Doctors! Nurses! Hospital workers! Share your funny/gross hospital stories.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

A tale from the field.

Our glorious FD first responders were first onscene at a breathing difficulty call.

36 yo female 12 hrs post-op hip surgury. Pt is propped in a chair with two FD guys up in her face, one with an O2 mask several inches away from her face, following as she swings her head fairly quickly back and forth, avoiding the mask.

“she’s not tolerating the mask” the guy says.

Now I seldom yelled at people on scenes, tried to keep things professional, but this . . .

I took one quick look;

“she’s so hypoxic, she’s fucking BLUE! Strap that thing on her and hold it in place or get the hell out of here and let me work.”

This woman had a pulmonary embolism, an O2 sat of 15%, and was pretty close to being dead, and they’re worried about holding her in place for vital treatment. Implied consent dudes! She’s so hypoxic she doesn’t even know you’re in the room.

22

My first assignment was an E.R. in East Oakland. We saw everything. One night, I went in (I loved night shifts) to the doctors’ room. It was just a big room with 2 or three desks, a couple computers, telephones, and a couple viewing boxes for x-rays. On the night shift, the entire staff congregated there. It was just easierwe were a pretty tight knit group, and when it’s quiet in an emergency room, it’s DEAD, so we’d all sit in there and play cards.
Anyway, I went in, walked back to the doctors’ room, and saw that the attending had a film up on the box. “Hey. How’s it going?” “K.” He was sitting there grinning, and I couldn’t figure out why. So I walked over to look at the film. There was a rather large (about 2 inches long by three inches wide) foreign object high up in the patient’s large intestine. “Damn, John. How’d she manage to swallow that?” “It’s a he. And he didn’t. Swallow it.” I started grinning and sat down to hear the story I just knew was coming. So here’s what the attending told me:

“It’s a Vitalis hairspray cap. This guy comes in. He tells the girl at check in he may have a foreign object in his rectum, of course doesn’t know how it may have gotten there, that his GF did it to him while he was passed out drunk (There was no alcohol in his system). So he comes back, the nurse taking the SOAP note gets another story about how he really did it to himself while he was doing himself a favor. She’s understandably disgusted, sends him to x-ray, he gets films, comes back, and I was just in talking to him. He gave me a third story. (BTW, by this time there is a pool going in the staff room as to which story is true) He tells me, his BF tied him up and did this to him, and that he was too ashamed to say it earlier.”
By this time, I’m trying very hard to not laugh, because A) I feel kinda bad for the guy, he’s had to confess this to three different people, albeit with three different stories, and B) the staff room doesn’t have a door, and loud whooping laughter would certainly be construed by the patient to be directed at him. Which, of course, it would have been.
But wait! There’s MORE!!! “So, naturally, when the cap comes off after he’s finished and they’ve removed the, er, hairspray can, he’s understandably worried,” John continues. “He tells me he tried to push it out, without success, and tried to, um, have his partner remove it manually. That just seemed to push it in further. By this time, there’s a real sense of desperation, because of course the alternative is coming here and having us remove it. So. He got a pair of needle nosed pliers.” “OMG! John! He DID NOT!!” “Yes, I assure you he did.” I was in shock. I can’t imagine being so terrified of having something like that found out that I’d be willing to tear up my intestines (which this man ended up doing in a couple places) with a pair of needle nosed pliers.
“So I’ve got a surgery consult coming in. Lemme know when he gets here.”

The guy was fine. The surgeon removed the hairspray cap, repaired the lower intestine, which fortunately did not require resection, and the patient stayed for a couple days, getting antibiotics.

23

Or the tale of the inadvertent flatline. More hospital related.
We brought in a pt. post cardiac arrest. It was a save! Yay!
Anyway, everything was done, tubes, lines, pacing (remember that part). So I go to give report, and she listens, nods now and then. We move the pt. over, move the iv bag, switch out the O2.

“Wait a minute . . .”
“What?”
“This guy is on our pacing”
“Oh, no problem. Our machine paces too”
“But . . .”

  • just realized the the only ‘funny’ part of this was the look on her face after she popped our leads off.

