As vital as they are, hospitals are not exactly pleasant places to be and even less “fun” to work at. It can be pretty illuminating to hear from the professionals who have worked in one sharing the various things they’ve seen and done in the pursuit of saving human lives.
Someone asked “Nurses: What's your worst work-related story?” and folks in the medical field shared their experiences. So get comfortable as you read through, prepare to see some true horror stories, upvote your favorites and be sure to comment your thoughts and personal stories below.

#1

Lab guy here. Responded to assist in the ER when a 5–6-year-old boy was pulled from the irrigation canal he was swimming in during our first heat wave of the summer. Was unobserved and suspected of being under for a total of 7–9 minutes, completely blue and unresponsive to stimuli.
We worked on that kid for about 4 hours and finally got a weak pulse. I kept him on the monitor for the remainder of my shift, and he also got fluids, warming blankets, and oxygen. I left for the night before I knew the final disposition. He came in 2 weeks later with his family, running up and down the hallway, everyone getting big hugs and gratitude for helping to save his life. I am thankful I got to be part of that miracle. I’m pretty secluded back in my department and away from direct patient care, so I know it’s serious if I get called down to assist.

#2

Lady with sores and foul smelling discharge coming from her vagina. We spent days trying to figure out what had happened, labs sent, no infections, swabs clear.. it was an enigma.

Until I caught her douching her vagina with bleach. She thought that’s how you kept it clean.

Sex education is important guys!

Image credits: Thpfkt

#3

Labor nurse here! 36 year old female patient who had been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer in her 8th week of pregnancy. Her and her husband had been trying for a baby for 10 years. Was advised to terminate the pregnancy to pursue aggressive treatment, of course she refused. Was induced at 32 weeks and her entire abdomen was overcome with malignant tumors by this time. The cancer had also spread to her lungs and bones. Baby was born, sent to NICU and mom was sent home on hospice. She died 3 weeks later. Baby is doing fine today and just turned a year old.

Image credits: beat_of_rice

#4

Had a nice older gentleman patient who was tachycardic, but all his labs were normal. He seemed like he took fairly good care of himself, was a little disheveled but he dressed nice and had nice shoes. We initially couldn’t find anything wrong with him, but he had a peculiar odor to him that seasoned nurses would get suspicious of. I asked him if he had any infections on his body that he knew of, and he said “no”, but I wanted to do a thorough check, so we took off all his clothes, and he was fine, until I got down to his feet.

He was wearing an old pair of socks, and as I peeled them down, literally the skin around his foot came off with the sock. I was essentially degloving his foot. It was so vile, I couldn’t even get down more than a couple inches. It was raw flesh under those socks. The wound odor was so strong, I knew then that his feet were the source. He probably hadn’t changed his socks in several months. He ended up being admitted and given lots of antibiotics and wound care.

The memory of pulling down his socks will haunt me forever.

Image credits: SillyBonsai

#5

ER RN here. This, so far, is the only death I've experienced from work that I've lost a significant amount of sleep over. 24 year old male walks, again walks, into the ER with complaints of flu-like symptoms for the past 3 days. He had decided to come in that day because he started to develop a "rash" throughout his body that he was unfamiliar with. Sadly this rash was actually the result of a failed battle with bacterial meningitis, causing him to bleed internally and externally. By the time we got him back into the ER, he started crying blood and the terror in his eyes was palpable. He went downhill fast. His lucidity diminished with his blood pressure and the last thing he said before succumbing to pulse less V-tach was something about his mother that we could not make out. You could see his consciousness fade from his eyes as we started compressions. The code lasted close to an hour. At first we could still keep his oxygen levels up with mechanical ventilation, defibrillation, and medication, but blood was filling his airways faster than it could be suctioned out. He was bleeding to fast for any medications or fluids to keep his blood pressure up. He died soaked in blood and nearly unrecognizable due to his now almost uniformly purple skin and swollen face. We later found out that he was studying neurobiology, had a devoted girlfriend that was for all intense and purposes a fiancee, a large family, and many friends. He was an athlete who lived healthy. He had beautiful curly hair. This made the death tragic in a way that you just don't experience when a 80+ year old dies. It made the unanswered pleads to God for help that had been sent echoing around the room by his family all the more bitter. I helped drag and push him into a body bag.

