Working in the medical field is not for the faint of heart. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals need to have enough physical and emotional resilience to be able to withstand grueling hours, rude patients, and unexpected situations.

Some doctors cave and quit; in fact, 25% of American physicians have thought about leaving medical practice since the beginning of 2025. Most just can’t deal with the burnout anymore, while others cite retirement and clinical demands as the top reasons.

Yet sometimes doctors may want to quit due to crazy experiences. Bored Panda recently came across a thread where medical professionals were sharing the creepiest things that happened to them, and honestly, some of them are totally worthy of noping out of your job immediately. We’ve collected the most interesting answers to the question “Doctors of Reddit: What’s the creepiest thing you’ve encountered while on the job?” and present them to you below!

#1

Whenever you admit a patient you have to inquire about their DNR status in case of a code being called. I had one elderly patient (late 80s/early 90s) who was severely demented and chronically ill (in and out of the hospital every month barely holding onto life – basically a horrible miserable quality of life). I asked the patient’s family (I think it was a granddaughter who had medical POA, but I’m not sure, it was a while ago) about their DNR status (you don’t want to put someone through a brutal resuscitation that may not even work if it isn’t something that they would want if they wanted to die naturally). She flat out stated that “Oh, we want everything done for him because we really need his check”. I didn’t understand at first, but apparently the family was living off of his social security and could not have cared less about his pain and suffering or his wishes. I’m pretty sure it was the creepiest thing I’ve seen. These people were supposed to be his loved ones taking care of him and they were using him like an inhuman object.

Image credits: bigskyandsunshine

#2

Working the night shift as medical on call. I’ll explain that I’m easily startled. It’s around 3am, and I’m back on a ward where I started my night to see how an unwell patient from the start of my shift is getting on.

I have a chat with the nurses at the desk, they tell me he’s much better, and most recent obs are improved, but that his chart is on the end of his bed. No problem, I trot off to the bedside.

In I go, pull the curtains round and, to not wake the other sleeping patients in the bay, I use my torch to check his chart. All looks good and I’m happy.

I turn around, and suddenly in the dark I’m toe to toe with a hunched over old man, who has obviously noiselessly crept in behind me. Well I just about have a heart attack of my own right there.

I jump back, scream, and knock over a drip stand. He starts to yell, and the nurses come running, someone wheeling the crash trolley.

“Oh doctor, that’s just Albert, he likes to have a wander at night!”.

Image credits: Sarahdarah

#3

Not a doctor, but I work in a personal care home. We used to have a resident who would constantly yell out ‘hello’, drove us a bit bonkers. After he passed away a lady moved into the room. One night I was working a double, evening to nights, she pulled her call bell. I went in and she asked me to make him stop.

“Make who stop what?

“The old man standing beside the bed, he won’t stop yelling hello.”.

Image credits: Ephy_Chan

#4

Not a MD, but I do work at a hospital. I was sitfing a patient up at the edge of the bed in the ICU when she started getting all squirrelly. She didn’t speak much English but kept saying “stand, stand” so I helped her stand up. After standing for a few seconds something told me to lay her back down. Before her head ever hit the pillow her eyes rolled back and she was gone. She had a massive stroke and was gone on the spot. But, I like to think I honored her last wish of wanting to stand.

Image credits: RedheadDPT

#5

Nothing I can say can possibly describe the year I worked in Psychiatric Intensive Care. Creepy isn’t the thing that comes to mind when I think back on it…more heartbreaking and horrifying. But creepiness was a part of it. Especially evening and night shifts, naturally.

There is always something disturbing about watching someone while they hallucinate. You can tell it is 100% real to them, and something about that makes you believe it, on some level. A lot of stories end with, “and of course, I had to look over my shoulder to make sure”. You see the emotions it brings out. Here’s a couple stories.

There was a woman that came in and sat down across the table from me for her admission interview. She had bandages all over her arms and scotch tape over her mouth and ears. She looked very uncomfortable and wouldn’t really sit still. When the nurse would ask her a question, she would peel the corner of the tape back and answer, then stick the tape back on really fast. We eventually found out that she saw and felt bugs crawling all over her, and they were trying to get inside her body. The tape was to keep the bugs out. The bandages were because some bugs got in and she had to dig them out. She couldn’t sit still because she felt the bugs all over her even while we sat and talked. The worst part was, she had some idea that it was her mind playing tricks on her. Can you imagine going through your life, feeling like someone is continuously dumping buckets of cockroaches on your head, feeling like they’re all over you and getting inside of you to the point that you’re digging chunks out of your flesh in a panic, all while knowing intellectually that none of it is real?

