27 Doctors And Nurses Share The Goriest And Most Disturbing Things They’ve Seen While On The Job

1. “TRAFFIC ACCIDENT, BABY EJECTED”
As a paramedic, responded to a call of “traffic accident, baby ejected “. We prepared for the worst we could imagine. Arrive in about 8 minutes, trooper on scene trying to clear the area of bystanders/ gawkers and preserve the scene. He had covered the “baby” with the yellow death-sheet troopers carry in their trunks. Lifted the sheet to check vitals/pronounce death, and it was not a baby, but the top half of the 19 year old girl that was driving the small pickup truck about 50 yards away.

She was driving and arguing with her 19 year old husband who was the passenger. They were doing about 55mph on a two lane road, and met an oncoming truck pulling a doublewide mobile home. She ran under the front corner of the mobile home, cutting her in half. Her bottom half remained in the drivers seat, while her unhurt husband watched as the truck the skidded another 50-60 yards, sideswiping a minivan, sending it into the ditch upside down. When the truck came to rest, her bottom half fell out onto the ground. We also found a trail of ribs from the cab to the bed, and down the pavement to the top half. It looked like a movie set. Her top and bottom looked unhurt, but from mid chest to about pelvis was strung along the road. The husband was absolutely freaking out about what he had just seen. He was babbling incoherently, running around swinging at people, just a mess. A witness who lived right in front of the scene started having chest pains, and had to be transported. We took the husband, and I called medical control and actually got orders to give him iv valium, something paramedics normally can only give for grand-mal seizures. The driver of the big truck was fine, but was also very very distraught at what he had just witnessed.

That was 16 Years ago and I can still remember pulling up to that scene like it was yesterday.

—bigidea

2. WIPING DOWN
I used to be a nurse’s aid. I once had to put a very obese woman on the bedpan (she was only mid 40’s) and I left. She put her call light on and when I answered she said she was all done. I turn her on her side to remove the bedpan only to see that it is empty. My first thought was that she had been mistaken about having pooped. But then I look and realize that her ass cheeks were so massive her entire dump couldn’t make it the length of her cheeks and had gotten wedged in between them. I had to dig the entire load out of her as by hand. It was only about two months into the job and it gave me some serious second thoughts haha.

—deleted

3. CLEANING UP THE HOUSE
A somewhat mentally deranged person that they had somehow deemed fit for society had to be vacated out of a house that was going to get demolished, and it was my job (and others on my team) to move out what could be saved.

We ended up essentially just taking him with us, as nothing could be saved (he had mostly just furniture, which reeked with the most pungent odors that you cannot imagine).

Here are some highlights (important note: I have an iron nose and stomach, I don’t really puke unless I’m very sick):

• Two of my co-workers immediately puked upon entering his house, and they were unable to enter without puking even after that. Me and my boss had to check out the place ourselves.
• There was utter junk all over the house; it was very hard to move around. It was mostly newspapers…which leads me to my next point:
• This guy shat and pissed on the fucking floor and covered it with newspapers.
• The reason why he did this was because his toilet had entirely clogged up, and the high doorstep to the bathroom meant that there was about 2-3 inches of water, piss, diarrhea, and shit. When I initially opened the door to the bathroom, I had to go outside and get air immediately: I ended up gagging and very nearly puking from the concentrated fumes. My boss puked from just walking by the door after I had opened it.
• After evacuating him to his new place, we immediately washed the entire company car (big Toyota HiAce)
• because the whole car smelled like Satan’s asshole—especially the place he had been sitting.
• 3 weeks after the incident, after having washed the vehicle 3 times, we could still smell his god-forsaken aroma of fetid calamity. We ended up calling in a professional cleaning crew to fix it, as the stench permeated everything.

—Soltheron

4. DEATH IN A CHEAP HOTEL
Autopsy tech/death investigator.
A morbidly obese man had died in a cheap motel room with the heat cranked up and wasn’t found for several days.
By the time we got him to the morgue he was horribly bloated from decomposition gas and was purple and green all over. There was lots of skin slip.