:smack:

24

I tried that once or twice at a particular hospital, and got nailed for it. I did, however, once set an unlabled urine specimen next to some other unlabled pour-offs, and asked the RN to come identify the one she collected. She said “Well, I can’t now! I don’t know which one it is.” “My point, exactly.” It also bugged me when they would call down about the “MI in bed 2”. Well, there are 100 bed #2s in the hospital. Which one are you referring to? I could never get them to understand that all we knew was a name and MRN.

Some of my collected Dx:

thrombocytopenis

eurosepsis (only for Europeans, apparently)

patches disease and bone pain

Motrin not working (for what? And, let me guess, you want something stronger.)

“migraine headache” - “got injection in head”

swollen penis (isn’t there another name for that?)

sudden onset inability to think (how did she know?)

weirdest FOB: an aquarium tube in the rectum. I mean come on, those are thin-walled. It wouldn’t take much to break it. He could have gone to an adult bookstore, bought a dildo with lots of lube, and said it was for his girlfriend since he was going out of town… :rolleyes:

Vlad/Igor

25

Vlad/Igor, in the two years I worked in that place, it never failed to astound me what people would consider putting in their rectums. For the love of God, you IDIOTS! WHY??? I did get to deliver a couple of babies, though, and that was probably the highlight of my entire stint there.

26

:eek:

This is the most frightening thing I have ever heard.

27

That is not an uncommon “diagnosis” when an abnormality or syndrome is still in the differential diagnosis phase and tests are being done simply to “rule out” certain diagnoses. At that point all the docs and nurses may have to go on is that in their “gut” it’s just a “funny looking kid” or FLK for short. :eek:

Sad to say it is usually replaced by something more definitive. :frowning:

28

Maureen and Vlad : “It was a million-to-one shot, doc.”

You guys have a lot of fun stories about hospitals. I spent a year working Central Supply in one, and all I have memories of are sex with the nurses and aides when I was the only one on shift up there. :frowning:

29

In just six months of clinics before grad school, I saw enough for a few years of stories. Cockroach in the ear of a psychotic patient – I wasn’t sure it was there until I saw antennae through the otoscope. COPD exacerbation in a schizophrenic who insisted that it was all due to “fluid in the meninges,” a persistent hallucination of his that was untreatable despite all attempts since first diagnosis in the mid-1970s. I missed the guy with a Gatorade bottle in his butt (the OB/Gyn nurse with small hands was called in to try and get it out; when asked how it got there, he replied quite honestly, I guess, “Just fuckin’ around, doc…”)

Here’s my best. Night call at a community hospital surgery team as a second year medical student.

Around 1 AM, we get paged to the ER with BRBPR (bright red blood per rectum). There lies a young, pretty attractive, well-built ex-Marine in some discomfort. He explains that he carries a diagnosis of chronic prostatitis for which he is on long-term antibiotics. To relieve the pressure, his urologist recommended “self-massage” with the thumb. Well, he said, that just wasn’t cutting the mustard. So he put a rubber glove on a metal rod, lubed up, and went at it.

Until he felt something rip. :eek:

He had moderate bleeding. The third year resident I was with took a quick look and couldn’t see anything, so he decided we would try to tamponade the tear to stem the bleeding. How to tamponade a rectal tear? We had two options. I could stand there for an hour applying direct pressure, which I quickly turned down. Second option was to take an entire roll of Kerlix, coat it in KY, and cram it up there. IIRC it was the 4.6" by 4.5 yard roll. That’s a lot of gauze.

We left it in for an hour, when it was my job to go and take it out. Not the most pleasant of jobs, lemme tell you. It was still bleeding, so the tear must have been relatively extensive. Off to surgery. We paged urology, as a full thickness tear may communicate with the urethra and therefore he needed cytoscopy.

We get the guy out, on the table, and prepped. The urologist comes in, takes one look at the guy and exclaims “I know this guy! He comes into clinic every week, shoves 5 fingers in his rectum and points to where it hurts!” Anyway, cytoscopy was clear, we stitched him up, and discharged him the next morning.

Nice to know that some are so familiar with those nether regions of their anatomy.