Image credits: wolfbriar

#6

So, so many to choose from. I’m gonna go with the homeless guy that came to our hospital with an abdominal abscess (basically a hole in his abdomen). We were trying to clean his wound and assess the damage, and when we reached inside his wound, we started finding money. He nonchalantly stated that he kept his money tucked in there, to protect it from being stolen.

Image credits: DyingLion

#7

I once worked as a security guard at a hospital. We had this very old man turn up at the emergency room in an equally old pickup truck driven by what looked like a 12-year-old. The old man opened his door, stepped out, and stood up.
There were V-shaped cuts in his jeans that were absolutely blood-soaked from the knees down. He asked for a wheelchair. I ran and got him one. As he was sitting down, he explained that he was working on his lawn mower, and it had started somehow and fell across his knees. He said he needed his kneecaps ‘put back in,’ reached into his pants pocket, and showed them to me. Darndest thing I’ve ever seen!

#8

We had a guy come into the ER from a nursing home. According to report, he asked the staff for a glass of water. When he didn’t receive it quickly enough, his rational response was to start eating his fingers. By the time he got to us he had eaten all 10 of his fingertips away. Bone was definitely visible. There was still flesh stuck in his teeth and on his sheets. That’s a sight I won’t forget anytime soon.

Image credits: hauolihaole

#9

The worst smelling thing was a homeless man who came in with what looked like moon boots on his feet except they were surgical boots that he placed foam around and duck tape. They hadn’t been removed for about 3 months. He was also diabetic and had ulcers on his feet. We had to cut them off to be able to see what was happening. The smell permeated the entire emergency room. To top it off maggots were just falling off his feet and wiggling on the ground. He was yelling down the hall and rude to everyone but me and would only let me take care of him. He ended up refusing care and insisted that we tape his shoes back on and let him leave. Management finally said we could and we sent him off.

Saddest stories are the kids. 6 year old shot by a drive by and was being coded by the time she arrived. She didn’t make it and hearing the mother hear the news and screaming from down the hall will stick with me forever.

Happy story a teenage was out drinking with friends and they accidentally ran him over. We thought he had no brain activity and was going to be a donor. (He was transferred from another hospital.) We run some tests and he is able to squeeze fingers and respond some. He went to surgery and then ICU and was discharged a week later and his mom found me one day before he left and I was so relieved for the family.

Image credits: justwatchmefly

#10

Did a short stint in mental health. Had an 18ish year old come in. Had been found in the fetal position covered in s**t and naked in her bedroom by police. She’d basically been locked in there by her parents for years (most of her life). She kept asking for her mum cause she didn’t know how to do anything. Her mother was still trying to control her from prison.

Image credits: stupidperson810

#11

A Royal Marine, not long back from Belize, came into Casualty at the hospital I work at. He had a ‘cyst’ swollen on the back of his neck. The guy was in agony. 3 local anaesthetic injections later, the doc attempted to lance the thing and it moved. He peeled off the top layer of skin to reveal a massive larvae wriggling underneath. About the size of a 50p. It popped out without any problems and was huge when it was unravelled. The hole in the marines neck was clean, amazingly. Great example of a host.

Image credits: Tristania

#12

I was friends with a guy who was an ER nurse in a neighborhood with a lot of gang violence. One night, they get a gang member who was shot and in pretty bad shape, but still alive.
My friend left the room to go grab something, and when he came back, there was a guy dressed in a clown suit with a shotgun up his sleeve. As he raises his arm to shoot the gang member, security tackled the guy and arrested him.

#13

Not a nurse but a medical assistant. Was my first day on the job at an urgent care and was asked to assist with an abscess drainage. I said sure. Walk into the room, the patient is laying on the bed with her legs in stirrups. NBD, just assumed the abscess was on her inner thigh maybe. WRONG! She had TWO (2) abscesses, one on each side of her labia, each about the size of dates. So the doctor cuts into the first one. Now usually with abscesses, you cut it open and blood and pus drains out. This one though…..She cut it open and a green fluid the consistency of molasses started to leak out. The smell was so terrible, but I could not react as the patient could see my face and I did not want to embarrass her any more so than she already was having vaginal abscesses drained and all. When the draining slowed down, the doctor literally started pulling on it, basically roping it out of the wound. After packing the drained abscesses I had to bandage her up. After the patient left I was congratulated by my coworkers for keeping composure, especially for it having been the first procedure on my first day! I loved that job and miss it every day, I don’t really miss the craziness, that made my job interesting and fun.