Our forensic pathologist went to make the initial Y incision, and the force of the escaping gas blew gore all over us and the ceiling while making a sound like a wet balloon with the air being pinched out. We all paused for a moment as the worst stank I have ever smelled enveloped the room like something that had crawled out of Satan’s anus.

Then we burst out laughing because it was all we really could do.
It didn’t help that he was leaking liquified fat all over the floor, that shit is SLIPPERY! My boots have never been the same since.

—deleted

5. HOLDING A MANUAL C-SPINE
In my EMT class an instructor was telling me about one of her calls to a freeway accident. There were two cars involved, and one of them had an elderly couple in it.

Since she was so small, my instructor is often assigned the job of crawling through the windows of the car to stabilize patients while the crew works on prying the doors open.
She crawled into the backseat of the elderly couples car and held manual C-Spine for the woman (holding someone’s head in place to prevent an injury by twisting the spinal cord). As she held the head, it came off in her hands – the woman had been decapitated by the accident.

She had to take a couple of weeks off after that and talked to a therapist to help cope; I can’t imagine what it must have been like to go through something like that.

—Angiotensin

6. A GYNECOLOGICAL ISSUE
A few years back when I was a medical student I was doing my primary care rotation when I had to see a morbidly obese lady for a gynecologic issue. She said she was having a lot of itching and soreness in her vagina. Even as I set up for a pelvic exam I could already tell it wasn’t gonna be good. I could smell a foul odor already and I haven’t even looked. I was gloving up when I got so nauseated and I was about to get sick. So I excused myself and lied to my attending that I had a problem taking a look in her cause she was so obese and I didn’t have much experience with such a challenge. The truth was I just couldn’t stay in the room. It smelled like rotting vagina.

A few minutes later my attending calls for me to show me what he found. I thought for sure it would be an aborted fetus but I was wrong. I go in with my mask and there my attending dangles this cylindrical object covered with bloody debris. It was a fucking tampon. She apparently had difficulty removing it a week ago. My attending kept saying “It stinks like a mag!” The embarrassed patient was crying and I felt bad but I had to step out of the room cause I was starting to regurgitate my saliva and was about to puke.

To this day I can’t forget that smell. It took a few weeks before I was able to go down on my girlfriend again. I think that was my deciding factor as far as not going into OB/Gyn. I just don’t wanna encounter the rotting vagina smell again ever.

—deleted

7. BACTERIAL MENINGITIS
ER RN here. This, so far, is the only death I’ve experienced from work that I’ve lost a significant amount of sleep over. 24 year old male walks, again walks, into the ER with complaints of flu-like symptoms for the past 3 days. He had decided to come in that day because he started to develop a “rash” throughout his body that he was unfamiliar with. Sadly this rash was actually the result of a failed battle with bacterial meningitis, causing him to bleed internally and externally.

By the time we got him back into the ER, he started crying blood and the terror in his eyes was palpable. He went downhill fast. His lucidity diminished with his blood pressure and the last thing he said before succumbing to pulse less V-tach was something about his mother that we could not make out. You could see his consciousness fade from his eyes as we started compressions. The code lasted close to an hour. At first we could still keep his oxygen levels up with mechanical ventilation, defibrillation, and drugs, but blood was filling his airways faster than it could be suctioned out. He was bleeding to fast for any medications or fluids to keep his blood pressure up.

He died soaked in blood and nearly unrecognizable due to his now almost uniformly purple skin and swollen face. We later found out that he was studying neurobiology, had a devoted girlfriend that was for all intense and purposes a fiancee, a large family, and many friends. He was an athlete who lived healthy. He had beautiful curly hair. This made the death tragic in a way that you just don’t experience when a 80+ year old dies. It made the unanswered pleads to God for help that had been sent echoing around the room by his family all the more bitter. I helped drag and push him into a body bag.

