"How did they survive that?" is a question doctors ask themselves more often than not.
It turns out the medical field is full of more than a few medical oddities, but are you really surprised?
After Redditor Raging_fox_01 asked medical professionals to sound off with, "Doctors of reddit. What was your "how the f*ck did you survive that" moment?" we can't help but cringe and yet be impressed all at once.
"It's about 11pm..."
First year of my core surgical training I was on call in a very small rural hospital. This hospital only had 2 doctors on at night, me and a medical trainee, and no emergency doctors.
It's about 11pm and this guy, 26 comes in after being in a fight. Blood pumping from his nose which was clearly fractured. I suspected he probably had other facial fractures underneath but he was awake and talking to me, otherwise seemed fine. I spent about 45 minutes trying to stop the blood, using all sorts of nose packs, pressure, even tried a catheter balloon to try and tamponade it. Nothing was working, and he was starting to go into shock, and I was basically sh!tting myself at this stage. Based on his vitals I'd estimated he'd lost almost 1.5 liters of blood so far. Nearest proper surgical hospital was 45 minutes away, and my consultant was at home, 25 minutes from the hospital.
Eventually I got four bags of o neg from the lab (the lab tech happened to be in, which was very lucky), put this guy in the back of an ambulance, still bleeding, and sent him blue light to the surgical centre in the city. Got a phone call about 3 hours later from a surgeon at the other hospital, saying he had brought the patient to theatre and been able to control the situation. He was probably 15 minutes from dead.
If you come into that kind of small hospital with that much bleeding, all stats say you're in trouble. The guy was very lucky his friends got him in so quickly.
"I was a surgical resident..."
Giphy
I was a surgical resident in a small town hospital. We got paged to see a patient for a speared piece of driftwood through the leg. We were thinking it was a nicked femoral artery and discussing if this poor kid needed amputation. When we saw him he was standing on the skewered leg taking a piss. Turns out the wood missed every single one of the vital vessels and no fracture - just muscular damage.
"The child was admitted overnight..."
I was working in the emergency department when a toddler came in after falling out of a 3 story window completely unharmed. The sad thing was they were from a rough neighbourhood and the Mum hadn't noticed for about half an hour. Apparently the friendly apartment pot smokers found him, checked him over and sat with him for half an hour and when Mum didn't show up went to find her. The child was admitted overnight mostly for social reasons but it's just amazing how well kids bounce.
"One guy got hit in the face..."
Every time I think this question, the answer is usually "meth."
One guy got hit in the face hard enough to let air into his brain cavity and was being an absolute arsehole (which seemed to be normal for him) and literally asked "got any meth?" when I offered some pain relief. To my understanding, he recovered without any need for surgery.
"Once had a guy..."
Once had a guy come in who had been cutting a tree with a chainsaw when it hit a knot in the wood and kicked up into his neck. Finished cutting the tree because he knew his wife would make him get rid of the chainsaw. Put a towel on it and drove himself to the hospital. CT showed no vascular damage, simple wash out and home the next day.
One of the paramedics who saw him said to his patient "that's a real emergency, why don't we ever get those."
"He gets brought into the trauma bay..."
Intern year doing surgery, guy gets brought in for a gunshot wound to the head. He was working at a jeweler that got robbed, his coworker was black bagged at the scene.
He gets brought into the trauma bay and it's pretty hectic because GSW to the head and well he's alive. Not only is he alive he's following commands but not speaking, probably from the shock.
Cops are giving us report saying he was likely shot with a .357 snub nose they recovered at the scene. So we do our primary and secondary survey and all this guy has is a single would wound to his left frontal scalp where the bullet went in.
So the team hasn't really seen something like this before. Sure a GSW to the head wasn't new but this guy was otherwise completely fine. The decision was made to get a quick frontal and late head X-ray to verify where the bullet was before proceeding to CT. Well we don't see any bullet on the films. There's no bullet on the board or bed or within the patients clothes.
The man was shot in the head and the bullet bounced off his skull. CT showed no fracture even. It was wild, never seen anything like that since.
"A week passed..."
An elderly lady had a massive brain hemorrhage, was transferred to terminal care to the health center in-patient ward I was working at as the doctor. Her prognosis was that she would die at any moment. There was no treatment, she was comatose, but breathing spontaneously through a tracheotomy tube.
A week passed, with no medications, no food, no fluids, still alive. Then she began to stir, came conscious. Delirious, but conscious. So we started i.v. fluids, appropriate medications, and eventually physiotherapy. After a few months she moved into the local nursing home, lived for a few years. She had profound dementia, but was able to move.
I wonder if the air-moisturizing device in the room (because of the tracheotomy) kept her hydrated, because a healthy person would generally not survive a week without fluids.
"Farmer was driving..."
