Follow the doctors orders! How difficult is that rule? Why am I even asking? We're currently in a health crisis because people won't wear masks strictly because doctors say so. It's maddening. If you're not gonna do what the medical professionals say, then why even bother wasting your time and theirs? Why rack up the medical bills that most of us will ever be able to pay. Just stay home with scotch tape and prayer. Let us know how that works out.
Redditor u/vitortrv reached out to all the medical professionals here to see who wanted to vent about the foolish actions of some patients by asking..... Hospital workers of reddit, what was the dumbest thing you saw a patient do immediately after leaving?Light it Up!
mothers day smoking GIF
Giphy
Somebody lit up a cigarette (in a no smoking area) with a nasal cannula on, and lit their face on fire. Had to come right back into the ER.
your nurses are crap!!!
Not a hospital worker but I was in the emergency room due to a sports related injury. Finally got let out after hours of x rays and examinations as I was learning how to use crutches and watched someone with stitches on his arm start stretching like he was going to run all the way home.
He turned around, walked towards the desk and yelled "your nurses are crap!" after the cut on his arm reopened mid stretch. The woman at the desk looked so tired.
Slinged.
I saw someone pull his newly slung arm out of it's sling so he could put his jacket on as he was leaving the ER. He just stopped in front of my desk and started whimpering and yelling "Owwwwww! OHhh!" as he slowly worked his arm around to get it out of the sling and into the sleeve of his jacket. I'm pretty sure it wasn't very cold outside at the time.
I plead for him to stop but he ignored me. It was really bizarre.
Downtown!
hey arnold nicksplat GIF
Giphy
Guy was discharged from our emergency room and wanted a cab voucher to get downtown. We wouldn't give him one because he didn't meet our requirements. He walked outside, called 911, and told the ambulance to take him to a hospital downtown.
So Screwed.
Go out to the carpark, meet their dealer in a car, and shoot up through their IV cannula. Then saunter back into their room as if we couldn't tell??! He got security on him after that to stop him leaving. It just meant he spent his entire stay in the toilets smoking so much we could barely breathe on the corridor and we had to watch his visitors like a hawk in case they passed him something on the ward.
He was a nice guy too. Just screwed up.
Baby You're a Firework...
In the Darwin Awards is a tale of a man in hospital with a skin problem. The staff coated him all over with a cream which is highly flammable, warned him about it and told him to keep away from any sources of ignition. He immediately snuck outside for a smoke. Went up like a roman candle.
"bad luck"
Not a doctor but.... I knew someone that is a fitness freak to an obnoxious level. She had a medical emergency (intestinal blockage) one day that involved major abdominal surgery and removal of part of her intestine. The day she was released from the hospital, she went back to her insane workout routine, trying to make up for the muscle she lost.
She claims her doctor told her she could. Her intestines ripped open. She barely survived. She still claimed after the fact that her working out had absolutely nothing to do with her body ripping open and it was just "bad luck."
Deep Breaths....
paper bag GIF
Giphy
Patient came in for shortness of breath. She was seen and discharged. A nurse saw her walk into the parking lot, jab herself in the leg with an Epipen, and come right back in saying that she's short of breath.
Oh the stories....
- Inject heroin into their PICC line (big IV)
- leave to go smoke a cigarette and get hit by car
- steal from a 7-eleven while in a hospital gown
- escape from the ER and steal an ambulance senorkose
Off the Rails....
motorcycle jim GIF
Giphy
My brother works as a volunteer for the red cross. He mostly volunteers as a medic in ambulances. He told me how they picked up a guy because he crashed his bike after he didn't pay attention and got his tyre stuck in some tram tracks. About 3 hours later he was picked up again after he tried to ride his bike with one hand in a cast. First time round he sprained his elbow, second time round he broke his shoulder on the same side.
we can see inside of you....
I work in medical imaging where patients have to drink oral contrast for their exam.