#14

My father worked in ER at the beginning of his nursing career, and he said one of the hardest things he had experienced was a young man who shot himself in the face, but he was still alive.
All that was left was the back of his neck/bottom part of his skull. The man died a short time later, but could you imagine seeing something like that?
God bless nurses, they truly deal with so much.

#15

When I was a junior neurosurgery resident, I was called to the ED for a 30-ish-year-old male who ran his motorcycle head-first into a telephone pole while intoxicated. No helmet.
His face was smashed beyond recognition. (I have no idea how the medics got him intubated in the field.) But when I saw him in the trauma bay, he had a frontal open skull fracture down to his orbit. We took him to the OR right away to decompress him. After 2 cranial operations and 3 months in the hospital, he went home.

Image credits: YorkeFan

#16

Not me, but my grandmother used to work at the ER back in the sixties. She saw some horrible stuff, but the worst she’s told me about was about a car mechanic. This was back when, instead of lifting the car up to weld the bottom of it, you just parked it over a ‘hole in the ground.’
He’d been welding when the gas tube exploded. Since he’s in a small hole with nowhere for the flames to go, they completely engulf him. The only reason for them bringing him to the ER was to have a doctor legally pronounce him dead. My grandmother saw his remains. He had been crouching down, shielding his face with his arms when it exploded. She could see his watch; it had melted into his flesh. Otherwise, it was all just like a coal statue of a man.

Image credits: rean25

#17

Doc not nurse.
Probably resuscitation efforts on a 20 year old who died of diabetes. All I could think about was that he had clearly just got a haircut for the new term at uni as I broke all his ribs.

The other was another diabetic chap (64years old) who’d already lost one leg and had been putting off amputation of the other. He came in profoundly unwell with a white cold dead foot. I spent 10 hours overnight trying to stabilise him for transfer to a hospital where they could amputate it. I couldn’t, he was too unwell. I asked him multiple times to let me call a friend (no family) for him, but he declined. Intensive care declined to take him. In the morning we told him we weren’t going to be able to do anything for him, and he kept saying “so then what next?”. The conversation was excruciating. He wasn’t getting it. Eventually the consultant said “you’re going to slip away”, the patient said “I’m going to die?!” And the fear in his eyes made me want to vomit. He then quietly asked me to call his friend. He died 5 hours later.

Happy story: 98 yo man comes in with terrible heart rhythm (VT) and dropping blood pressure. Had a DNAR and daughter said he wouldn’t want to have cardioversion (electric shock paddles thing you’ll have seen on tv). He’s conscious and awake. I am giving him a medicine that might work, might not. I ask him what he needs, and he looks at me with a single tear coming from his eye and says “I know I’m dying” in that case, I say, what do you need? He wanted a sip of beer. This is at 4 am. We managed to get him his beverage. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and his heart went back into sinus rhythm and he was saved.

Image credits: lipeu

#18

I work as a nurse in a cath lab. Once was on call when we got a patient with a massive heart attack, no chance of a sinus rhythm so far and he was incredibly hard to resuscitate because he had had a coronary bypass and the bones in his chest were fused together like a knight’s armor. This was a comparatively young man in my line of work, mid fifties I guess. He died in our cath lab.

Anyways, turns out he had a very heated argument with his grown-up son that night when he collapsed and had his heart attack. Apparently, a couple of days later his son hung himself in the woods near where they lived.

#19

Posting one more that I just remembered: 20 year old patient in for a motorcycle accident sans helmet. Kid “survived” but was never going to be NOT a vegetable living off of 15 different tubes ever again; he literally lost too much brain tissue. That kinda stuff is par for the course in a level 1trauma center. What was hard was watching his parents stay in his room in shifts, documenting every little twitch and spasm and reporting it to us as a sign that he was “waking up”, only to have to be gently told (after assessing of course) that it’s just spasms with no conscious thought. They would also happily keep telling us about the welcome home party they had planned for him, and making jokes that they’re never letting him buy a bike again. One day they started visiting less and less, and eventually stopped coming at all. Finally, they made him a dnr. He was their only child.