Another story: A girl spent my entire 8 hour shift fist fighting the same ghost. She would throw a few punches, and obviously landed knockout blows, so she’d bend over and twist her hand around like she was wrapping some long hair around her wrist. She’d drag her opponent down the hallway, give a few good kicks, then set up for a curb stomp. Starts off kinda funny, then gets a little disturbing when you think about the graphic things going on in her mind, then just sad after you watch this replay for hours on end.

Image credits: anon

#6

Motorcycle driver, accident, 3rd degree burns, arrived DOA. Had to transfer him from ambulance gurney to ER bed. As we were moving him with a transfer sheet, the liquefied/cooked subcutaneous fat caused the charred skin on his back to separate and his body slipped onto the floor (despite several of us trying to “catch” him).

Image credits: Doc-in-a-box

#7

Not a doctor, but I work in a nursing home doing activities and housekeeping. I answered a call light of a little old lady and she asked me to remove a, as she put it “large, black woman” from her bed. No one was in the bed. I asked the “lady” to get up so she could go to bed. Didn’t think anything of until I talked to a CNA and she had answered a call light the next room over and the gentleman in that room had asked the CNA to have the “large, black, lady” to stop pointing at him and leave his room. He is bedridden and only gets up for meals. These two don’t talk to each other. So there is someone there. It’s made me watch things a little closer.

Image credits: AuroraSarah25

#8

People turn crazy and creepy as hell when they get really sick. There’s even a term called ICU psychosis…. And trust me, it’s real. Anyway, the creepiest that takes the cake for me is this (am an ICU nurse, btw):

Had a patient who with a very long history of mental health problems. She was thrashing around in bed, very combative, kicking people for days, totally incoherent. Well the night I had her, she started making decent sense, but still not oriented at all. She was extremely paranoid and kept talking about the man in black in the corner. I’d hear her talking to him and screaming, all night long. So I’d go in there and try to calm her down, but you could see the fear in her eyes. she was talking other nonsense about how she was in space, and with certain patients, you try to redirect their “reality”, but what I did didn’t help.

She said “that man in black! Don’t you see him!” And pointed to the corner. I said “there’s nobody here. I stepped in the corner she was pointing to and waved my hands around. While I’m waving my hands around in the air, she had the most horrifically terrified look on her face that actually scared me, like I had just attacked the man in black. I said “see, there’s nobody here” and she said in a matter-of-factly: “that’s what you think”. I promptly got out of there.

Image credits: HeatherTakasaki

#9

When I was working as a critical care nurse, I sent my patient down for a heart catheterization. She was so sweet, and I remember that she and I were joking about a bunch of different things before she went down for her procedure. When she came back, she was very drowsy, as is expected from the Versed, but very very confused. She proceeded to have ICU psychosis due to the sedatives. Every time I would come in the room, she she would throw cups of water at me and yell at me. She would make this guttural noise, and tell me that I was the devil. I walked in one time, and she said, “Dear Lord, please come down and slit this woman’s throat.” She continued to say this kind of stuff. She told her husband that I was walking into her room with poison balls. She said that my skin was falling off of my face. She scratched and hit me. It was very sad and scary. I hadn’t seen this happen prior to this. We had to give her anti psychotics, and restrain her initially to keep her from hurting herself. It was pretty terrible.

Image credits: anon

#10

Not a doctor, but both of my parents were.

After “retiring” Dad worked in geriatric care for a few of the nursing homes around town. One guy had this really weird affliction that I can’t remember the name of, but it caused him to have really weird hallucinations, like snakes coming out of his nose and mouth. The strange part was that he was completely lucid and actually really intelligent, and my dad would talk to him frequently. They would be discussing films or philosophy, and the guy would occasionally calmly say, “Hang on a second,” and then proceed to pull a two foot invisible snake out of his nose. He’d lay “it” on the ground, and then it apparently would slither away. He could talk about them and describe them in complete detail.