Some folks really hate the stuff and one patient after being given the oral contrast went outside and dumped it in the bushes and came back in and said that they had drank it. Our front desk lady actually saw her dump it in the bushes and told us about it but we would have seen the lack of contrast in the image even if she hadn't told us. I talked to the patient and was like "we can see inside of you, we can tell if you drank it or not."
have some self control Sir....
When I was a nursing student I did a rotation on a transitional care unit in my first year of school(where people go to wait for a nursing home placement). Had an older man as a client who did not have any cognitive impairment complain about abrasions on his penis. Ok all is well and I call for a doctor to look at it to get some antibiotic ointment for it. The doctor can't come up to our floor for another few hours.
I tell the patient this and leave to go do something else. About half an hour later it's time to go take his blood sugar and guess what I find the man doing? Masturbating in plain sight and his hand and penis are bloody and raw. I literally had to have a conversation with a man my grandfather's age and have to tell him not to masturbate while the abrasions are healing and to take it easier once it was healed.
"tackle football"
I work for a medical device company that makes bone screws. We had a patient sue us for faulty implants - apparently his screws broke less than a month after surgery. This is a big deal, and not just from a financial standpoint, so of course we launched a full investigation.
Turns out the dumb fool decided to play tackle football less than a month after his major back surgery. Our bone screws are strong, but not "tackle football" strong.
NOOOOO!!!!
Giphy
Discharged a patient after hysterectomy (removing uterus, stitches at top of her vagina) and she went home and had sexual relations, busting her stitches and allowing for her bowel to protrude through the vagina. Had to have an emergency procedure to fix it.
Bless Me Father.
I had a patient that was a regular, scans every 3 months. He knew the prep and always fasted for 6 hours like we required. I asked all the usual questions and got the exam started. As soon as I inject the medication he mentions in passing how he was at mass that morning and had taken communion!!
This is an exam that is royally messed up and invalidated if a person has consumed anything expect for water in the 6 hours prior to the injection of meds. My jaw hit the floor! When questioned it turns out he's very religious and basically did not consider communion food or drink (host and wine!) Yeah, he had to come back and repeat the test.
Help The Woofie....
I heard on my neurology rotation in vet school. They did a surgery on a doberman for wobbler's (neck instability). Dog came back a week after surgery quadriplegic. The owners let it play in the backyard with it's brother and he got tackled. The dog never walked again. :/ I couldn't believe the owners were so stupid to spend 6K on a surgery for a dog and not follow through with the recovery instructions.
Zero stars for Yelp!
Now retired but one of the things I liked about "my" hospital was the food. We have a lot of immigrants in our area and some wise person decided to hire a pretty diverse crowd of cooks - Jamaican ladies making spicy chicken, Japanese cooks making sushi, Mexican dudes making made-to-order burritos, local barbecue, etc. And it was all very "clean" from a nutritional viewpoint - all of it was inspected by our RDs.
And just about every day I would see patients turn down this excellent food and have their families bring them crap from fast food joints in town.
Edit: well, this caught fire while I was asleep. Yes, the food was good - the barbecue vendor also offered fried chicken. But, the reason I retired a year early is because that hospital was being absorbed into a large health care corporation and we all know that never benefits anyone but the suits. From what my former coworkers tell me, that cafeteria now offers the finest food service meals delivered daily in refrigerator trucks and served fresh from the microwave. Hiring cooks who needed/wanted a job is probably not part of the corporate profit plan.
Armed.
Giphy
I feel like I am that person.
When I was 15 I broke my arm. Went to the hospital got a cast went about for a few weeks and got it removed. Great! I have my arm back. Now I wasn't the brightest kid and needed everything explained to me. No one told me not to have an arm wrestle with my fresh out of cast arm.
No one explained it was still healing. 4 hours after having my cast removed I was back in A&E and getting a new X-ray and then a new cast put on by the same nurse who just took it off. I have never seen such disappointment in the eyes of someone who wasn't my mother.
