it totally sucked but I was out of shape and have cold-induced asthma so I ignored it. At this time I was picking up shifts left and right so sometimes I was closing the coffee shop, sometimes coming in at 4am to unload the truck, I was basically a zombie from what I assume was lack of sleep. This goes on for a couple months, until I had my annual physical. I was joking with my doctor that I was super exhausted from work, and I must be getting out of shape because that half mile walk to work really sucks. Turns out I had severe pneumonia, one lung was totally full of liquid and the other had some liquid too. The doctor couldn't believe I was still up and about, let alone walking to work & whatnot. 12. I was putting a patient with mild breathing difficulty on a COPD research study. He remarked that he had been "healthy as a horse" all his life. The next day, his routine chest X-ray showed metastatic lung cancer. He was dead within 2 months. 13. Guy comes in for an eye exam. I note one eye seems a bit redder then the other. He tells me it's been like that since a branch snapped back and hit him in the face 3 months earlier. I look under his upper lid and there is a piece of wood the size of a tic tac embedded in the underside of the eyelid. Can not believe it did not bother him more. 14. Guy shows up for a discharge physical (marine). Noticed what looked like cellulitis on his leg. Turns out it was a brown recluse bite that he ignored. Had a fist sized hole of dead tissue in his leg. We treated it with maggots for a few days. It healed over with a very nasty dent/scar. EDIT: Yes, maggots are still a thing. We import them from Mexico. We dump them straight into the wound and put a clear cover over it, so we can see them. We check a few times a day to make sure there aren't too many dead ones in the wound. They will eat only the dead tissue and yes, the patient can feel them squirm. We also use leaches. They are good for the anti-coagulant effect for things like finger reattachments. They keep the blood flowing and keep swelling down so the blood vessels can reattach and heal. We use cats in nursing homes to keep the residents in better spirits. Even the worst alzheimer's patient seems to respond to cats. We also use electric eels to help keep babies awake so they...okay, that's not true, but it is funny. 15. Not a physician but a clueless patient. Went to go see my doctor for a checkup, had chest pains waking up that morning, started to feel like someone is sitting on my chest, walked 15 minutes to the physician's place, and apparently after he checked my breathing he told me I had to go to the ER to get my lungs X-Rayed. Spent a week in the hospital for having a 40% collapsed lung. Doctors called it a Spontaneous lung collapse. Really not the kind of spontaneity I'm looking for in my life. EDIT: A lot of people are asking if I'm tall and skinny. I was pretty fit at the time (was running half-marathons) and I would say average height (5'11). Also, never smoked anything ever. 16. I went to an urgent care and someone must have mis communicated to the doc because I rolled into a room in a wheelchair, and doc asked me about my cold. I said I don't have a cold, but I'm not sure what I did to my leg and rolled up my pants. My kneecap was on the side of my leg. They seemed rather surprised. They told me to go to the ER immediately. 17. EMT here. The current top comment made me think of this patient. Had a patient who had gone to his primary for occasional blurred vision that would come and go over the past week. He was sent to the hospital where they discovered an intracranial carotid aneurysm that was almost 5 cm across. Vital sets and fancy doctor work that I am clueless about indicated that rupture was imminent. Our send off from the RN was simply "Drive fast" 18. We just got a guy in with Fournier's Gangrene from a very alarmed family practice doc. His nuts are in his thigh now. Edit: Gangrenous balls and taint, if you were curious. Google images has some exciting results. 19. Heard this story from my aunt who works in a eye centre. One day this woman came in with her friends, all drunk and high as fuck as shit. She was holding her eyeball. Somehow she managed to get hit in the face by a pair of heels and it pulled out her eyeball in the process. The kicker is after surgery and all that, she still seemed cheerful and even asked my aunt when her eyesight would recover. Apparently she was under the impression that her eyeball could be reattached. Source