Image credits: VivaSpiderJerusalem

#11

My great grandmother told us the exact day she would pass away more than two years in advance. My great grandfather had passed away years earlier and she was always telling us she wanted to “go home”, her wording for pass away and get back to granddad. Well I had one child and she was waiting for her to turn two, but right before my daughter’s second birthday I got pregnant with my son. I was barely pregnant but she told me, “I’ll wait til this baby’s two, then I’m going home.” She adored her great great grandbabies, and told everyone she was waiting til the baby boy turned two, and she passed away in her sleep on his second birthday. Though I was sad, I mean, she’d been planning it for two and a half years. But seriously, to. the. day.

Image credits: shaylenn

#12

Friend used to share stories of when she was newly a nurse.

She was checking out a patient, following protocol. This guy had been seen multiple times, and given an antibiotic for a lung infection. Again, this guy had been seen by a nurse and doctor and she was to do the last follow up before releasing him.

“What is this?”

“A shirt, I keep them in my hole.”

Dude had an abscess so big that he stuffed a t-shirt in it and forgot about it. At the time it had gotten so large that he now stuff 3 shirts in. Neglected to tell the doctor or get it checked out. By the time the last puss and blood soaked one was pulled out, the smell was so bad it cleared the room.

Image credits: DarrenEdwards

#13

I was having a pt signing her admissions paperwork. Everything was going normally and she seemed coherent until she looked out her window and asked me, “did you see that?” I hadn’t seen anything and she said, “a man just jumped off the building.”

Then she shook her head and mumbled to herself how her mind isn’t right anymore. Freaked me out. Now I’m terrified of getting old and having dementia.

Image credits: PM_Me_Ur_Saber

#14

Saw a lady once who chewed off her lips.

Image credits: bluegraypurple

#15

Not a doc but im an EMT, Honestly old demented women holding baby dolls. They pet em and that baby is REAL to them….freaks me the hell out.

Image credits: Traumajunkie971

#16

Obligatory “not a doctor” statement, but I work in a nursing home. I wouldn’t say it’s the creepiest thing EVER, but I once had a patient who was hallucinating and kept talking about the person behind me. I knew he was hallucinating but I’m not gonna say I didn’t turn around and check a few times…

#17

Doing patient rotations at the end of college to get my PT license. Large obese white male comes in via power chair. 500+ lbs, oily hair and skin, and that sort of fetid sweaty buttcrack smell that only super-obese seem to get hung in the air around him like gas station perfume.

After the instructor and I manuever him onto the special queen bed sized pt tables built for larger patients and I’m blocking him so we can asses and get started the very tiny ghost white woman who had come in with him steps forward and in her Minnie Mouse voice asks if we can help him change clothes while we have him flat since evidently that isn’t something that happens often. I don’t know what to say but my instructor nods and takes the bag, saying something like that can be a goal for the day… exercises that help strengthen him to do basic activities of daily living like putting on clothes and washing.

So once he was on his back and his rolls separated OH MY GOSH the smell took on a life of its own. Like it should have had a color to it, or solidified into a evil fug with a face from a horror movie. My instructor offered to give him a warm towel if he would like to wash up a bit once we got his shirt off and he said sure but he would need help. So we roll him this way and that, showing him how to turn and reach and how the new bars that were going to be installed would help and finally get his shirt off.

This is where you will want the barf bag…
So now that he was topless the source of the smell became more evident. In every deep roll and crevice this dark, almost cottage cheesy Mold? yeast infection? was oozing. It was so moist and thick it would have made a decent condiment. The coup de grace was after we mentioned he should get that looked at and he said something like “yeah,whatever” and then stretched in such a way his deepest roll at his “hip” separated. Tucked into this crevasse was a large slice of rye bread. At first I thought it was regular bread turned black but after a small stifled gag I asked him to hold on and with a glove removed it. I was dumbstruck and sort of held my hand out and said “Uh, here, I found this stuck to you”

He started laughing and said ” I haven’t even HAD rye bread in like a couple months!” and smiled and me and asked if he could keep the oily smelly bread hung which was now starting to fall apart. I couldn’t take anymore ( I was also barely pregnant at the time and delicate stomached enough). So I left, but my instructor said when his wife came back in there he and she had a very long conversation trying to remember when he had rye bread last and ended up taking it home in a baggie.

I like to think he scraped some of his man cheese off and put it on the bread and ate it…

#18

I watched a patient’s heart stop on the monitor once. There are false alarms sometimes of course. However, I was experienced enough to know that it was true alarm. I called the nurse and told her she might want to check the patient. I remember her laughing nervously to tell me that she was talking with the patient at that moment so she could not possibly be without a pulse. I could even hear the patient talking to her cheerfully in the background. I double checked the monitor and saw a few beats here and there and looooong lines. Just as I was advising the nurse to manually check the patient I heard her drop the phone and go… “Oh no!” followed by the code blue alarm. That patient did not come back.