—wolfbriar

8. HADN’T HAD A BOWEL MOVEMENT IN A MONTH
My dad has been a nurse for nearly 20 years. He has moved around from working on the ER to radiology and now the ICU. He is one of the most well respected nurses in the hospital. I would know because I worked at the same place as a phlebotomist.

Anyway, our hospital is a “bariatric center of excellence” so you know what that entails: some pretty big patients.

So this one day, I go up onto the fourth floor in the neuro unit to get a blood draw and as soon as I step off the elevator, I smell shit. Really foul, rotten egg smelling shit. I don’t think much of it as the hospital is older and is poorly ventilated (I know, right?) But when I get home, I ask my dad about it since the ICU is on the same floor.

He said that they had a guy who was 550lbs. in the unit, and he was having some abdominal pain. Turns out he hadn’t had a bowel movment in almost a month. Before he was transferred to our ICU, other clinics had tried giving him a few enemas to no avail.

So my dad is saying that he is putting in one of those balloons into the guys anus so he can attach a bag, like a catheter. He turns around to check a monitor and he heats this dripping noise behind him. Turns back around, and there is a river of shit falling from the bed. The entire floor is covered in a month’s worth of shit, dripping, splashing, all over everything, including my poor dad. He and all the nurses roll up their scrubs like they’re going clamming, and after an hour or so get this guy cleaned up. Housekeeping stopped by and just left a cart for them and said, “Nope!”

I guess right after they finished cleaning it happened AGAIN. I don’t even want to imagine the smell in that room if it was enough to stink up the whole fourth floor! I can’t begin to describe the respect I have for nurses.

—vondahl

9. A CYST THE SIZE OF A JAWBREAKER
The very last patient I saw in my internship came in with a cyst in her pubic area… Think to myself “ok, seen plenty of these.. No big deal”.. I walk in to find a cyst the size of a jawbreaker… It was purple and practically had a face. We had to lance it, so we needed to give local anesthetic. When the syringe touched the cyst, the whole thing blew open with pus. The smell in the room was terrible. Upon pushing on it further, the cyst made a sound as it released more pus. It sounded like basketball shoes on a freshly waxed floor. The core of the cyst was about the size of a dime. Love this kind of stuff and considering going into dermatology.

—emilydean

10. COMPLAINT OF A FOUL ODOR
A super obese (that’s an actual medical term) woman comes to clinic complaining of a foul odor that she’s noticed. And yeah, me and the attending noticed it too – a smell somewhere between rancid milk mixed with rotting fish and a disemboweled skunk swimming in garbage. We do the usual workup: take a good history, do a thorough physical (as best we can given she is huge and has folds and folds of fat and skin draped all over her) including rectal/genital exam just in case there was some funky “down there” growth, and run some simple labs. As me and the attending are discussing how we have no clue what is going on, the nurse comes out holding a green, soggy mush in her gloved hands and waves it in front of our faces (I nearly puked right there). Turns out the woman was using pieces of bread to soak up sweat by putting them in between her fat folds. Apparently she forgot about one of the pieces, which then stayed there to marinate in her juices for weeks (as estimated by the patient). I was sent in to see if there were any more hidden pieces; luckily there wasn’t, but having to lift up and search every fat fold was as embarrassing for her as it was disgusting for me.

—doctorsquared

11. DOMESTIC BLISS AND M-80S
A guy was drunk, fighting with his girlfriend, and decides to light up some M-80s and throw them at her. Well, he waits too long after lighting one and ends up blowing off his hand. He’s brought to the ED, completely drunk and having lost a lot of blood. We stabilize him and take him to the OR. While the hand surgeons are cleaning off his stump of a hand, me and the surgery resident are fixing all his chest wounds. One of the hand surgeons says “Wow this is a mess. Did anyone at the scene find his thumb?” No one knows. We continue examining, cleaning and suturing his wounds, and lo and behold, buried in a deep wound in his upper abdomen is two-thirds of the guy’s thumb. If he hadn’t been so fat, his thumb would’ve likely entered his peritoneum.

