As incredible and fascinating as the human body is for allowing us to move and experience the world, it can also be equally as strange and even frightening at times. The thought alone that our body can start attacking itself, like in the case of autoimmune diseases, sends shivers down my spine.
If you’re curious to know more about the strange things our body can hide, scroll down to find the list of the most unusual discoveries medical and autopsy experts have made while examining bodies. But be warned, as some of these can get quite intense.
#1
Young man comes in complaining of headache. I work in radiology.
We ask for history. Nothing to report, he says.
We scan his head. CT shows a bullet rattling loose inside his sphenoid sinus (kind of between the nasal cavity and the brain).
I asked the guy: “Have you ever been shot in the face?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that.”
To clarify, the guy had been shot in the face a few years earlier, never sought treatment for it. The bullet had somehow missed all the vital structures.
Image credits: lord_wilmore
#2
One of our cadavers had two spinal cords, aka split spinal cord malformation.
Edit: just a first year med student here folks. Unfortunately it’s against our school’s policy for me to even take photographs, yet alone share them. One of our groups during our laminectomy (removing the back of your vertebra to expose spinal cord) lab, once they cut into the dura mater (the tissue that wraps around the spinal cord) noticed a spit cord in the in the thoracolumbar region, side-by-side. Our lead anatomist was very excited to see this and had the whole class come see. Apparently it’s not the most incredibly rare thing, but it is the weirdest anomaly I’ve seen thus far.
Edit 2: So a lot of people are mentioning Spina Bifida. From what I understand in my studies, that would be the result of bones in the spine not forming correctly. This was not what we saw. There were no signs of prior surgery or herniation of the meninges.
Image credits: mctaylor241
#3
She isn’t dead, but this week i saw a patient with endometriosis in her lungs.
Somehow, womb-lining cells had travelled to her thorax and colonised on the lung. She previously had symptoms of coughing up blood while menstruating, but because the endometriosis was so severe, was on the pill to stop her periods entirely.
Then she came off it to have a baby, and after the birth, with her hormones all over the place, she developed two pulmonary embolisms (blood clots in the lung), and a few weeks after that, three successive pneumothorax (collapsed lung). The womb cells had tried to shed, and made a hole between the airways and the sac surrounding the lung, letting air escape.
She’s deciding now whether to let the surgeons cut out the part of her lung with the endometrial cells, to go back on the pill for life, or to have a full hysterectomy and remove her ovaries. Tough choice at 32.
Image credits: chocolate_on_toast
#4
Weirdest thing was in a woman’s intestine- a dead mouse. Tiny little thing…. obviously never got the chance to ask how the mouse got there as this was post mortem. Definitely unexpected though…
Image credits: Butterfly1014
#5
Did an autopsy once where the patient’s plasma separated from the blood. One giant plasma ball. It was really weird.
Image credits: faded_rose
#6
A mummified foetus – I was working in Africa and the usually very stoic Congolese surgeons called me in to theatre, gagging – the patient was an elderly woman with a protruding abdominal mass. When they opened it, they found that it was a long, long dead mummified foetus which as a result of an ectopic pregnancy, had somehow managed to both wall off after it died and somehow avoid killing the mother. Her body had encapsulted the alien tissue and over the years, it had slowly eroded her anterior abdominal wall to the point where it finally caused her to have enough symptoms to get something done about it.
It was horrific and the smell was worse.
Happily, though, the patient survived the procedure and just left the surgical team with a .. memory.
Image credits: anon
#7
My dad had a patient that “slipped and fell” on a whole mayonnaise jar.
Image credits: Sire777
#8
Sirenomelia (mermaid syndrome). Born about 5 months premature. She didn’t make it, and she was brought down to the pathology lab for examination.
Image credits: JobUpgrayDD
#9
Intrathoracic kidney AKA kidney in the chest.
Image credits: samanthajonesnyc
#10
There is a great book out by Adam Kay. He talks about when he was a jr. Doctor. PRobably intern in the US and Canada. A lady come into emerg with severe burns in her v****a. She had stuffed christmas lights up and turned them on.
Gives new meaning to the phrase she put the christmas lights up herself.
Image credits: butcher99
#11
Asked this to an emergency doctor friend of mine a while ago. Patient comes in complainjng of severe abdominal pain, nurses take vitals, ask questions etc. Eventually my friend sees her and, after a few questions, he has her lift her shirt.
The “severe abdominal pain” on the chart was in fact due to a gash so severe part of her intestines were sticking out of her. No one had noticed and she hadn’t thought to mention that her organs had started leaking out. In fact, she seemed just as surprised as he was.
Image credits: drushkey
#12
Undertaker here. Seen lots of abnormalities but afraid to be specific as it might give away the identities of the decedents as they are very specific. One that I can say is once I did a Autopsy on a person who had a history of various substance abuse. Upon opening him we found the inside lining of all of his organs to be bright turquoise blue. From his trachea down to his colon was bright blue. It was a weird but welcome break from the usual red and yellow.