#19

I’m not a doctor, but I’m a nurse. I work with geriatric patients and there was this incident about three years ago. Before I explain, let me say that I DON’T believe in ghosts.

Anyway, this one time I was working the night shift and I was super sleepy so I decided to skip lunch because I wasn’t hungry and go to my car and sleep for 30 min. I got inside my car, covered myself with my sweater, set the timer on my phone and immediately knocked out.

I’m dreaming, but in my dream I’m still awake just sitting there. Someone taps on my car window and I see that its one of my patients (we’ll call her Dee). Surprised I asked Dee what the hell shes doing outside and she tells me she is looking for her daughter. I tell her to go back inside and that we will call her daughter in the morning. My patient becomes angry and starts banging on my car window. I kinda freak out and try to reach for the door handle to get out and calm her down, but I quickly realize I can’t move. Let me add that I frequently experience sleep paralysis, so even though I am asleep, I realize what is happening.

I fight it and try squirming my body in an attempt to wake myself up. I finally manage to wake up and my heart is racing and my forehead is a bit sweaty. I sit there for about a min, realize it was all a dream and roll the window down to cool myself off.

My break is over and I clock back in and see that my supervisor and two other nurses and huddled in front of a room. I am still by the station clocking when they see me and call me over. I walk over thinking maybe something was wrong with the ventilator or the patient fell, but my supervisor tells me Dee passed away while I was on my lunch break. Since most of our patients are DNR, I was not paged. It took a couple of seconds for the message to register and I freaked out internally. I got goosebumps but didn’t mention anything to my supervisor about the dream.

I don’t believe in ghosts or anything like that and I mostly likely had that dream because she was the last patient I interacted with before my break, so she was still on my mind and I was mentally going over my patients charts in my head.

#20

Not a doctor, but I once had a patient chart on my desk that seemed a little fuller than most charts. When I opened it there was a baggy stapled to the inside fill of skin bits, cotton balls, and hair. Chart note said that the patient believed they had bugs crawling on their skin and brought in the baggy as proof. They had been brought in by a friend who took the patient to the hospital and the urging if the doctor to seek psychiatric help because there was nothing there. It was just dandruff and hair.

She ended up calling several months later and I somehow got the call. She screamed at me about how we betrayed her because she came to us for help and we sent her away were she got a lot of medical bills that were stressing her out and making the bugs worse. Not the worst story out there, but I felt bad for the girl and she needed serious help.

#21

I posted this a while ago in a different thread, but I think it fits right in here!

“I worked in the dementia unit of a retirement home for a while, and I can tell you that it was by far one of the most interesting job I’ve had. It was sad in many ways, of course, but I think what some people don’t understand is that we’d never known our residents before the Alzheimer’s or Lewy Body or whatever else. We just know and care for them as they are. Even some of the most advanced cases are able to demonstrate that they are unique individuals who enjoy life and need love and belonging like everyone else.

That said, strange things happened every day. I’d say the strangest and most unnerving would be what happened with a resident that I will call Nancy. Nancy had very advanced Alzheimers, to the point where we had not heard her say a word beyond incoherent mumbling for 6-8 months. Every day, she would just pace the halls until it was time for bed (pacing is a very common behavior with moderate to advanced dementia; in Nancy’s case, she pretty much never stopped unless we made her come and eat or something). We would commonly try to walk with her and talk to her to keep her stimulated, but she would hardly ever even look at us. Just pace.

Nancy had a husband that also lived in the community– this home had a section for dementia separate from a normal assisted living facility. Her husband, whom I will call Wayne, lived in the other section. He would visit his wife every day, until he himself became so sick that he was confined to his room. When this happened, we started to grow worried. Even though it sometimes doesn’t seem like it, frequent visitors make a big difference to even our most advanced cases. Nancy and Wayne had been married for over 60 years; it was undoubtable that even through her disease, Nancy still received some comfort through Wayne’s daily visits.

