Real-life isn’t like a medical TV show (shocker, we know!): not everything goes according to plan and miracles don’t always happen at the last possible second. Happy endings aren’t as common as on the screen and downright weirdness can pop up when you least expect it in the operating room. It’s tense situations like these that show just how much skill and grit some surgeons truly have. And their ability to keep cool under pressure is seriously phenomenal.
The surgeons of Reddit shared their biggest ‘oh, dear God, no!’ and ‘oh fudge’ moments with everyone in a viral r/AskReddit thread. They were completely candid about the times they or their colleagues messed up and went into detail about what they did once they realized they had a massive crisis on their gloved hands.
Scroll down for the most riveting surgeon stories, straight out of the OR, and upvote the ones that impressed you the most. (Though if you feel that you’re super sensitive or if you’re currently eating something, you might want to consider checking out something lighter in the meantime, like our article about cats.)
Do we have any medical Pandas in here today? Tell us about the biggest challenges you overcame at work in the comments. We respect medical professionals very much, and we want everyone to know just how much pressure they face at work.
Bored Panda got in touch with Dr. Andrew Carroll, the CEO/Medical Director of Atembis LLC and Family Physician, to hear his thoughts about the qualities that surgeons ought to have and whether it’s possible to learn to stay cool under pressure like the best of the best. Read on to hear what he had to say.
#1
I perform a C-Section on a hefty woman once. Everything was happening fine and I took the baby out and stitched the woman up. I found out later that day that the hefty woman was pregnant with twins and I forgot one of the babies inside her.
Image credits: DarkBo
#2
Nurse here. I was assisting with a simple vasectomy and the doctor was having trouble differentiating the vas deferens from the testicular artery. I stopped him just before he cut the artery. If he cut that, the testicle would die… not to mention make a very bloody mess.
Image credits: markko79
#3
I wasn’t present for this, but I got to deal with the fallout. Client brings his cat (found as a stray) to be spayed. The vet (my boss) preps cat for surgery and begins cutting…and can’t find the uterus or ovaries…
Uh oh. Cat is a male! And poor kitty just had his belly sliced open for no reason whatsoever. The owner was, understandably, *furious*.
Image credits: almightyshadowchan
#4
This one’s from my dad:
We were putting up a central line for a drip with an 18G needle (1.2mm- relatively big compared to most needles) in the patient’s external jugular, and all of a sudden the needle went right into the jugular. We all started panicking because usually with a drip the needle is meant to come out and only the plastic remains, but now we had lost the needle **inside** this guys jugular.
Before we could even fish it out it was gone, I looked at the fellow surgeons and nurses and before we could do anything we rushed him right into theater. After a few minutes we fished the needle out near his subclavian vein- closer towards the shoulder- and we breathed a sigh of relief.
Image credits: DrShlomo
#5
Not a surgeon, but I’m a medschool student. A student two years older than me dropped a brain tumor on the floor on the first surgery he ever went on. The surgeon laughed at him, then told him to leave his operation room. He was devastated and never saw that surgeon again! But he still got a good evaluation for that rotation…!
Image credits: Capucine25
#6
“When I was in residency my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen year old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I… and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I’d let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that’s all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine.”
🙂
Image credits: anon
#7
Craziest: probably a medical student passing out face first into the wound, then falling backwards and cracking his skull on the floor. He starts bleeding from the head and isn’t moving. Just total silence for a few seconds. We didn’t know whether to laugh or yell at him or what. Heh. Luckily I didn’t have to have that talk with the family. Favorite: when I was a student my chief resident was sleeping with one of my friends who was also a student. We were both operating with the chief of surgery when someone pages the chief during surgery. The nurse looked at it and said it wasn’t important. Chief gets annoyed and asks her I just call it back. She replies it was a text page, would he like her to read it? He says yes. It was my friend telling him she wanted to meet him in a call room after he was done. (paraphrasing here). Another awkward silence. Residents sleeping with students is a no no and having them page you in surgery is one too. But the chief of surgery was having an affair with the nurse, we all knew it, so after a rapid fire exchange of significant glances around the table, we all shut the hell up and finished the case and never spoke of it again.
- You might also like: 19 People Share The Most Ridiculous Things They Have Ever Seen In An ER
Image credits: 911Hawk
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