Farmer was driving a tractor with one of those huge rolls of hay on the back. The hay was not secured correctly so when he stopped it rolled forward over him and bent him in half. All he had was 2 compression fractures in his lumbar region.
"I am not a doctor..."
I am not a doctor but when I around 23 I was stubborn and didn't go to the doctors for feeling weak and numb all the time with some blackouts. I brushed it off until I literally couldn't get up to walk to the bathroom. Thinking it was just a cold or flu, when I finally made it to the ER my blood count was at 3, regular is around 14. Doctor said he didn't know how I was alive still.
Wanna jump off the bandwagon? Then keep reading!
U/lit3rallyuseless asked: What doesn't deserve the hate it gets?
​Film and media are probably the biggest contender for being hated on randomly. It may seem harmless, but not always deserved.
Actors are people too!
Actors who played characters that people didn't like.
Really if you hated the character then the actor did a good job (assuming that was the role).
The best cartoons.
nice day summer GIF by PBS KIDSGiphyChild cartoons. Some are actually really good, even as an adult.
I feel like watching cartoons aimed at generally a younger audience allows for you to be reminded of some life lessons, I know I forget some things, or didn't realise others, or it at least partially renews my awareness of something I should still like or appreciate
This doesn't deserve awards, it's just my opinion that is apparently shared by many.
This man did nothing wrong.
Guy Fieri, he literally is the nicest person in the world but since he looks like he was electrocuted by mountain dew people want to saw his head off.
Even before that, I was witness to his other charitable work. A few years back, Santa Rosa was hit by some terrible fires and he showed up at a few shelters and personally cooked up and served some killer buffet food. No cameras, no massive team of PR, just a dude with an assistant to keep him on schedule to hit up other shelters in the area. Guy Fieri legit earned a lot of respect in my book for that.
You know who DEFINITELY doesn’t deserve hate? Animals. They’re just living their best lives, and need to be left alone.​
The best cats.
Black cats.
We got a black cat for the first time last year. I've since formulated the theory that black cats might get some of their reputation from the fact that people can't see them well in the dark and so they seemingly appear out of nowhere and they might be instinctually cautious because they know people have a tendency to kick them while walking in the dark. Our black cat is the sweetest cat I've ever known.
They get a bad rep.
Discovery Sharks GIF by Shark WeekGiphySharks. They are beautiful, complex creatures, deserving of respect and, like any wild animal should be left alone in their natural habitat, but they get this reputation as vicious bloodthirsty monsters. This is only because every shark attack is news, and only then because they are so rare. More people are killed EVERY DAY by mosquitoes than sharks kill in a year.
Any apex predator that has remained evolutionarily unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, whose existance predates TREES, is deserving or our respect and admiration. Shine on, you crazy cartlaginous fish, shine on.
So cute too!
Opossums. They're neat little critters. They eat tons of ticks that carry Lyme disease, (mostly) don't carry rabies because their body temp is too low, and they're the only marsupial native to North America! They get a bad rap because their first defense is to hiss and bare teeth, but failing that, they just play dead.
If you don't have the predisposition to hate them, you'll find they're pretty cute too.
E: this is about /opossums/, the north American species.
Kiwis, I feel for you, but this comment isn't about your possums.
​Hating on other people for just living their lives also seems to be a big contender for things that don’t deserve to be hated on.
This is so true.
Unemployed people. A lot of people genuinely are looking for work and did not want to lose their last job/it was beyond their control (like a layoff) but they get so much hate and called lazy by most people. I know too many unemployed people that are actually really trying hard. They definitely aren't lazy. (Not saying lazy unemployed people don't exist, but to be fair, so do lazy employed people too lol)
Leave the weather man alone!
Fox Raining GIF by Family GuyGiphyMeteorologists. They try their best to predict the weather based on patterns, models, and data. They're not perfect because predicting the weather is insanely difficult. When they get it wrong, I think we should go easy on them. It was probably an outlier result almost no one could have foreseen.
I've seen people get angry over the meteorologists for getting it right. Like they control the weather - it is their fault we are having rain, that kind of BS. Never made sense to me, but hey, I have plenty of relatives I clashed with growing up.
Please stop being d*cks to these people.
Customer service associates.
I hate when customers think that I, the minimum wage person forced to sit there and listen to them yell, am personally responsible for every policy they disagree with. Like, ma'am, if I had that much power and influence, I wouldn't be sitting here on a Saturday evening serving you.
Wholesome and necessary.
People don't deserve hate they give themselves when they are not doing too good at the moment.
I'm in a weird place and I didn't know I needed to read this. Thanks buddy.
If you haven't heard it from anyone else today, I'm proud of you.
It seems like people hate on things simply because they think they're meant to hate them. But you can always be the change and make an effort to stop being an a**hole about certain things.
No matter what though, sometimes haters gonna hate