I suppose we need not have worried. Wayne passed away early one morning. We (as well as most dementia care units) have a policy that prohibits bringing negative energy where it would not do any good, so Nancy was not (supposed to be) told about it. Later that day though, during her usual pacing, Nancy stopped. She stared into the upper corner of the room for several minutes and then all of a sudden started screaming. Now this isn’t as alarming as it may seem; there are a lot of screams happening all the time in dementia units. But it made all the staff come around to see what was wrong. She abruptly stopped screaming, and I *swear by everything I hold dear* she started repeating her husband’s name. “Wayne Wayne Wayne Wayne Wayne” over and over again. Keep in mind she had not said the smallest word in almost a year. I go up to her, touch her on the arm, and ask her gently if everything is ok. Nancy looks straight at me (which was also very abnormal for her) and says “he’s bothering me. Tell him to leave me alone.” Then goes back to staring into the upper corner of the room. Half of the staff just noped right out of there, while the rest of us tried to get her distracted by giving her a snack and a different activity.

From that day on, she started talking again. Not anything lengthy, but she would occasionally start trying to talk either to us or herself. Many times she referenced someone she called “grandpa” and started speaking to him in an otherwise empty room. While this isn’t an uncommon thing for our residents to do, the fact that it did not start until that incident the day her husband passed away, and still does, seriously give me the creeps.”

TL;DR: Woman who hasn’t spoken in a year starts talking to her recently deceased husband. I don’t believe in ghosts, but trust me, in that moment, I did.

#22

I flew to Florida ( from Ontario) to pick up my 95 yr old grandmother to take her back to Toronto. She has severe dementia and constantly was hiding food and Kleenex all the time for her protection in her mind. On the plane she kept talking nonsense and just before we landed she said to me ” I think this will be the last time I go to Florida, why are you here with me? I wouldn’t want to Travel with me when I am being so crazy all the time but I love you for doing it grandson.” Right after that she asked me how much she owed me for picking her up and then slipped back into comeplete dementia again. I will cherish that conversation for a long time. She passed away 1 month later.

#23

Nurse, not doctor. But I had a 91 year old woman who came in with a stroke. She was unresponsive and breathing at about 44 respirations per minute (hyperventilating). This went on for about three days. We were waiting for grandma to kick the bucket any minute. All of a sudden her bed alarm went off. We figured it was a visitor who had leaned on her bed too hard, because that can send it off. So I don’t exactly bolt toward her room. When I get in there, she is sitting up, legs swung over the side of the bed, yelling “I NEED TO PEE!” I get her to the commode, and get her back to bed. She starts bawling, saying she wants to see her husband (who is long deceased). She passed away two days later.

#24

Not a doctor, but I’m a nurse that works in an intensive care unit.

I took care of a patient who had a history of esophageal cancer. Awhile back, he had surgery, got better and eventually went home. Months later, he got pneumonia and came back to the hospital in respiratory distress. He had to be put on a mechanical ventilator.

He was stable; no blood pressure issues, heart rhythm looked great, breathing wasn’t terrible, responsive and following commands. All of a sudden, his blood pressure suddenly drops and he lost his pulse. We called a code blue and began CPR. We brought him back after an hour and continued to run tests to figure out why he crashed. None of the results of the labs or imaging were remarkable.

15 minutes after we had brought him back, his blood pressures drops again and he lost pulse. We continued coding him for another hour until it was clear he couldn’t be brought back.

His wife came in after the fact. She told me she couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation her and her husband had.

Wife: “honey, don’t forget you’ve got an appointment with the home health nurse this Saturday”

Husband: “well I won’t be here this Saturday”

Wife: “what do you mean you won’t be here this Saturday? Where are you going?”

Husband: “I don’t know… I just won’t be here”

This conversation happened Wednesday. He was admitted to the hospital Thursday and he was gone Friday at 11:30pm.

#25

I worked in an ER and the creepiest thing I can remember wasn’t so much an event as a look.

A 4 month old child was brought in because it had basically suffocated in it’s crib due to neglect. Maybe it was the shock, but watching as one of our priests tells her outside the trauma bay “Heaven has claimed your daughter”, the glassy, thousand-mile stare she gave as she asked if there were police going to her house and if she could go home.

Something that utterly wrecked everyone in our ER and she had this otherworldly, totally distant look because she was thinking about how she’s going to get busted.

Some days, your faith in humanity is tested.

