This article is based on the AskReddit question "Redditors who work in the ER, what's the scariest/dumbest/weirdest thing someone has came in for?"
[Source can be found at the end of the article.]
1/16. Had a lady come in for shortness of breath. Began to place an oxygen mask on her. She yells "I'm allergic to oxygen!" and pulls the mask off. I heard the doctor laugh behind the curtain.
-Hoax13
2/16. My friend worked in ER. She had an obese man come in complaining of a rash under his gut. Upon close examination they found several splinters. When asked, the man casually replied "oh, that must be from the love board." So the crew had to ask for details. Apparently, the couple had to use a board to pry the man's gut up to get to his penis for love making activities.
-11111one11111
3/16. My wife is an ER nurse. Valentine's Day tends to bring in the best stories. A few years ago a couple came in with lacerations all over their bodies. Apparently, the guy had duct taped a large mirror to the ceiling for sex and it fell and broke all over them. My wife got to pull little pieces of glass out of the lady's scull and back for a few hours.
-FundipTuesday
4/16. A 20 year old male came in for stomach pains. Said he was hungry. Hadn't eaten in two days.
-mech3
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5/16. My aunt is a nurse and this is her story:
Two extremely drunk men came in. One of them fell down the stairs and somehow he got glass in his eye. His friends pulled out the glass and sealed the gash in his eye with superglue. The meds had to soak his eye in acetone to get it open.
-brianofcortlandt
6/16. A lady who came into the ER, spilled her soda on the floor then frantically began cleaning it up with her hands because she "didn't want the government coming in to collect her DNA". Now you may be thinking she had Schizophrenia or something else that causes delusions like I did, but nope. All that was wrong was she had pain in her knees, overall though, she was healthy, just dumb.
-barrancabermeja
7/16. Currently writing this in the ER, during a slow moment. Probably the dumbest I've had was a husband and wife who rode in an ambulance together, both clearly drug seeking. For whatever reason, they were placed in rooms across the hall from each other and kept yelling back and forth about what drugs they were getting.
The ambulance was initially called for the wife, who had fallen down stairs (no injuries visible or on x-rays). The husband rode in with them and checked in, claiming the wife had fallen into him and taken them both to the ground. The husband's only injury was where he said his feet had tangled in the steps. There was no bruising, swelling, abrasions, etc., but he had clearly just manually pulled out 5 of his toenails. They were not contiguous toes, and it involved both feet. Just the nails.
-therunnykind
8/16. Morbidly obese guy came in for right lower quadrant pain. I Lifted up his gut and found his lost wallet. Solved two problems.
-ferretnoise
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9/16. Two stories:
A 30-something year old rancher that was out four wheeling with friends, they bet him he couldn't climb a tree...he did. Then they bet him he couldn't jump out of the tree and land upright...he did. Both legs broke. He had a pretty good sense of humor about the whole thing, and barely needed pain meds.
Another was a teen boy, came in because he got upset at a party and punched a window, the glass cut him. When I say cut him I mean a few tiny cuts and scrapes. no glass lodged in the wounds, and he needed exactly zero stitches. We cleaned him up and he cried endlessly. The funny part was that he had full sleeve tattoos, and when the doc brought up the idea that the tattoos had to have hurt way worse than the scratches, he just cried more. We had to laugh about that one. It is kind of callous of us, but something about that situation was just funny.
-Inittornit
10/16. Guy comes in with a salt shaker lodged in his rectum. Said he was changing a lightbulb then somehow fell onto it.
-Theedukeybrown
11/16. I had a 19 year old guy come into the ED on the night shift on 4/20 this year. His complaint was that after he got high he decided to masturbate and his urethra felt harder than normal. Not his penis. His urethra. I got to the room to assess him and he was in the bathroom peeing. His poor girlfriend was sitting in the corner of the room with her head in her hands out of embarrassment. He got back from the bathroom, stood in the doorway and said "you know....I feel better now....I think I'm just going to go home...". And then he turned around and walked out.
-MadDoctor47
12/16. A parent was convinced their child had internal bleeding because she ate an entire pint of blueberries, which caused her poop to turn a blueish colour. Her discharge diagnosis was literally "ate a carton of blueberries
-BooRadler
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13/16. I used to be an EMT and one time we got called to a house in the middle of the night for a patient with belly pain.
We get to his house and he is bent over a chair in extreme pain.
We get him in the ambulance and start taking him to the ER. The whole drive he's letting out these tiny farts that are deadly. He's also yelling that he just needs to fart. Can't we give him something to make him fart?
The ER doc asks us if there is a possibility of a foreign body issue and I say that I didn't check. Doctor sends him to the CT scanner where he lets rip with a fart that echoed. He felt better and left the ER. They had to close the scanner to air it out.
-dev_c0t0d0s0
14/16. Guy came in said "I think a bug crawled up my ass this week! I'm sleeping somewhere..uh..not so nice. I feel him crawlin around in there!!" He had a hemorrhoid
Or the lady that had an allergy list a mile long, including: "all poisonous plants" (duh we're all allergic to them hence POISONOUS) and "cocaine gives me anaphylaxis
-Kaatiekay
15/16. Guy walked in completely impailed with a 4x4 wood post. He was drinking and working on his roof when he fell off. His buddy got a chainsaw, cut the bottom of the post, and somehow the impaled guy stood in the back of the pickup for the ride to the er. He walked in the reception area and said "hey everybody, I hope you don't mind if I cut in line a bit. This seems quite serious" and promptly passed out. He survived.
-butterflytestic
16/16. Did a chest x-Ray on a male in the ICU with severe pneumonia. He was barely able to get a breath. On an X-Ray his lungs were completely white. White means dense, hard material (like bone or metal) lungs are a mixture of black (air) and grey ( tissue/mucus). It was weird with the compete whiteness and I wondered what kind of material it is or what happened to his lungs so I called the doc for a medical history. The doc replied thusly:
"Patient was on a bender, looking for drugs. He broke into his neighbors garage and found a batch of powder in his neighbors fishing tackle box and snorted the whole thing. A few days later he developed pneumonia. It turns out that the fisherman neighbors sister had died years ago and the fisherman kept her ashes in his tacklebox so she went with him whenever he went fishing, just like when she was alive. The patient had snorted the leftover metallic ash of his neighbors dead sister."
He died a week later.
-TriscuitCracker
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