Image credits: anon
#13
A colleague of mine saw an obese woman in the ED for flank pain. Workup included a CT that showed a frog skeleton just outside the ribs. A second physical exam revealed a necrotic frog carcass between some fat rolls with very irritated surrounding skin. When asked about it, the patient said she and her obese husband were too large to have s*x in the usual fashion, so they would get in the pond behind the house whenever they wanted to have s*x.
Image credits: TheSeattleite10
#14
I saw a patient with endometriosis (lining of inner uterus cells) in her nose. Meaning that she would get epistaxis (bleeding from nose) every month or so related to her menstrual periods.
Image credits: Ezekielshawn
#15
My grandmother has 2 stomachs, like a cow. Her doctor asked if he could publish an essay about this, and she agreed. I have searched and searched and never found the actual article, but it’s still pretty interesting. She is like 5’2 and 100lbs so no she isn’t overweight or excessively hungry. She also found out she was pregnant with my mom after having a tumor removed from her stomach. We joke that they left the tumor and took my mom out, because she’s kind of a human cancer lol.
Image credits: fucknite69
#16
Medical student here.
This guy was one of the patients of our tutor. The patient was 30 years old and he was first time in the hospital with something more serious. They took CT scan of his chest and the doctor found he had kidney right next to his lung. Normal functioning kidney just hanging out in the chest area and the other kidney one was in its usual place. Cool.
Image credits: anon
#17
Mate’s mum was a nurse and she told the tail of an old lady that came in complaining of sprouts growing out of her v****a, turns out she had a prolapsed uterus and had put a potato up there to help it and forgot.
Image credits: mishthegreat
#18
Father owns a crematory, we once cremated a man (with no clothes and not in any container) and along with his ashes came a massive belt buckle. I kid you not, we have no idea how it got in him but it was definitely there.
Image credits: im_upsidedown
#19
I was a combat medic in the Army.
Not super super uncommon (about 1 in 10,000 people have it), but I had a buddy with situs inversus. All of his major internal organs were reversed (heart on the rights side instead of the left, for example). As soon as he got to the unit, it was the first thing he told me. Wanted to make sure if he got hurt I wasn’t curious as to why he had no heart, I guess.
Image credits: PyssDribbletts
#20
My colleague was embalming an autopsied male and found two hairnets, numerous plastic tissue sample slides, a plastic urine container (with another person’s name on it) and over twenty seven latex gloves within his abdominal cavity…
Image credits: anon
#21
Not a doctor, but my brother and I were the first for my mom’s doctor. My brother and I are twins, but I was born a month premature. My brother was actually a few days over due. My mom got pregnant with my brother and a month or so later she got pregnant with me. Her body released another egg despite her already being pregnant.
Because of the way we were conceived my brother shoved me up under our mom’s ribs.
Her heartbeat concealed mine, so a month before my brother’s due date the doctor finally realized that there were two of us. This was in 1985 ultrasounds weren’t nearly as good as they are now.
I’m female. Another sort of rare occurrence, and I was born breech. My mom told me that the doctor had to pull me out because I wasn’t coming out on my own. To add to my mom’s luck I was sucking my thumb and tore her quite a bit because the doctor didn’t realize my elbow was sticking up. Luckily for her though my brother had already been born.
Image credits: lscreativecrochet
#22
Here’s another weird one… 3 golf balls in a man’s stomach. His cause of death was lung cancer. Still trying to figure out how he ate golf balls/how long they were in there considering he was on life support for 2 weeks before he died.
Image credits: Butterfly1014
#23
A real grub inside a tooth.
An old patient came to us with a longterm and several pain in her tooth.
The doctor extracted the tooth and put it into a tray. After 1 minute, we saw a grub crawling out from the tooth. This woman had lived with it for at least 6 month…
I think it is probably maggot.
Image credits: haolohaolo
#24
I worked in medicine as an X-ray tech/medical assistant. One day we had a patient come in complaining of a stomach ache. Considering the time of the year it wasn’t an abnormal complaint to have come in our family practice. So we run him through the normal test urinalysis, and an abdominal X-ray (KUB for those medically inclined). Well, he was a shorter fella so I had a lot of room on the film. This kind of X-ray is one large shot centered on your belly button, it’s mostly used to see how full of s**t you are.
I went to the dark room to process his film when something weird could be seen near his butt. There was definitely a lot of poop backed up but I couldn’t tell what was causing the blockage. I showed the doc the film and she busted out laughing. The doctor I worked with was usually stone-faced and serious about these kinds of things. So it was odd, we were all confused.
She asked me to go into the room with her while she asked him some questions. The first thing she asked him was what he shoved up his butt. I was so taken aback by this statement I almost missed what he said.
You see, this 40 year old man has diarrhea the week before and decided to shove a tampon up his butt to stop it. He tried to take it out but the string got caught, and then he “simply” forgot about it.
We had to remove it. It was disgusting, and I never did another procedure ever again.
Image credits: anon
#25
ER nurse; man comes in after a car accident, we do a brain scan for safety and find a 3 inch nail imbedded in his brain. Ask man about it, he says he has no idea. Admits he was once shot with a nail gun but HAD NO IDEA A NAIL HAD BEEN LODGED IN HIS HEAD. Had been there for well over 4 years.