#26

While I was in nursing school I did rotations in a small ER. We had done compressions on a full arrest for quite a while and the doctor finally called it. Afterwards they called it I was asked to do post mortem care. As I was rolling the patient with a coworker, the patient was rolled towards me and almost up against my body as the nurse cleaned her backside. At that moment she began to vomit and she kept vomiting, all over my white scrubs. Vomit sucks. But a corpse vomiting on you takes it to a whole other level.

#27

I’m not even a doctor so this most likely isn’t relevant, but i’ve spent months of my adolescence in the city’s children’s hospital, incarcerated in multiple wards – most prominently the psych ward.

after 9pm there are nurses on guard duty patrolling each dormitory in case anybody tries to escape and harm themselves during the night. the dormitories are very small, only four rooms holding up to two people, so it’s practically impossible to get past the guard. regardless, i kept my door locked in case.

at around 3am i’m awoken from my slumber by breathing. i groggily disregard it, assuming that it’s my roommate – before remembering that my roommate had *left the day before*. nope, it’s the manic depressive bipolar girl who managed to sneak past the nightwatchman, *unlock my door and watch me sleep*. i have no idea how long she was there for, but she just smiled and then backed out of the room.

when i woke up, there were tiny shards of plastic and glass all over the floor. that place was mental (no pun intended).

#28

Not a doctor but care provider in a home for developmentally disabled adults. (Some details changed for anonymity/privacy).

A long time client whose mentality/interests were comparable to 4-6 year old would cover his head with the bedding when he went to bed. When staff playfully asked him what he was doing, he’d tell staff he was, “Hiding from the ghosts.” He never identified the ghosts and did this for *years* so staff always thought it was just the client being playful.

At one point this client didn’t want to do his normal routine like eat, drink, stay up to watch television, or use the restroom. While bathing, the client said he was seeing ghosts and pointed. Staff replied, “What ghosts?” And the client said, “My mom and dad. Goin’na take me home.” Staff gently reminded the client that his parents had already passed away, that they couldn’t possibly take him out that weekend.

Within 72 hours of telling staff he saw the ghosts of his mom and dad, that client went to the ER, was admitted to the hospital, and passed away.

I was the one that had spent half the night in the ER with that client. I had taken him to the ER before and other routine medical appointments. This client was known for being rather combative during such visits but was unusually peaceful the entire time the last time he went to the ER. When I went to the client’s memorial, I told the client’s family that I thought he knew it was “his time” based on how calm he was. I didn’t disclose the part about seeing ghosts of his parents shortly before the ER visit.

#29

Not a doctor, but as an EMT a few years ago I came across the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.
So to set the stage a bit, it’s the middle of august and its over 90°f, >32°c outside, with 70% or higher humidity. Real miserable conditions outside… We get a call to help the police with a welfare check. Basically the police knock on an elderly person’s door and make sure they’re still alive or need anything. This was after the neighbours had gotten worried about the over 90 year old woman who lived in the house. She hadn’t been seen in about 2-3 weeks, from what we were told.

The responding officer checks all of the doors, and windows and gets no response, so we pull up the contact info from our last visit to her house. The young gung-ho rookie cop got the okay to break in to check. So he goes to break down the front door, he runs up to kick it and slips as he’s giving the kick, and falls into a bush. He finally got it right the second time and knocked the door in. Meanwhile me and my partner are laughing hard at him. The next moment he set foot in the house and turned right around. He was stopped cold by the smell… That’s when we knew we didn’t have a patient, but a body to find.

So a little more background to the environment.. this house didn’t have air conditioning, and was sealed up tight, no windows were open or anything. Add in the temperatures outside in the previous month and you have an oven of a house. We were walking into a house that had a deceased person sitting in it for over 2 weeks in an oven…

So we go inside, and the most horrific, eye watering smell hits us. It’s indescribable how bad it was, we could taste it it was that intense. So while we are gagging and trying to search the house, we finally found her body. She had been taking a bath, and somehow managed to die and fall into the water. Think bony, festering, maggot soup and that’s what we saw in that bathroom. We took one look and noped out of the house. I still have nightmares about that sight, and the smell.

The ME thought that she may have slipped and struck her head and drowned, or she stroked out and drowned in the tub..

#30

RN here: I took care of a lady once. She never talked, only whispered in this bright bubbly voice, like a little girl’s, but she said awful things, like “Can you push me outside so I can chew my fingers off?” And she would smile all time. She also had some really bad pressure ulcers (bedsores) from just basically being immobile for so long. We had to dress her wounds daily. She’d usually rip the dressings off pretty soon after we put them on. One night I went into her room and saw a piece of what I thought was dressing on the floor. Upon closer examination, it was a chunk of her own skin. A partially healed skin graft to be exact. Still gives me shivers.