—doctorsquared

12. COOKED FLESH AND MECHANICAL GREASE
I saw a man just after he was burned in a boiler explosion. His skin hung in strips off of his body, as if it had slipped off (like how easily the skin of a tomato slips off after it is boiled). Underneath was glistening pink/red flesh. The room smelled of cooked flesh and mechanical grease. The poor man was aware and moaned/screamed in pain. It was terrible.

—redbook123

13. A LESSON ON WITHDRAWING CARE
I want to tell this story because I feel there is very limited knowledge about when it is appropriate to WITHDRAW care on your family. If any of you take anything away from this, please write a living will and talk to your loved ones about your wishes.

• A man brought his 92 year old mom to our hospital because we were renowned for our outcomes. She had some pneumonia and was placed on a ventilator (breathing machine) to help breathe. Numerous antibiotics and drugs were given to help the lady as her son wanted “everything done”. She stayed on our unit for weeks breathing and eating through tubes with incredibly advanced dementia. Every time we came into the room or spoke to her you could just see the fear in her eyes. Every time we had to turn her vent settings up as she got closer to dying, we talked to the son about withdrawing care.
  
• He denied. Never. This was his mom and he did not want to let her go for any reason. He started yelling at the staff and we had to escort him out a few times. Yet since he was appointed as the decision maker in her living will, we had to continue to ask him to make decisions about his mom’s care. When his mom was literally days away from death, maxed out on every drug we can give, we asked him to withdraw care on his mom. He punched me in the face. Later that day we performed CPR on his mom, breaking 4 of her ribs and she died anyways. The rest of the family watched us do this in horror to their mom because the son COULD NOT withdraw care. When you are appointed to make decisions in a living will, it can only be up to you.
  
• We could have withdrawn care weeks earlier, giving her a peaceful and restful death. If we are all going to die eventually we should have the respectful choice to decide when we no longer wish to be cared after. It is therapeutic. Sometimes, enough is enough.
  —starciv14

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14.
I work as a paramedic in Canada (more specifically Ontario) and we were dispatched to a call by police for a code 4 (emergency) code 5 (obviously dead) and requested to bring a box of N95 masks.

My partner and I were quite confused but did as we were told. When we arrived on scene a police officer met us outside and when I handed him the box of masks he looks significantly relieved. My partner asked what was going on and the officer directed us to the door. Within two step of where we were we began to smell it. That oh so obvious smell of death, death that has had time to fester. At this point we understand the request for masks and as we poke our heads through the door we are greeted by a clearly deceased human (we are assuming). It was a woman who probably weighed on the light side of 400lbs when she was solid, which at this moment she was not. The officer proceeds to tell us that she hasn’t be seen or heard from in two weeks and when someone finally came to check on her, they found her as a puddle. To make matters worse she had her heat blasting (it was the middle of summer and temperatures can get up to 30+ degrees Celsius or approx 86 deg F) and she had all her blinds open and she was seated in direct sunlight.

It was probably the most disgusting sight I had ever seen.

—KM86

15. UPSETTING TO HEAR
This wasn’t so much what had happened but what was said. I worked in a nursing home as an aide and was putting one of my favorite residents to bed for the night and I go to leave the room. She’s on alarms because her dementia is so bad that she thinks she can walk on her own and it goes off. I turn around and help her do what she’s getting up to do and as I’m tucking her in again she stops me and says “Jeremy…,” her son’s name. “You can have the money just don’t beat me. It’s not about the money, you can have it just be a good boy and don’t hurt me.”