Image credits: harperjefferson
#26
Had a kid, a**s imperforate, not that uncommon. Basically, his intestines ended in a blind pouch. What *was* odd though, is that his genitals were rotated. When you took off his diaper, the s*****m sat on top, the p***s was under it, pointing back.
A fair number of cloverleaf head kids.
An omphalocele that contained all of the large intestine, the liver, part of the small, and part of a lung.
Edit: am peds nurse.
Image credits: Jynxbunni
#27
Teratoma consisting of a couple molars as an incidental finding in a pelvis xray (it was in the patient’s uterus).
Guy in his 20s who had a neck xray. It was discovered that the peg holding his head onto his body was congenitally absent (sans odontoid). It’s probably a good thing he never played football.
Image credits: now_she_is_dead
#28
Guy came in for an outpatient MRI of his cervical spine. On the form where it asks if he ever had any metal in his body (specifically asks if any injured by a metal object) he selected no. Same with a verbal questionnaire. Also we do a keyword search in the patients hard chart for the term foreign body incase it’s documented- nothing came up.
He lays down, and I start taking images while talking to him though the speaker. During one of the image sets- he starts pounding on the inside of the scanner and screaming. Figured he was claustrophobic- so I stop the machine and get him out. Immediately he jumps up and starts talking nonsense and runs into the wall,
screaming he needs to get away from the ‘ocean’. I call overhead for emergency room staff to come down and security as he’s flailing, continues screaming and running into the wall before we restrained him.
The staff rush down, and he’s talking a mile a minute and explaining how he is inside of the poster of the beach that covers the entire wall in the room he’s in, scared out of his mind and hallucinating. Security restrains him, and he’s taken down to get an X-ray of his skull. There was a BB in his frontal lobe. It had just enough ferrous metal left in it to travel a few millimeters in his brain. In the emergency department he kept trying to escape, and was very fast. While unrestrained he got up (somehow convinced the guard he was ‘better’). Patient bolted out of his room into the main hallway. A code was called for a lost patient. For over an hour nobody could find him, until a nurse looked into a large storage closet. Poor guy was found in a pool of blood. He crashed into a large mirror that was leaning on the wall, and had severe lacerations of his neck, face and arms. Efforts were made to transfuse him but it was too late. Still haunts me how a simple BB from 40 years earlier could do that. Discovered his brother accidentally shot him with a BB gun when they were kids.
Image credits: Aj409
#29
Doctor here. Guy came in and told me he stuck a giant Cuban cigar up his ballon knot because he had an itch in his intestine. Apparently, his wife usually does it but she’s out of town. Okaaaay dude.
Teratomas (tumors) with teeth/hair. Pretty gross.
Another dude who was constantly putting screws up his ureathra because it “kept him hard”.
Image credits: dudeeewhat
#30
Not me, but my friends found a horseshoe kidney. Basically one long kidney.
Image credits: squidthesquidgoat
#31
In med school my anatomy group had trouble transecting the p***s on genital dissection day. Turns out the cadaver had a penile inplant. Two thick braided wires coated in plastic. We couldn’t figure it out but the instructor came by and recognized it immediately, liberating the shaft with a vigorous upward thrust and leaving the implant protruding from the pelvis. He also had some hernia mesh but that was less interesting.
#32
I work as a statistician in a major hospital so I see and catalogue ALOT of weird things.
Worst thing id seen was someone come in complaining of leg pain and showing signs of septic shock. After examination dr orders scans and theres 2 metal rods (one in each leg) that werent on their file. Turns out the patient has been to SE Asia to get a height altering surgery and the ‘dr’ had used items youd pick up from the local hardware store to fix the bones after breaking.
After extensive surgery patient lost the lower part of one leg and was lucky to keep the 2nd.
#33
I had a patient intern year who had an interesting story about his abdominal pain and constipation. CT showed a can of hairspray which had been inserted rectally but migrated up his sigmoid to the descending colon. It had to be removed surgically, rectoscopes could not grasp the end of the can.
Edit descending colon and pic.
#34
When I was working as an ICU nurse in San Diego, I took care of woman with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease for a few days (the human version of mad cow disease). She was only 44 years old, lived in Mexico. Her husband was a butcher… and they owned a restaurant in Mexico. They had 3 daughters, 18-22, and were a really lovely family. It was really really sad. My heart broke for them. There was nothing that could be done.
My unit had a strict “no more than 2 visitors overnight” policy, even despite my pleas given the situation (she didn’t have much time left). So I did what I hope someone would do for me: I told the family the bad news of the policy, and then gave them the good news that I would be pretending they were obeying it as soon as my boss left. The family donated her brain to University of Wisconsin so they could study it.
#35
Not me, but my boyfriend’s mom is a doctor for people with special needs.
One of her patients, an older man with Down Syndrome (among other diagnoses) appeared to have extreme abdominal pains that lasted for weeks. They did several tests and tried some medication but the pain wouldn’t stop. He also suffered from constipation and stopped eating altogether at some point. The source of his trouble remained a mystery for almost two weeks and the doctors were starting to get desperate. Then suddenly one afternoon my boyfriend’s mom got a call from her clinic (she’s the head of the department so they let her know when something important happens while she’s not on duty) that this man had finally been able to go to the toilet and among some stool was a blue latex glove.