#20

Not mine but my mom was a night shift ER nurse before I was born and this is what she told me was one of her worst (but in a long and convoluted way, best) nights.

So one night they bring in this dude on something, they don't know what exactly but he's going buckwild. They leave him restrained and alone in one area of the hospital to work the d**g out and hopefully be manageable by dawn. Eventually my mom goes on a break to eat because it'd been a slow night and she was hungry. She got her food out of the break room in the area of the hospital the previously mentioned d**g guy was and eats in there.

Eventually she smells something burning, goes outside to check on what it is, turns out m**********r had a lighter he wiggled out of his pocket and began to burn off the restraints. She knows she can't stop him at this point so she runs to the doors to alert security. In some twisted horror movie series of events, the doors are locked up but she sees someone at a desk on the other side. Too late, d**g man's now freed himself and is going to start chasing my mom.

She out runs him and manages to bang on the door once she makes a lap around the area. Not enough time to get helped this lap, she runs off again still being pursued by the maniac she's locked up with. Third times the charm, she's far enough ahead of him and the doors are unlocked and ready for her. By this point the cops have already arrived and two officers go through the doors to restrain him and take him in, the third talks to her and comforts her.

That officer was the man she later marries and has a child with. Eventually she also later divorces him but still considered it a great night because it lead to the existence of her child, me!

Tl;dr- Mom got chased around a hospital wing by a [addict] and when the cops showed up she met the man who became my dad.

#21

A man was discharged from a mental health facility a few days prior. He went home and built a gun in his garage out of pipes. He proceeded to shoot himself in the chest. His wife called EMS. He was talking when he came into the ED. He asked for water because he was thirsty. This is usually the first sign someone isn’t going to make it. The CT scan showed there was a bullet in the heart. He was rushed into my OR.

The trauma surgeon split the ribs and was feeling around for where the bullet went. Meanwhile, the front desk is trying to get ahold of the cardiovascular surgeon on call. He’s out of town and says to call one of his partners. The first partner is also out of town, the second and third are both an hour away at other hospitals.

The trauma surgeon finds a hole in the left ventricle. I am able to get ahold of another surgeon who isn’t on call but is 20 minutes away. He says the patient needs to get on bypass if there’s any chance, but he’ll probably end up dying anyway. Anesthesia is on a massive transfusion protocol, but his vitals are not improving. The surgeon opens the pericardium and it sounds like a water balloon hitting the pavement. In an instant, a liter of crimson colored blood pours out of the drapes and onto the floor. Anesthesia calls out there’s no pulse. Another liter and a half pour from the drapes. We now know where all the blood went.

The next 2 hours include filling out paperwork and calling the medical examiner. I have to speak to the widow and his mother about signing the forms for the ME. His death will have to be investigated by the county. I still have to get the meat wagon from the morgue and put him on ice. My shift ended three hours prior, but it’s my death in my OR so I’m responsible for all the details and paperwork.

This one isn’t as emotionally tough as the 12 year old who crashed a side by side on a co-worker’s property. He was declared brain dead the next morning. The staff lined the halls for an honor walk as his bed rolled by to the OR for an organ procurement. As the father of two young boys myself, I broke down and cried as the mother said goodbye. She adjusted his blanket to keep him warm and kept telling him, “it’ll be ok. I’ll see you later. It’ll be ok.”.

#22

Anything involving maggots. Unless we put them there on purpose.

Had a drive and dump that got admitted…lady of the night based on clothing choices…had roaches (just 3, but any is too many) crawling out of her nether region. God love my tech, she just stomped on them and made fun of me.

Got my arm stuck between a patients butt cheeks while inserting a fecal management system for c-diff management. I weighed in at about 115 at the time…he was 400+. He clenched and was screaming at me to get out of his a*s. Happened years ago and still gets brought up.