—OkayCOMMAneat

16. STUBBORN PRIAPISM
One of the most horrifying things I have ever seen in the hospital was a guy who OD’d on one of his prescription medications. One of the side effects was priapism (erection lasting more than four hours). Once the doctors got his cardiac and respiratory systems relatively stable, they tried to get rid of this poor dude’s erection (which was starting to turn purple/black/blue). After several non-invasive methods, they did what they had to do. They had to inject drugs directly into the head of his penis. Not one shot. Not two, or three, or four. NINETEEN. NINETEEN injections into the head of his penis. It was still swollen, bruised and red two weeks later.

—lornad

17. HEMORRHOIDS AND FIREARMS
1. Guy was scratching his hemorrhoids with a 50mm bullet and it got stuck up there. Since it was a live round, the bomb squad was called and held their blast shields or whatever around the patients butt as it was removed. 2. Couple wanted to make perfect/custom dildo for guys butt so they put a condom in and fill the condom with cement. Condom breaks and almost a foot of his intestines has to be removed.

—Malvadere

18. MOTORCYCLE VS SUV
So basically my dad was on his way to go pick up some pizzas from one of our favorite pizza places. he had just turned down the T intersection towards the pizza place when he heard an extremely loud crash. He turned around just in time to see a motorcycle helmet coming down from about 30 feet in the air. The driver of the motorcycle had just ran the red light and slammed right into the side of an SUV with two teenage girls all dressed up on their way to prom. The guy was driving wayyy to fast especially seeing as how you cant even see the intersection until you are almost right on top of it. When he hit the side of the SUV his face hit right at the bottom of window at the driver side rear door. It threw his helmet off straight up into the air, shattered the window, left a huge dent in the door, and COVERED the interior of the car, and the poor girls, in their white prom dresses, with specs of blood.

My dad pulled over in a nearby parking lot and rushed over to help. At this point in time a couple people had already gotten out but due to the mans condition, were just standing there in shock. The man had taken almost all of the force of the crash directly to his face around his jaw. At this point in time he was laying in the middle of the intersection with blood streaming from his mouth. He was in bad shape but was still trying to breathe. My dad saw this and attempted to clear his airway. He used his fingers to scoop out enough blood from the mans mouth so he could breathe, and then attempted to pull his tongue and jaw down to open his airway. He described the man’s chin as literally having absolutely no structure as the bones had been pulverized. He compared the feeling of this man’s jaw to “hand full of mush”. He continued to stabilize the mans neck, and hold open his airway until the ambulance arrived.

It took the ambulance a good 10 minutes to show up, and had my dad not been there to help this guy out he surely would be dead. He let the paramedics know his name, and that he was an anesthesiologist, and gave them a quick rundown about what he already knew. Once the man had been taken away my dad decided it was now time to wash off. He walked the short distance to the pizza place. His forearms were pretty bloody at the time and he said it was quite amusing seeing the look on people’s faces as he asked them to open the doors to the pizza place, and restroom, with arms covered in blood. He washed up, grabbed the pizzas, and came home. The man ended up suffering multiple fractures in a couple different vertebrae, an almost non existent jaw and other facial fractures, broken collarbone, broken ribs, collapsed lung, amongst a slew of other things.

Now my dad having worked in a hospital for almost 20 years with an extremely busy emergency room really did not think much of this at the time. He was simply doing the kinds of things he does on a daily basis, just outside of the normal environment. I myself did not even hear about the situation from him until 2 days later. Now this is the thing about this that I find the coolest about the whole story. Fast forward a year. One year to the day of the accident exactly. My dad is at work when he gets a page to come down to the main lobby. As he comes into the lobby he notices this man standing there and thought he looked kinda familiar. Without much hesitation the man comes up to my dad, wraps his arms around him and just starts bawling. My dad instantly realized who this man was and started crying himself. The man repeated over and over under the tears “Thank you! you saved my life!” They continued to chat a little bit about the man’s physical therapy and how it was going. I do not think they have kept in contact but my dad said it was one of the best experiences in his life.