Over the following days he passed about 20 of these in total and he felt better and better and luckily started eating again. Most likely he had somehow been able to steal the gloves from the cleaning lady’s cart and ate them without anybody knowing/seeing, causing the gloves to get stuck in his intestine while absorbing his digested food, filling up like little poop balloons in his stomach.
This really is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard, but my boyfriend’s mom said he had been known for eating weird stuff, like this one time he ate a T shirt.
Edit: TL;DR Man experiences abdominal pains, unable to s**t and stops eating. After nearly two weeks of this he starts s******g blue latex gloves filled with poop and feels fine again.
#36
Worked for the local medical examiners for a few years. Got a guy who died at home and wasn’t found for a couple days. His cats had snacked in him a bit (not super uncommon but still unnerving in concept). In his pockets, found a receipt for cat food.
#37
My girlfriend is a dental nurse. She’s only been working for a year or so, but she’s already seen her fair share of weird stuff. So anyways, a dude comes in and says his teeth hurt really badly so she and the dentist have a look around. They tell the guy that everything looks in order, but he insists that there must be something wrong. After double checking again they can’t find anything, but the guy insists so they send him to get X-rayed. They look at the results and, well, his teeth are fine, but his jaw is perfectly broken in half along the middle, the only thing keeping it in place being the flesh around it. After some coaxing, the guy says that he got into a bar fight and got hit across the face with a baseball bat, but he didn’t think it was that serious or that they would find out. Needless to say, they sent him to the hospital instead. I don’t know why, but the thought of your jaw getting broken along the middle is really discomforting.
Oh and there was also this other time where they found a huge fly between a chick’s teeth, and the patient hadn’t even realised it was there.
#38
My friend’s mum was a student nurse in her earlier years.
She was with the doctor in charge at the hospital when a young man was presented to them with a small bust of Queen Victoria wedged in his backside.
“How on earth did he swallow that?” she asked the doctor…
#39
A glowstick in a guys bladder. The dude went to a club and shoved the glowstick up his urethra.
#40
Nursing student here. I was taking care an older male patient who had recently been paralyzed from the waste down and had bouts of confusion and disorientation. I went to bath him only to see that his p***s was completely split down the middle from the urethra all the way down the shaft folding out the like a banana peel. Poor guy didn’t know it was like that and luckily couldn’t feel it. I think it may have been due to the catheter…
#41
Paramedic here. For our morgue rotation, Isaw a couple of cool cases. The first guy was a older-middle aged black guy, found in his apartment that was sealed very well. He was NEON GREEN. Not really decomposed but intact and actually green. He had HIV, hep c and all the co- morbities that come with it. They pathologist said it was a mixture of all his meds and the environment of the apartment. The next guy was a s*****e who jumped from a bridge, he shattered his legs from the landing in the water. He got caught on a piece of floating debris and half the body was submerged and half above water. The half above the water was mummified by the sun and the other half a bloated watery mess. The last guy was brought in as we were cleaning up. Approximately 40yo man, morbidly obese still wrapped in his blanket from home. He had an apparent MI from all the coke and physical exertion with the hooker that called 911 and dipped after taking all his money. When they took the blanket off, this guy had THE BIGGEST d**k piercing anyone has ever seen. When they opened him up his heart was the size of my head.
#42
A p***s with two heads. Only one had a true urethra orifice. Funniest thing, he had 8 kids. I couldn’t stop staring at his wife the whole time he was at the ER.
#43
First Assist for a Cesarean Section and The Baby I pulled up is Anencephalic (Meaning No Skull/Brain).
#44
A broken of piece of a cd in a wound. It was a mental ill girl who self harmed her with broken CD and she shoved a piece (3-4cm) under her skin. I was about to sew the wound when I thought it looked kinda weird.
#45
I’m a funeral director. I haven’t seen anything too anatomically weird. But I did have an innocent seeming old man with a tattoo on his shaft. Also, we had an obese woman and when we were embalming/bathing her, a sugar packet fell out of a fat roll. Just one of those little pink ones. It seemed like it had been in there for a while…
#46
In my anatomy lab, my groups’s cadaver had died from systemic complications of stage 4 lung cancer and when we got to the lungs they were two rock hard, necrotic blackened masses that looked nothing like the other cadaver’s pink and spongy lungs.
My anatomy prof took one lung out and wrung it resulting in this putrid black goo flowing out of the lung.
As he was draining the lung, he mentioned in an Indian accent
“This. This is what happens when you smoke”.
#47
Heard a story from a urologist when I was in medical school about a guy who came in for a vasectomy. During the procedure, the urologist has trouble finding the vas deferens. So he orders a few tests, turns out the guy has bilateral congenital absence of the vas deferens (CAVD).
But the guy had three kids…
#48
Neurologist here..we don’t get as many cool stories as the ER docs. However, when I was a medical student we had a cadaver with a very large and very tiger stripe tattooed p***s. This was the only tattoo this man had, and was very unexpected when it came time to genital dissection. Obviously, this was saved by the staff for use on all of our anatomy exams (you walk around the room to different parts/bodies and identify whatever is tagged, and this specimen was always identifiable by the only laughing medical student as they kept rotating around the room).