Had a patient who had a sacral decub that was HUGE. My head would have fit in the hole, no hyperbole. The dressing change was like trying to pull a deep dish extra cheese pizza off someone's caved in lower back, she had so much slough. She lived through that for months. Plus she was demented, deaf, blind, on dialysis, had AKAs to her hips, and had bilat amputations to her elbows. Constantly begged Jesus to let her die. Her daughter had POA and just wouldn't change the code status.

Image credits: andishana

#23

I’m not a nurse but my grandmother was. She was an ER nurse and while working the night shift they had a guy come in on an ambulance after being in a serious motorcycle accident. He was holding his helmet by the plastic face guard and the EMTs couldn’t pry it out of his hands. The guy was in such bad shape they didn’t have time to waste so they brought him to the Emergency Room. When my grandmother and several other nurses tried to get the helmet away from him he bashed her in the face and knocked out 75% of her teeth. My grandmother had a full set of dentures from age 24 on.

Image credits: MJDAndrea

#24

Hopeless romantic

my mother in law is a nurse and every year around christmas there is a man who comes in with a candle stuck up his bum that progressively gets bigger. last year she compared the candle to the size of a pickle jar

Edit: my old lady told me the guy can no longer candle himself do to a perfiated or permeated r****m, (can’t remember the word she used).

#25

This one is a sad story. My cousin is a nurse. She loves her job and I asked her this question expecting to hear a different kind of story but she said this one time troubled and disturbed her the most. My cousin is a tough chick n isn’t an emotional type but the whole situation effected her for a few days after.
A single parent father and 15 year old daughter were having a really heated argument. In the middle of them arguing he starts to have a heart attack. The ambulance takes him to the hospital and he ends up losing his life:( When the daughter arrived, My cousin had to tell the daughter her father didn’t make it.
the girl then runs over to him and just collapses on the floor screaming and bawling her eyes out bc her father is now gone forever and shes the reason he died.

#26

Not a Nurse but I work in the Emergency Department

Pt came in and said he hadn't pooped for a week. The doc prescribes some stool softeners and decides to send him home. *Without ensuring that he had a bowel movement before he left.*

Pt comes back in 6 hours later and is having severe abdominal pains and is brought in one more time. Pt is put on a bed and scheduled for some type of scan. All the sudden starts feeling nauseated.

Pt then starts literally throwing up his feces. He was obstructed. The nurse and attending run into the room. Nurse pushing on the stomach and attending holding his back trying to get the rest out.

Pt aspirated and had a heart attack.

The s***tiest way to go.

Edit: it wasn't a small amount of feces. The room was s**t lake. On the walls and ceiling.

Image credits: Ilbkaro

#27

I’m not a Nurse, but I am an X-Ray tech, and to parrot a lot of what most of the other horror stories are, is the families reaction to lost loved ones.

There was a freak accident last summer where a teenage boy drowned in water. He was dead before he arrived and they could not bring him back/get his heart beating again. I was standing by with my machine outside the room waiting to go in when the doctor told the Mom and a sibling that he was dead and that there was nothing they could do. The Mother basically let out an uncontrollable screech until all the air in her lungs were gone, curled over, vomited, and collapsed to the ground and passed out for a brief moment.. True heart break is what is the worst. I’ve seen a lot of people break down and that’s what gets to me the most. Of course it is sad when someone dies, but when it’s an 80+ year old that has been battling cancer or some other disease, it’s different. When it’s an unexpected loss and heart break, it’s very intense and disturbing. It’s something that no dramatic movie has ever even come close to creating in comparison to the real thing.

#28

I’ll go with the frequent flier with unidentifiable green goop oozing out of cauliflower like sores on her legs. The goop wasn’t anything that showed up on culture and often resulted in maggots burrowing in her legs. It also smelled awful. And she was really mean. She was about a one a monther for various reasons and ended up being found dead at home.

Runner up is the 516lb lady I managed to cath with the assistance of 3 med students. Found some food decaying in one of her folds. I think it was a Little Debbie.