30

I was working the early AM shift in a day-surgery unit of a hospital (God, the greatest job ever!), and one of my jobs was to make sure the charts were ready before the pt. went to surgery. One day I had to call a doc at 6 AM so he could come in and write the history and physical on his patient. I will never forget what he wrote: “The patient has never lived in the tropics and is not allergic to cayenne pepper.” That was it, nothing else. What a dick.

31

I work in a hospital’s health education center. We have a public library, and run health and wellness programs as well as health education stuff like birthing and infant care classes.

I had a call once from a new mom who was unsure whether to have her baby boy circumsized. She wanted to know were the “current trends in Wisconsin circumcision”. She actually specified Wisconsin. BTW, I was astounded to learn there is an answer of sorts to this. In our hospital, and we have the 2nd largest number of annual deliveries in the state. 75-80% of boys are circumsized year in and out. It is a covered procedure in the most popular local medical coverage programs. In others areas, IIRC California was one, circumcision is frequently not a covered procedure, and it is performed far less frequently.

32

Jerk. Y’know, if you don’t want to be at the surgery center at 6am doing an H&P, then you shoulda DAMN well done it when you did the consult! Moron.

33

:smack: Pre-op. When you did the pre-op

34

You’re going to have to explain this one more thoroughly – I’ve been in healthcare for 20 years, and I only have a vague guess as to what happened. Are you saying that your monitor was picking up their pacing signal, and that’s why you thought the patient was not a flatline, or that the patient coded again when you switched pacers (neither of which I can see happening, BTW)?

35

Classic exchange on the Emergency Room radio:

“Moriah Ambulance to Med Center ER: We just lost our patient.”

“Med Center ER to Moriah Ambulance: Just exactly WHAT do you mean when you say you lost your patient?”

“The back door came open and we LOST him!”

36

In the days before external pacemakers, a patient came in hypotensive with a 3rd degree heart block. He was getting prepped for a stat subclavian temporary pacer insertion, and the chest was being cleaned with isopropyl alcohol, when he went into ventricular fibrillation. Paddles were grabbed, a cardioversion shock was delivered, and the patient’s chest burst into flames.

They were quickly doused, and the rescusitation efforts continued, but to no avail. :frowning:

Talk about crash and burn!

37

One of the patients on the SCI Unit where I was clinical coordinator required an amputation of his leg from injuries he sustained in his MVA. He also sustained a spinal cord injury. After the surgery he went through the grieving proscess for his leg as well as for the changes resulting from his SCI. He finally got to the point of moving forward, did well and was discharged.

Months later the lab called me. It seems the wanted to dispose of his leg and required a signed consent from him to do so. Of course they wanted this from me. I informed them that they had one as it was a standard part of our pre op package. They looked in their records again and called me back and said they must have lost it., could I track down this man who was finally living his life and ask him to sign another form so they could dispose of his leg? Jeez, now how would you feel if months later you had to think of your leg, which you had finally managed to reconcile the loss of, still lying in some lab?

I called the lab the next day and told them to just keep the leg; that I preferred not to disturb my patient with this problem. I am not sure what they did with the leg in question but they did not call me back or my patient to my knowledge.

38

I attended an autopsy (at my request, really!) where the diener and pathologist had worked together for a long time, and had a lot of stories. The one that sticks out was where a patient had just died, and the MD wanted an autopsy right away. George Carlin has a line that goes “Dying takes place in stages, and most people don’t realize that.” That was the case here, as the patient, while declared dead, still had ventricular fibrillations. In this hospital, a particular sercurity guard had a habit of peeking his head in the autopsy room door during late procedures, and he did so during this case. The diener siezed the opportunity and held up the still-quivering heart that he had just dissected, and said “Hey, look at this!” The guard blanched, backed out quickly, and never peeked in the room again.

Vlad/Igor

39

DX=FLK (Funny looking kid) has been around for years in any peds setting. There’s a series of books on genetic aberations that is generally refered to as the “Ugly Baby Book”
I may add a story later, but not right now.

40

Our monitor was providing the small electrical impulse needed to initiate the patients heartbeat as opposed to just reading it. Unplug our leads = no electrical impulse = no more heartbeat.