#49
I was a mortician for a religious organisation, and I have to say that The Butt Plug Conundrum of 2013 was among the more difficult issues I’ve faced in the field. A decedent arrived in my morgue with a bejewelled butt plug firmly in place within the r****m, which led to a very interesting issue- if the family had known that the deceased was likely to have had such an item, we’d be screwed if we didn’t list it amongst personal effects to be returned to the family, but if they were as vanilla as most of the relevant religious community claimed to be such an item would probably be considered a slanderous perversion. Fortunately, my boss was a member of the relevant clergy, so I simply removed the item and popped it into a biohazard bag for him to decide upon.
Edit- I actually don’t know what decision was reached, and alas, that boss has since shuffled off the mortal coil himself.
#50
ICU nurse here. Had to prep a patient with a rectal-vaginal anastomosis (a connection between the v****a and r****m). Every time I would insert the enema into her r****m, all the s**t water would come out of her v****a.
I honestly don’t know if this is my weirdest but it’s the first that comes to mind.
#51
Not really fitting with the question posed, but a medical oddity just the same. My Mother in law miscarried twice before she had my husband and his twin brother. She had some kind of cyst or protrusion in her uterus that once one of the previous fetus got to a certain week of growth, it would rub against the protrusion and rupture the sac…and the fetus would not be at a point of viability and would perish. So when she became pregnant with twins, she knew inevitably she would sadly lose them at that stage. The timeframe comes and goes, fetuses are still ok and growing normally. Comes time to have them (early as with twins) and lo and behold, not only are they in the same amniotic sac, but the other twin’s sac is around the one they shared. They were double bubbled. They had twin transfusion syndrome, so no one at the time had a moment to think about it (life or death emergency at that time) but the fact that they were double wrapped is more than likely the only reason they made it that far. Both survived the twin transfusion (very rare in the early 80s for one if not both to die.) Just an amazing story, I think.
#52
I’m a carer for the elderly at a hospital. A nurse asked me to help her insert a catheter into a lady with dementia, but when we propped her legs open there was a horrific smell and we could see something dark in the vaginal cavity. It was a teddy bear. We think it was there a while.
#53
ER physician and i think I’ve seen almost everything… really… it’s like anything anyone can think that is messed up they have come to see me in the ER! Welded c**k ring on for a week causing guy to lose his junk, fingernail polish remover bottle in an 85 year old mans a*s that ended up causing him to get a colostomy, multiple small vibrators on and active in a lady that said she couldn’t reach it…
even a terrible case where i found a big a*s square 6Volt battery in a woman’s v****a … she came in because she thought her pimp had put an oil can in her because black liquid was coming out, but turns out the moisture caused the battery to make connection and charred the inside of her to crisp!
#54
Not in the biz, but my Granda went for an ultrasound at 80 (his first) turned out his liver was twice as big, only had one kidney, and his gull bladder and some intestines were all twisted and backwards. The doctors felt it should have caused problems earlier, they just removed his gull and a some other stuff and he lived another 8 years.
#55
In cadaver anatomy, the woman we dissected was just filled with tumors. That wasn’t the way she died. One of her ovaries was basically entirely taken over by tumors. It was really odd to see, and odd that they had apparently never known/found out until after death.
That was the big one, but there were so many weird small things that it makes you wonder what there is weird about your own body that you may never know!
#56
The list goes on, but recently saw a patient with the complain of vaporizer cartridge stuck up his a*s #vapenaish.
#57
Not a pathologist but I work in a Coroner’s office. On more than one occasion we have directed a Post Mortem on someone who has died abroad, often due to heart-related issues. I once got a phone call from the pathologist after he had opened the body to examine the heart:
“This person died from a heart attack, yes?”
“Apparently so”
“You want me to examine the heart?”
“Yes please”
“…where is it?”
Some other countries routinely remove organs when they are determining a cause of death, then the body is embalmed and sent back to their home country. We still often have to confirm the cause of death, so I’ve spent a lot of my time chasing missing organs around the world…
#58
Every letter of the English alphabet tattooed on a piece of extra skin flapping on some chicks v****a. Hence the name.
#59
Not a medical professional but I have one. Bit of background info for clarity: I was born with a potentially fatal kidney condition and had a few close calls in my childhood. By time I reached my teens my doctors were really concerned that I would end up needing a kidney transplant before I even reached adulthood. Now my dad is a universal donor so he volunteered to go ahead and give me one of his if it would even give me a chance. Doctors were game and he had to get examined and stuff only to find something really odd and kinda upsetting for both of us.
Turns out that my dad was born with only one kidney. So that wasn’t happening. Lucky for me I ended up not needing a transplant anyways but my dad was really upset about that for a while.
#60
When i was in med school, i had a 3 y/o girl come in for a check up. Was checking her heart, and it seemed abit off. When i brought it up to the mother, she said that the girl had situs inversus totalis, or, in other words, all of her organs were on the opposite side of the body, including the heart. When I checked the right side of the child’s chest, the PMI ( point of maximal impulse) was normal and the heart sound was normal. What the kicker of this girls condition was that not only was this a very rare condition, she was the only person in the world to have the particular mutation. In other words, her mutation was rare, even among other people with situs inversus totalis.