#31

Couple creepy experiences I can share from my third year of med school, which is when everything is still new to you and you have no idea what to expect or how to handle some of this stuff.

Psych rotation at the state mental hospital. Went in to evaluate a middle aged woman with history of visual hallucinations and erratic behavior. Through most of the interview, she looked at the floor and responded slowly with one word answers. Very flat affect and clearly schizophrenic, but not really endorsing any of the symptoms that brought her to the hospital. All of the sudden as I’m thanking her for her time and about to leave the room, she jumps up and grabs the lapels of my white coat, pulls surprisingly hard, and gets right up in my face, close enough for her breath to fog my glasses. Didn’t say a word, just had the most intense look of fear on her face and just stared right at me, breathing hard. I froze. I didn’t know whether to push her away or to say anything, and I had no idea what she was going to do. It only lasted maybe 4 seconds before other staff came in to help, but those few seconds were so terrifying.

#32

I’m not a doctor, but I am in the health care field as a dental hygienist. the creepiest/most confusing thing I’ve seen is as follows:

we had a new patient come in for a cleaning. he was around 3/4, and mom said he had never been to the dentist before. not uncommon for what I see on a daily basis, so at first I didn’t think anything of it. I did his cleaning, and then went to take his routine xrays.

this is where things got weird. after looking at the xrays I could see that the child had already had a large amount of dental work done. he had around 6/7 composite (tooth color) fillings. when I sat back down at my chair I asked the parents again if he had ever been to the dentist. they were both adamant that he hadn’t, and also said there was no way a relative could have taken the without them knowing.

what the heck? how did this happen? who took him? where were the parents? had they possibly been in jail for a long time and not known he was taken to the dentist by someone else and had work performed? what if this wasn’t really their child, and actually some kid they kidnapped? his insurance had no record of him having previous dental work, so that was a dead end too.

I think about it often, but know that ultimately, I’ll never get an answer. it sucks.

*edit* I wish I had more answers for y’all, but unfortunately I don’t. as far as I know the family never came back in for his routine cleanings. I just hope that whatever the situation, the child is safe and being taken care of.

#33

My mother was a NICU nurse for 30 years and one time she showed me a picture of a baby maybe a cm or two smaller than a dollar bill placed next to it.

She told me it didn’t survive too much longer. That job wrecked her, I remember her coming home some nights and just pouring wine immediately.

I’m also never going to forget when she told me with tears in her eyes “if your are very unlucky you will lose a child in your life. I lose one every month.”.

#34

My wife works on the oncology floor of our local hospital. Often she has elderly patients who are severely confused. Recently, they had a patient on their floor who was mean to everyone. He was a wife beater, and got physical with some of the hospital staff on multiple occasions.

His health quickly turned VERY bad, and soon after this happened, the man, who was in a cold room, began telling people he was literally on fire. He even called 911 to report him burning alive in his room. He reported seeing people in his room telling him how horrible he was. He also claimed to see a horned creature emerging over the end of his bed telling him that “you’re coming with me”. She requested not to have that patient anymore.

#35

I felt like i should say something though i am not in the medical field. My Mom told me a story when i was young about my great grandfather often going to a bar when he was young and it became regular for him. Where we live in maine and seeing as he was a WWII vet cant rightly say i blame him especially since he was a medic.
But i will say in returning to the story that at certain period in time a man would often join him for drinks at the bar and they became well acquainted. Having never met the man outside of the bar prior to the several days that he would sit and chat with him he told us before his passing he always seemed like such a nice man.

Until one night he entered the bar and he seemed different to him according to what i can remember and they talked for a bit but the man was anxious to leave.
My grandfather left the bar about a half hour later and discovered a large amount of police officers at the hospital while he was driving past. To which he payed no attention too, but after arriving home the very same man who had been drinking with him every other night or so was on the news wanted in connection to several violent crimes at the hospital of registered nurses after hours.

#36

While on an infectious disease elective, I took care of a patient with a brain abscess. The abscess had knocked out the language centers of the patient’s brain resulting in an aphasia. His words were completely scrambled 90% of the time. Ironically, the patient was a computer scientist/software engineer responsible for coding groundbreaking voice recognition technology. The irony really creeped me out.