—BleedTheWay

19. HOBO IN A WHEELCHAIR
Back when I was a nursing student I witnessed a very nasty procedure. A wheel chaired hobo who smelled because well, who knows why but he smelled like he hadn’t showered in weeks and he had a gangrene foot. Now I was still a student and I did not realize how disgusting an infected foot actually smelled like. My god, when the doctor removed the bandages covering his foot, it released this god awful odor of just putridness. Combine the infected foot and the lack of a shower, ugh and this wasn’t the worst part! The hobo had a huge gaping hole in his heel and he needed some debridement. For the next 5 minutes, I witnessed the doctor physically go into the heel and scoop out dead cells and other nasty goop that was inside. Literally scooping out of his heel, it was like scooping ice-cream but instead of cookie dough it was scoops of combined dead skin cells, dried blood and who knows what.

—Boop_

20. THE POWER OF ADDICTION
I was doing my residency at cook county hospital in Chicago about 25 years ago. My friend and I had a short break in between surgeries, and he went to the bathroom. I headed down the hallway to get a snack. After I got some chips, I went back and waited outside the bathroom for him. I waited 10 minutes and then went in. I found my friends body on the floor with a large knife buried in his throat. A drug addict came in to the bathroom and killed my friend to take his prescription pad to get more drugs.

—That_One_Zombie

21. THE CALL LIGHT KEPT GOING OFF
I worked as a nursing assistant at a nursing home when I was 19. I usually worked the night shift (11p-7a), so the majority of my residents were usually sleeping. One night the call light to this one room kept going off. I go in there and ask the resident what she needs. She’s just up laying in bed and states that she doesn’t need anything. I turn the call light off, but a few minutes later it goes on again. Same thing happens – she doesn’t need anything. Now a lot of the residents there had dementia/Alzheimer’s, so them pushing the button and then forgetting what they wanted (especially at night) wasn’t unusual. However, this happened a couple more times. So about the 3rd or 4th time I go in there I decide to look if maybe she’s sitting on the call light and that’s why it keeps going off. I follow the cord of the call light from the wall onto the bed, under the sheets, under the resident’s leg, and…right into her vagina. Not the worst part yet.

So I deal with that situation and then have her again the next night. This night I make sure to tie the call light to the bed so she doesn’t have as much cord to have a repeat night, but enough so that she can still use the call light when needed (safety first). Part of my duties was to clean dentures of residents so that they’re ready to go in the morning. Go to clean her dentures and notice only the top dentures are in there. Having had this resident multiple times before I knew she had a full set. I start looking around for the bottom dentures. Look in the bathroom, on the night stand, wherever. I ask the resident – she has no idea. Think to myself, ‘No, can’t be. She wouldn’t…would she?’ Sure enough – she had a repeat of the previous night, except this time with her bottom dentures. Every time I saw her smile after that I couldn’t help but cringe.

—ToastestTheMostest

22. A FREQUENT ER VISITOR WHO’S SEEN SOME SHIT
I’m not in the medical field, but I have a chronic illness that lands in the ER very frequently. The hospital I frequent most is in the middle of Baltimore. I’ve seen guys walk into the ER with a gunshot wound to the head… complete with brain matter glopped on their shirt, and falling out of their new head-hole. I’ve seen I crackhead with a large abdominal knife wound stand up to leave the ER… only to have a large portion of their intestines fall out of their abdomen and onto the floor. I’ve seen a tremendously fat woman with her entire leg rotted SO bad that the smell alone was enough to make you vomit, and it stuck to my clothes for several BLEACH washings! I’ve seen a gang member come in with a flesh wound gunshot, only to have a rival gang member come in and finish him off. All the horrible nastiness aside, the staff at that ER are totally amazing people, who are very kind to me… many know me on a first name basis (isn’t that pathetic, I’m there THAT much!). The past few times I’ve gone in (which, thankfully hasn’t been necessary in quite a while!) they’ve been really cool and put me in the far back corner room, away from the crazies, the gang bangers, the druggies. It’s a rare thing to actually get a peaceful moment in the ER, I have a lot of respect for all you front line workers. Thank you for what you do!