#61
Not a doctor/ME, we had a car accident case with a single female driver in really bad condition. While being treated it was discovered she had a very large purple vibrator inside of her. I believe it was was still on.
#62
Not a doctor. I have a friend who has an AMAZING medical history.
Three types of DNA malformations.
He was conceived in his mother’s second much smaller womb. His mother didn’t know until she was almost due because the womb had nowhere to expand.
His ligament on his left leg wrapped around his calf instead of going down to his toes.
His left foot has two distinct forms of club foot.
He has spina bifida.
He has kleinfelters. (He isn’t XX female or XY male)
He was born with an extra vestigial kidney.
The stuff that protects your spine? His is 10 times stronger due to his weird DNA
He is missing a vertebrae. He had an experimental spinal surgery which was tried only 7/8 times/cases, he was the only one to walk afterwards.
He was given shots of testosterone as a teen to make him have a male puberty. Now many years later this has given him prostate cancer. Testosterone blockers have now meant his kleinfelters has decided he is woman and he now has b***s. He is okay with this since he is a magician that also does bearded lady gigs.
There’s probably more to his medical history, but that’s all I can genuinely remember right now.
He has been to patient/ doctor soirees where he walks around talking to doctors about how his existence disproves their medical theroems lol.
#63
I’m a pathologist and during training I was working with the local medical examiner and had a case of gunshot wound to the chest that penetrated the heart; however, no exit wound was found and no bullet was recovered upon evaluation of the heart. An X-ray revealed bullet fragments within the major arterial vessels in the legs which presumably occurred when the bullet, lodged in the ventricular spaces of the heart, was taken up by the last agonal circulatory heart beats and carried down to the lower extremities via the aorta through to the femoral arteries.
#64
My dad is a mortician and sometimes when accidents happen he shows up for the removal right after the coroner gets there.
He told me one of the craziest things he saw was when he showed up to a construction site where someone was pressure washing out a pipe or hole of some kind. The sprayer the operator was using had the nozzle back up somehow and backfired the rod that the nozzle hooks onto straight though the handle and into the operators head. Ever since he told me that story I hold the pressure washer sprayer so it’s not aligned with me at all haha.
#65
I also had to remove a nail from a guy’s head. He figured it must’ve went off while reloading. He had intractable tooth pain, so he got sent by his dentist for a CT and low and behold there was a nail in his cranium.
#66
I dissected a cadaver that had his liver shifted superior (upward) to the point where it was under his ribcage. There was so little space for his lungs, like the maximum width of his thoracic cavity was my hand-length (15cm)
His kidneys were also shifted upward, and the right one had this huge calcified cyst. It was VERY odd feeling some bone-like shards from where I thought his kidneys were.
#67
About a decade ago, I was doing a ride along with a local paramedic EMS crew to recertify my EMT license. We got a call for transport FROM the hospital, and directions to swap rigs to the bariatric bus. Driver calls on the phone to get more details and keep chatter off of the radio. We have a patient being discharged from the ER who is too obese to be taken home via any other really available transport.
Yay! A big, big fat guy. This will make a great story later, right?
We get to the hospital and the paramedic goes in with the supervisor while the driver and I swap rigs with the super a who brought the bariatric bus. Pretty similar to a typical box ambulance with better suspension, an lower deck height, a wider patient area, a stowable ramp, and a Warn winch (like on your buddy’s Jeep) up front to pull the patient in on the gurney.
We wander into the ER, curious about the hold up, and wait near the nurse’s station nearest his curtain. He’s big, maybe 450-500#, but surprisingly ambulatory (or at least standing). We’re getting disappointed, thinking we were getting a >600# dude and a great story to tell.
As the nurse’s finish up with him everyone starts to prepare to get the big fella on the super gurney for the ride home. And then he turned around, with the poor, under-sized hospital gown hopelessly wide open in the back.
What the f**k was that between his legs? It looked like 2 watermelon-sized fleshy cysts hanging down between his legs.
I looked at the driver and said, “He’s going home with tumors on his c****h?”
The driver looks at me and chuckles, and simply said, “Not tumors.”
It took me a moment to realize, those were his testicles. ELEPHANTIASIS OF THE TESTES. I still can’t un-see it, and I’ve seen all manner of gruesome road accidents over the years. This was the one that haunts me.
Do yourself a favor and don’t Google it. You’re welcome.
#68
I work as an embalmer at a high volume funeral home. One day I was working on a deceased who had been autopsied (very common, nothing out of the ordinary there) except when I opened up their cranial sutures to remove the skull cap before injection, I noticed something very different than what Ive seen many times before. There was a baseball size area behind the ear at the base of the skull that was missing. In place of the missing skull, were pieces of her ribs, they looked to be split in half And wired together and then bolted to her skull to form a sheild of ribs.
#69
Not a doctor, but my mother was born with a rare condition that, in 1968, should have k**led her.