Image credits: atxviapgh

#29

Had a patient who was self treating severe breast cancer. Her whole breasts had turned into pretty much septic ulcers/abscesses. She called for a nurse (lucky me) and said she thought she’d spilled something in her bed at lunchtime, it was a bit damp. When I looked I saw that one of her sores, probably the size of a grapefruit was oozing yellow goo and liquid. I gloved up to start cleaning her up and as I gently tried to reposition her breast with the abscess on it, it burst. Not sure where the pressure came from because I made sure I didn’t squeeze it so that exact thing didn’t happen, but it ended up all over my arms and neck.

Definitely the hardest I’ve ever tried to not show a reaction in front of a patient.

Image credits: MadxLime

#30

While doing our mental health rotation we learned of a lady who was severely sexually abused as a baby and child. She was very easy to talk to and charismatic, but while talking to her one on one sitter she literally unscrewed a screw from a chair with her fingernails and shoved it into a wound she made on her belly. She also had wounds surgically repaired that she would then rip right open and shove anything and everything she could find into it so she would have to be taken back to surgery. Also had shoved a broken lightbulb up her vagina.

Another gross one was during nursing school we had a group watching a Dr. replace a gastric tube that had become clogged. Well even though I was farthest away of the 15 students observing, I was hit in the face and eye with gastic juices from this patient. The Dr. pulled it out, and it flung all the way across the room to where I was standing next to the door. I had to stop clinical and go to the employee health office to get checked out, and have my eyes flushed.

Not as bad, but it was the only time so far that poop smell really got to me. I had a patient tell me she was clogged back there, but she had dementia and I just hadn’t checked her yet. It was on my list to do, but she wanted to try going to the bathroom. Well a few minutes of her being on the commode we walk into her sticking her fingers up her butt and flinging poo off them. We make her stop, and have her lay in the bed so I can instead dig her out. I was 6.5 months pregnant and started dry heaving non stop. Luckily a coworker popped her head in and offered to finish for me. Sadly she passed about 2 weeks later.

Image credits: Heatkat

#31

I’m not a nurse, I’m xray, but I’ve seen a lot of crazy hospital s**t.

There was an elderly patient dying of a septic bowel. You could smell their festering insides rotting away throughout ER and almost all the way to xray. Unfortunately, due to overcrowding there was no private rooms available to contain their last moments, so we had to smell them for hours. I never wanted to know what rotting necrotic fecal matter smelled like, but now I do.

I was asked to do a portable chest xray in ER. A lady was found down at the scene of a car accident, apparently she was thrown from the vehicle. When she landed she must have landed on something sharp, and it gouged open her armpit. I’m standing over her torso, trying to line up up my xray machine and all I can see is these big globs of adipose (fat) tissue hanging off her armpit, there was even grass and dirt in there.

Come years back I was working Xmas eve. Had a patient come in with his wife, not very old (50s), complaining of minor chest pain. He was placed in the bed area reserved for patients who are not that serious but having a bed would make them more comfortable. He had no problems coming over (in a wheelchair) for a chest xray. We chatted about xmas plans. Seemed in good spirits, just slightly concerned. Few hours (around 2am) later he takes a sudden severe turn for the worse, they immediately move him in a trauma bay, start chest compressions and shocking him. His wife was asked to wait outside while this was going on. Despite their best efforts, the ER staff were unable to bring him back. The ER dr had a cry before she collected herself enough to tell the wife. This hospital is in rural area and while the ER team was trying their best, myself and the unit clerk were trying to find any sort of person to provide support for the wife. But she had no family in the area, and none of the religious groups in the area were answering their phones. I just kept thinking of this poor woman, and how they prolly had xmas gifts for each other under some tree, and instead he passed away in the wee hours of Christmas morning, leaving her all alone. :(.

#32

Easily any patient that has DIC. I swear its a condition from hell itself. basically the blood clots abnormally, and clots will form throughout the small vessels, causing hypoperfusion to all the organs. The kicker is while blood is clotting throughout the small vessels, its not clotting in places that are needed like the orifices (mouth, eyes, nose, genitals) around any external devices like IVs, chest tubes etc, or any open wounds. So the patient is bleeding out externally while going into multi organ failure internally because none of their organs are getting blood flow. all the patients I’ve had with this condition barely lasted 48 hrs. the last patient I took care of like this couldnt go more than 30 mins without some fluid resuscitation (even with vasopressors) or his blood pressure would drop to like, I s**t you not 50/30. It was a f*****g nightmare.