—JonnyFandango

23. THE LOVE STORY OF A WOMAN AND HER COUCH
My dad’s been a volunteer EMT/Fireman for as long as I can remember, and generally the worst stories I’ve ever heard have come from him. One that comes to mind right now deals with a lady not unlike the ones who have been mentioned in a lot of these other stories. She was highly obese and apparently had gone for a sit down on her couch.

That was a month before the call to head out to her residence was put in. When pop and the crew arrived, this lady was still on her couch. This woman had not moved from that spot for an entire month. For anything. She was GLUED to her couch with a mixture of feces, urine, and her own skin. They had to cut the fabric around her because both were so embedded with each other. And she was ANGRY that they had to cut her couch. How does one even–

—MissWonnykins

24. DIDN’T LIKE NURSING
I once saw an old woman’s foot fall off, I was left holding the leg. The nurse told me ‘DONT PUKE’…I puked on the leg…I didn’t like nursing.

—lukewilliam

25. SEVERAL MESSY CASUALTIES
Volunteer medic here:

I once attended an RTI with several messy casualties. A blue ford fiesta had collided with a red something or other and then finished by hitting a tree at speed. The driver went clean through the windscreen and into the tree. Face was a mess, body was crumpled up and bones were showing. He was clearly dead. Young boy passenger had his arm out the window at the time of the crash. It was lost in the collision at the mid-shaft of the humerus, luckily had his seat belt on and didn’t exit the vehicle when it hit the tree. Not so sure about the other car’s occupants as my colleague and the ambulance arriving behind us dealt with them.

The driver was a sight I’ll never forget. The impact with the tree had left a large dent in his skull that had split his skull open punctuated by bits of brain. His face was completely gone, just a pinkish grey pulp coated in red. His limbs were all at odd angles. One arm had completely dislocated and was held in place by a flap of skin. Blood and glass was everywhere on him and that horrible yellow-ish/clear cerebrospinal fluid from his brain was giving his head a shiny, varnished appearance.

That shit stayed with me for some time after, and the smells. First the smell of the accident and bits of people that are normally not exposed to the air, then the smoke grenades so the medical helicopter could land. Can’t smell the grenades now without remembering it.

Luckily the boy lived. Arm was not savable though.

—Galactic-Unicorn

26. SWEET URINE
An EMT I once know told me a story: she was dispatched to the home of a severely obese disabled man who hadn’t been taking his meds. He was alive, but basically confined to his couch. He also had a condition that made his urine have a high sugar content. He had ants crawling all over him, including into his urethra. The EMT had to clean him up, urethra and all.

—gustavopor

27. A MASS OF GORE
I am a rad tech in a level one trauma center with a burn unit. I have seen stabbings, shootings, amputations, horrible burns and lots of other stuff. One of the most heart wrenching things I have seen, was a woman from a motorcycle wreck. She was early thirties, beautiful, all decked out in leather, and I later found out, almost through with flight school to become an airline pilot. She rolls into the trauma room and the first thing that you notice is a fractured, splintered, incredibly white chunk of bone sticking out of her thigh. As you continue to look down her leg there is just a mass of pulped meat tendons and grass which end in a motorcycle boot. What we realized after a while is that her leg had been In between the bike and the ground, and her ankle had just spun around and around. This broke everything from halfway down her femur to her ankle, and just grabbed grass and everything else and twisted it into an unrecognizable mass of gore. The craziest thing was when they pulled off her boot, her foot was perfectly preserved and had polish on the toes. The two saddest parts we’re these. Her telling us the whole time how bad her leg hurt, and asking us to just readjust it and she would feel better. And the fact that she had no idea what we going on, was knocked out and had surgery and woke up with no leg. Oh yeah, and I was in the OR and watched the orthopedic surgeon pick up what was left off her leg, shake his head, and cut it off.

—Galactagogue