A “twin” that failed never got fully reabsorbed into her body before she was born which resulted in a *massive* cervical teratoma (as in, was crushing her heart and lungs as well as her throat). The only reason she wasn’t stillborn was because her mother had a UTI which caused a premature birth by about 60 days (on Christmas, nonetheless). Only 1 surgeon was willing to even attempt an operation and he *just so happened* to be passing through town for a medical conference.
Due to the loss of almost her entire thyroid as well as oxygen deprivation issues she was supposed to be mentally challenged, but she turned out fine. Couldn’t put on any weight for most of her childhood and persistent temperature regulations issues (she’s always cold) but other than that she’s fine.
#70
Work in theatres with lots of other nurses who have worked in ER and one told me about a woman who came in with a buzz light year inside her… she had been using it to pleasure herself and the wings had released and it got stuck.
Not an anomaly but my favourite “what’s the weirdest thing anyone has come in with” story.
#71
Maggots in a guy’s suprapubic catheter. They were borrowing around the tubing, and the urologist had to flush maggots from the guy’s bladder.
#72
Pulled 5 carrots out of a 72 yo guy’s a*s 2 days ago. Each one was 8″+. He said his girlfriend put them up there to stimulate his prostate so he could achieve an erection. The funny thing is he failed to mention to her that he had his prostate removed some years ago.
#73
I used to teach human anatomy. Weirdest cadaver we ever had came in with cause of death listed as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (very common for our cadavers.) Once we opened him up we discovered a lot of weird s**t.
He had a baseball-sized tumor right at the curve between his ascending and transverse colon, which f****d up both sections. His liver was malformed and tilted posteriorly. We never found his gallbladder but there were still cystic ducts, so I’m not sure if the tumor wrapped around it or he has had it removed. He had a number is cysts on his kidneys, including once the size of a over-filled water balloon that was filled with dark green fluid.
The kicker though was a massive aneurysm at the end of the abdominal aorta. It was the size of a duck’s egg. It was so big when I first saw it I assumed it was a tumor on his spine and not an aneurysm. It was also full of plaque, like a centimeter thick on the entire arterial wall.
The problem with getting cadavers fo teaching is that we get limited medical history. There was a lot of shrugging from me when my students asked why something looked weird.
#74
My sister eventually went to the Dr about a hard lump in her stomach which ended up being a cyst on her ovary. By the time they operated on her 2 months later she looked like she was full term pregnant.
Removed a 13kg cyst. Strangely, she doesn’t have PCOS, just the one, unlike me who has suffered they symptoms of it all my adult life. She lost an ovary but recovered well.
#75
Hamartoma on ovary filled with hair and mucus.
Had a pt that had such bad nasal polyps that he hadn’t breathed thru his nose in 25+years. The polyps had deformed his nose to the point where he looked like he had a lion-like nose. It got to the point where he had polyps visibly dangling in his nose. Took 3, 3hr sessions with the roto rooter just to open a passageway.
Had a pt with a clouded over eye that stayed open when anesthetized. She was a crack a****t, the d**g had taken a toll on her looks, and it was really creepy.
#76
Med student here:
Mom comes in with her son saying he hasn’t been able to pee the last day. Kid asks if we can see him without the mom present. She obliged. Well it turns out the kid shoved about 3 meters of a clothe line up his urethra. The clothe line got tied up into a knot in his bladder an he couldn’t get it back out himself. Fun times!
#77
The cadaver used in my anatomy class was an elderly man with the largest inguinal hernia I’ve ever seen. Almost all of his small bowel had slipped into his s*****m, meaning it had stretched all the way down to his knees.
Apparently it was not related to his cause of death, but still, can’t imagine it was easy to live with your guts in your balls.
#78
Not me, but my dad is in ICU nurse, he was also a combat medic in Iraq from 2003-2004. He told me once they had this guy sedated because of all his injuries, and he saw something white coming out of the patients nose. My dad, thinking it was a booger, grabbed a tissue to wipe it away. Not a booger. He pulled it outwards and it turned out to be a huge foot and a half parasite that was trying to get out out of the dudes body, probably due to the antibiotics they had pumped him up with.
#79
When I was an ultrasound student, a woman came in for her 20wk anatomy scan. It was right before Christmas. All her family was in town, and she was going to have a gender reveal. Her baby had anencephaly (absent brain), acrania (absent skull bones), omphalocele (herniation of the intestines into the cord), and a club foot. The Ob doc asked her if she wanted to be induced right then and there or wait until after the holidays. She chose to terminate her pregnancy immediately. I can’t even imagine how she was feeling. The baby looked like an alien.
#80
Not a doctor but one of my twins was born with two holes in his p***s. One for wee and the other we wouldn’t talk to him about until he was of age. There’s a name for it but cba Googling it. Anyway, one quick operation and that was fixed before he was even 1. He has no idea.
#81
Removed a man who died standing up. His feet were so blistered from gravity filling his feet with his fluids that i could clearly see his foot bones in the like seeing something in an inflated baloon.