#33

Not a nurse but a nursing assistant. I was pulled to the ER one night to help with a patient being brought in by ambulance. We’re a small hospital with only one ER nurse. Anyway, we knew this patient was going to be a mess after hearing from the medics that she had been on her floor for weeks. Her husband (who didn’t live with her) had been bringing her food but otherwise left her laying there. The medics had to literally scrape her off the floor with the help of a shovel. She was a rather large lady, and you can’t imagine the sores on her backside from laying there in her own filth for a month. We of course started cleaning her up right away, and it shocked me all the trash I pulled out of her folds. She even had a pop bottle lid in one fold that had carved a wound in her skin.

Image credits: cinn4monspider

#34

Homeless guy that hadn’t taken his boots off for a couple weeks because of the snow. Came in due to nausea and vomiting, but LOOKED good, just homeless guy weird. Start getting him changed into a gown for imaging and go to take off his boots, and what do you know? The skin came off like socks. Sick because of trench foot and gangrene. He lost some toes.

Image credits: Kartavious

#35

I saw a guy sneeze out his intestines.
He had a massive basketball sized hernia that had spread his skin so tight that all it took was a sneeze to split the skin and get everything that was supposed to inside outside.

#36

I’ll go with a sad one: 32 yr old male had bad motorcycle accident and was in our trauma ICU for over a month, barely made it and was somewhat miraculous. He ended up with a tracheostomy but was on his way to being able to discharge to rehab.

I had taken care of him three days in a row and the last day, late in the shift, he stood up and coughed really hard (we were getting him back to bed from the chair) and all of a sudden blood starting spurting out of his trach. We got him in bed quick and within a minute or so he starts coding (cardiac arrest). We call for trauma and ENT surgeons and start mass transfusing blood while coding him, family screaming and being escorted out. Slipping on blood on the floor while we were trying to keep coding, holding pressure on his neck because we didn’t know what else to do. One nurse says she thinks he stopped bleeding. He did— because he fully exsanguinated—bled out. We finally called it after about 45 minutes.

He had a tracheoarterial fistula which burst (artery around the trach that was worn down by the pressure inside the trach cuff) from a combination of persistent hypertension and strong cough and s**t luck. This happens in 0.7% of all trachs.

Nurses were sitting on the floor crying and same with the MDs…. it was a s**t night and a s**t couple weeks following.

#37

To be honest, the real “worst” stories most nurses don’t like to talk about. But here is a pretty awful case that is definitely up there in the category of “unfortunate souls”.

This poor lady we had who was constantly coming in with sepsis (blood infection). She had abdominal surgery and developed a fistula, which is basically a hole where there shouldn’t be one. Basically, the first one that happened was because her intestines stuck together and a hole formed through the walls of them. Every time the tried to fix them, she developed more. She had holes throughout her intestines, so she had a colostomy bag, but she also had developed numerous fistulas all over her abdomen from where her intestines had stuck to the inside wall of her abdomen and formed holes all the way through her skin. So she basically had a bunch of holes all over her abdomen that just leaked stool everywhere. We had an extensive abdominal dressing regimen, where we actually put colostomy bags over a lot of the holes. The whole deal took 2 nurses about an hour to an hour and a half, and no one wanted her twice because she was really needy, whiny, and mean, plus she was on MRSA precautions, so you had to grown up every time you went into her room. We changed her dressing 2-3 times per shift because no matter how well you did it, stool would leak onto her fragile skin and erode it further. It was awful, and even though she was a really difficult patient, we obviously felt bad for her.

Edit to answer a few questions: she was in her 50s, she is now deceased. The cause was actually unknown. She did not have hernia mesh and she did not crohn’s disease. I don’t remember the original surgery as this was almost 3 years ago now, but I do remember the doctors had no idea why every time they attempted to fix the fistulas they got worse and she formed more. It was very sad. She probably would not have chosen euthanasia, as she was very afraid of death and still very much in the denial stage up until the end.

#38

Ooooohhhhhh man….