#37

Actual MD here

Nastiest thing was during my MS3 surgery rotation a homeless diabetic person who had maggots eating away at his feet and legs when we took off his boots. I had a mask on and managed to vomit inside of it from the stench, then vomit from gagging on my vomit.

Drunk, combative, foul smelling adults… just another reason why I love being a Pediatrician.

#38

Hope this isn’t too late, and I’m not a doctor, but I have a few family members who are. One creepy story I’ll never forget was a 90 something year old man who absolutely refused assisted living. This old man ended up falling and didn’t have a life alert thing or anything and crawled across the carpet to his try and reach his phone which was very far away at the other end of this big carpeted living room. Apparently he was just in his underwear and when the family found him he had carpet-burned off his skin practically down to the bone on his legs and arms crawling across the floor for hours. I guess when you’re so old your skin is very very frail. So they followed this trail of blood to find him. Exposed bone and everything. He ended up living though.

#39

Not a medical professional but when I was about 15 I had to get in some volunteer time to look good for college apps down the road. My family has a bunch of docs/nurses so I was shuffled pretty quickly into volunteering at the Utah University Hospital. I was a flower girl – essentially I trucked around the hospital and delivered flowers to patients. I believe it was floor 5 at that point, but it was the psych ward. Oftentimes families wouldn’t know why their loved one was in the hospital if they were on the psych ward so would send flowers. I don’t think many of the patients were allowed them because I had to deliver them to the front desk and not the rooms. I’d have to wait at the desk so the nurses could double check the patient was there. So a few weeks into working, I’m doing my rounds and there’s a lot of flowers for the psych ward this time. So I go and deliver and wait for the nurses to double check everything. As I’m waiting, this bearded old dude with the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen is wheeled in from somewhere else in the hospital. The patient looks directly at me and we lock eyes. He politely asks me if I, “know God.” Before we lose eye contact. I turn around and the nurses are all pale as hell and rush me out of there as soon as possible. Found it weird until I saw his face again later that night on the TV during news. Dude was the guy who had kidnapped Elizabeth Smart and while I’m not the stereotypical platinum blonde Mormon girl, I’m a skinny minny with dirty blonde hair and blue eyes so I’m sure he was more than happy to see me.

Tl;dr: Was a flower delivery girl in a hospital and got creeped on by the guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart.

#40

Disclaimer: Incoming bad grammar.

I’m not a doctor, but my brother is (he is still studying to become a gynecologist). Long story short, one day, he and his team got a pregnant woman with her baby’s head stuck inside her and everything else hanging out. It was caused by a failed attempt of having birth naturally by *midwifery* (after searching for it, I guess that’s the term I’m looking for in English). Anyway, The baby, from what I can remember, the baby didn’t survive and seriously endangering the mother. Unfortunately, as hours went by, it was too late for them to save her. She passed away. My brother was the one who was given the responsibility to separate the baby from her. And the only way to do that was by cutting the head off first. After its done, He immediately called our mom and broke down in tears. He said that when he saw the baby’s face, he couldn’t stop thinking about his own daughter back at home who was born just a couple years back.

#41

Not I, but current coworker in IT. He was previous EMT, responded to a call of an accident. Corvette rear ended a semi at a high rate of speed. Driver was decapitated. Head was found on the passenger floor.

#42

I worked in transport for almost two years. In school to be a nurse blah blah blah. The most terrifying thing for me would be one late shift in transport, we store our stretchers on an unused unit, fourth floor way in the back, old building (we have since the start of the hospital in 1951 added to it). Now this unit used to be the old Psych unit before it was shut down. It had unique room layouts and doors with windows and custom locks. Well I was putting a stretcher back up there in the room where we store them when I just felt like I was being watched. I walked out into the hallway and asked if anyone was there. Usually a fellow transporter would sleep in one of the far rooms because he would work a morning shift but lived far away and didnt want to drive back. Anyways, no one responded but as I stood there and surveyed the hallway, the wheelchair that was against the wall just decided to start rolling by itself a few feet as if it was nudged by something. I promptly noped out of that unit. I never went back alone.

#43

Not me, but my friend and old coworker used to work in a psych ward and mentioned there was one girl there who would speak in tongues occasionally and had a vocal condition that allowed her to electively speak in 2 octaves. One night while he was nearby her, her eyes rolled back, she started speaking in dual octave tongues, getting louder and louder until suddenly the power went out in the building.

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