#82
Nurse here. When caring for the super-morbidly obese, it is important to do a thorough skin assessment to ensure they don’t have any wounds or other strangeness. It isn’t uncommon for people to hide food there because they know we aren’t going to give them some of their favorite things in the hospital. Sometimes stuff gets in there by accident, like wrappers or, in one instance, a small remote control. Sometimes, tragedy strikes…
Weirdest thing I ever found hiding in a fold: a dead mouse. Poor thing crawled in there and got stuck. It had been dead for a bit by the time I found it, too.
#83
*NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH*
Used to work in a psychiatric hospital. Had many trips to A&E due to somebody trying to insert objects into their body as a form of self harm. And not just ingesting it (although people swallowing knives/blades and other objects was common), but literally inserting items into their limbs. Pens were really common and some patients would show me on their arms where the pens still are and could move them around under the skin etc. I wasn’t usually squeamish in that job but that made me nauseous. It took a lot of effort to get them in which I think is the bit that disturbed me the most.
#84
I’m none of those workers but my mom’s new husband had a kidney stone once. It turned out it is not just a stone, practically his whole kidney turned into stone. Cannot imagine how painfull it was. After surgery they give it to us but they say the NEED it back after a week for educational purposes. It was a half-fist size bean-formed shimmering black stone. Shame i forget to film it.
#85
I’m a medical student so I haven’t seen much, but the first autopsy I attended was interesting.
The medical examiner found a cyst in the spleen about the size of a cantaloupe. The examiner told us to back away while she popped it because of the potential burst of fluid/pus. But it didn’t burst, instead we heard a huge crack! It had calcified and looked like a huge, pus-filled ostrich egg.
The examiner was visibly shaken and said she hadn’t seen anything of that size and that we should feel lucky that we got to witness it.
Not sure if I feel lucky, but it was certainly interesting!
#86
Can’t say I’m a doctor(or anything else), but due to serval surgical mishaps from my father getting put under, the hospital in my area is now legally required to make you sign a form that says you don’t have atypical anatomy.
For clarification, my father went in to get his appendicitis checked out and the doctor didn’t listen to him when he said that his appendix wasn’t where it was supposed to be. The doctor straight up told him he was lying and then tried to remove it normally.
To make a long story short, that didn’t go so well. After the surgery, my father was woken up to the doctor apologizing (never a good thing to do to a patient), saying my father was right about everything. Well, except for the foot long appendix that had grown from its normal place and was basically strangling his liver.
Again, sorry I’m not a doctor or a medical professional. You guys rock and I wish I had the guts(sorry pun) to go through with what you guys do.
#87
I work in mortuaries in England. There’s the usual beheadings, train jumpers and decomps etc but as to weird you don’t get much of interest outside of the occasionally interesting history of death (most are just depressing).
I did once do a post mortem on an elderly (84) gentleman and while the doctor was dissecting his bladder they found and old felt-tip pen lid (anyone growing up before the millennium will recognise the type I’m talking about, the tops look crenellated like a castle walls) not a comfortable item to of inserted up your urethra but apparently at some time in his (hopefully) youth he had done exactly that, maybe he’d put the whole pen up and lost the lid? Not sure…
A friend of mine once did a post mortem and a 600 year old knight that was dug up underneath st bees abbey. They’d preserved him so well that his clothes, hair, everything was still intact. He even had some blood left in him when they eviscerated him, crazy really.
Tbh I think that once you’ve been doing it for a while your idea of weird changes a bit and it’s hard to pick out what you’d be interested in as it’s all a bit ubiquitous to us.
#88
My A+P prof told me that when he first started teaching they got a hermaphrodite cadaver.
#89
Probably the autopsy I did on conjoined twins. Posterior thoracic fusion. Two mouths into 1 esophagus to 1 stomach split at the pylorus into 2 sets of intestines, then it all came back together in this cloaca style mess at the bottom. Heads were in such close proximity that their occiputs moved laterally to accommodate for room and fused together too. Which in turn made the spinal column make a 90 rotation to reach the base of the brain. All kinds of crazy stuff on that one. Oh, and it was the first autopsy I did in medical school.
#90
MRI:
2 kidneys(normal)
2 bladders, urethras, vaginas and uteruses.
#91
My SIL is probably the strangest medical case I know. She’d been feeling “off” for a few months but couldn’t figure out why. One night she starts having really intense RLQ pain and goes to the ER. Everyone assumed appendicitis and took her to the OR. They open her up and her appendix is fine. Her colon, however, had a very large tumor in it. That’s not the strange part.
They send the tumor to the lab and confirm it’s a carcinoid tumor. Those are very rare in the first place, but her case was esp rare, as the doctors told her 99% of the time it’s found in elderly black men. She was a 17 year old white girl. She was treated for the cancer and has been cancer free for 14 years.
#92
Theatre nurse here. Probably not to weird but we started a gastric sleeve on a huge women, stuck the camera in and she was riddled with cancer. Really weird she had no symptoms. She ended up losing all her weight without the sleeve.
#93
During an autopsy, we found a plastic shamrock that was about 3-4″ big in some guy’s stomach.
#94
Interned with an ME and we had a case where the death was very, very sudden. He didn’t really complain about any pain or anything, and then was gone. We open him up and there’s blood behind a kidney. Almost an entire liter of blood in the cavity, with no sign at all of internal bleeding.
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