Severely addicted [illegal substance] user admitted for sepsis and respiratory failure. About 3 or 4 days into his admission we find multiple broken needles lodged in his arms while trying to place a picc line. After a few more days he codes which was uneventful until the abscess that was brewing under his left clavicle exploded and sprayed pus everywhere. He survived that and went for an I&D which left a gaping hole in his chest and neck you could fit 3 fists in. His clavicle had rotted away from osteomyelitis and he had minimal tissue left connecting his neck to his shoulder on the left side. After 30 days intubated in the ICU he finally died. All the while his addicted sister kept stopping by and telling us how he was a fighter and was going to make a full recovery.

Yah right lady..

Image credits: newo48

#39

Too many to choose from, so I’ll just go with a recent one. Was doing wound care on a diabetic man who took 0 care of himself. It was a foot ulcer with necrotic tissue and gangrene, awesome. As I was pulling the old dressing off, i felt a subtle crunch. I looked and saw that yep, the dressing pulled one of the mans necrotic toes completely off with it. The hell of it is? He just sighed and said “not again”. Turns out just a few months ago, his OTHER foor was at that level of ulceration, and one of THOSE toes came off when he went to put shoes on…how he failed to notice the smell and severity (although tbh he was morbidly obese and couldn’t even see his feet) is a mystery.

#40

Not a nurse but a med tech, so I hide out in the lab, but the blood bank has the most “interaction” with the techs, nurses, and doctors and deal with emergencies fairly frequently.

The worst story was a toddler brought in just as “not breathing” to the ER. They draw labs, get a blood type/antibody screen done to take kid for testing and surgery. The OR nurse picking up the blood is chatting with us while we get everything tagged up to go and mentions “shaken baby syndrome” turns out the poor kid had several signs of previous abuse plus the signs of being shaken (blood on the brain, retinal hemorrhaging, etc.) And I believe family members got into a physical altercation at the hospital and security had to break it up.

More recently, a guy walked in to the ER stabbed and screaming, ironically his trauma admit name (basically a placeholder identity until they figure out the patient’s actual name/DOB) was ‘Trauma, Cu T’ as they had been using Cu A, Cu B, etc. He just got the perfect one for his condition.

#41

I was a new nurse during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. We were sad for the patients and terrified we would be infected and die, as not a lot was known, and there was a lot of misinformation — especially here in the South. Any accidental stick with a patient needle was enough for an all-out panic.

#42

There are so many to choose from but here are a couple, which are actually quite sad as well.

1. A lady who lived by herself had fainted on her patio and no one found her until 3 days later. She had been lying in her own feces and when she came into hospital we found live maggots crawling inside her vagina (and she was septic).

2. We had a very very obese and diabetic lady (250kg) who was only in her 50s admitted with infected/necrotic wounds on her apron. Unfortunately she had left it for so long that the only option left for her was surgery however surgeons deemed her unsuitable for surgery. She eventually passed away, but what was so eye opening to me was that we had to order a specific body bag for her because she couldn’t fit into a normal one. It took 2 wardsman and 5 nurses to get her into a body bag…

#43

So many-One very old lady was admitted from her home where her family was “caring” for her. I took off her shoes because I needed to do an assessment. Next I took off her sock & her entire necrotic heel fell off. Like literally fell on the floor. Thank God I had gloves on. The family said they hadn’t taken off her socks in over 2 months. Poor thing died 12 hours later from sepsis. Big surprise.

So much poop! Now I’m all for wanting patients to poop so they don’t get constipated, but sometimes staff joke around that they hope their patients have a big BM ten minutes after they leave their shift. People still die of preventable bowel obstructions. Sometimes when Milk of Magnesia, suppositories, or enemas just won’t work, ya literally have to go in after it & remove the “brick” or pieces of it, to get it started. So fun! One mentally ill person used their gaping butt cheeks to smear poop all down a wall in the hallway. So lovely! /s

I don’t mind blood, but pus smell is nasty.
One of the worst smells ever was a patient who had a brain shunt and also nephrostomy tubes so when we’d empty the drainage bag it was urine & cerebral spinal fluid mixed together. That one was about 23 years ago because I remember I was pregnant and I was hyper sensitive to smells. Luckily my coworker did me a solid by emptying and measuring it. I took care of the person otherwise, but couldn’t stand to do that one minute task.

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