Do Decaf....
A lady came to our ER for tachycardia, and anxiety. The triage nurse, on a hunch, asked what she'd eaten that day, and if she'd had any coffee. "I haven't had time to eat (this now being mid afternoon), and only four or five cups of coffee." Genuinely clueless...
Light it Up!
Giphy
Countless COPD/asthmatics coming in for wheezing, SOB, rapid breathing. We treat them and the second they feel better they will state, "I forgot something in my car", only to leave and light up a cig.
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Redditor OpulentOwl wanted to know about the tv shows our lives would brighter with, they asked:
"What's a great TV show that nobody talks about?"
I love The Closer & Major Crimes.
So well done.
Take a look.
Brilliance!
"Most of Bryan Fuller's stuff (other than Hannibal, which did get some traction). Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies were both top tier." ~ nostalgicBadger
GiphyJK Forever!
"Counterpart. Great cast and acting, cool story, two solid seasons." ~ elevenghosts
"I want to go back and rewatch it - the other side had a global pandemic that killed millions. As a result they don't gather in groups in public, they wear masks, they have UV hand sanitizers everywhere. And all this predates covid by a few years. Also JK Simmons is terrific as always." ~ canuck47
CBC History!
"The Terror. (season 1 is AMAZING)." ~ MagdaCadabra
"It was really interesting watching this series because it is part of Canadian history. I watched an old CBC documentary about it and some of the oral histories from the Inuit suggest there was a group of men still walking like 8 years on from when they first abandoned ship." ~ TheMightyWoofer
Actors Galore
"I really liked The Knick." ~ ricomt21
"The Knick had such an incredible cast. One of those shows for which I actively searched out the actors once it wrapped. I’ll watch André Holland and Jeremy Bobb in anything! Chris Sullivan was sooo good with Cara Seymour. (Unfortunately, I can’t watch him in This Is Us… not my cup of tea.)" ~ CCMacReddit
Precious Metal
"The Detectorists. Extremely dry and very British, but a really heartfelt and lovely comedy about some metal detectorists in Essex." ~ BwingoLord1
“Any of you chaps see a trampoline?“
"https://youtu.be/2-iyz1UB1og That’s the clip that I usually use when showing people the show. Either grabs them immediately or meh." ~ thermbug
GiphyI loved Dead Like Me.
That ended way too soon.
The Knick? Meh...
Huzzah!
"The Great. It's...great! Hilarious and charming and occasionally a true story." ~ Dusk9K
GiphyMiss you Ted...
"Better off Ted was unceremoniously killed before its time, with ABC citing a lack of viewers. It pops up from time to time on reddit, but being from 2009, it's largely out of the cultural sphere these days. Which is unfortunate, because Portia de Rossi in particular is incredible in it."
"I was looking for a good clip to show the best of this show for people who haven't watched it before, and the Jabberwocky presentation, linked below by a brilliant person, is probably the single greatest example of the show I can think of. As a few have been asking, if you're wanting to give it a shot, it's on Hulu right now." ~ lifelongfreshman
On a Hill
"Mission Hill. Just too ahead of it's time." ~ MotherLoveBone27
"It could totally come back in today's culture. Well, almost; it's literally a major plot point that Andy, after losing his waterbed selling job and mucking about, nets a job in marketing thanks to his friend Jim, being seen by Jim's boss as 'youth of today' and thus valuable for marketing input."
"That spin doesn't really work in current times, so in the event the series does come back, it'd be interesting what the writers do." ~ digitaldrummer1
Sci-Fi Best
"Farscape is one of my absolute favorite shows of all time and it pops up occasionally on threads like this but I never hear it talked about in the wild." ~ sharrrper
"Farscape is probably my favorite sci fi show for so many reasons. Great writing, interesting world, and they didn't phone in the aliens with facial prosthetics and some kind of bullcrap hand waving about 'ancient ones seeding the galaxy.'" ~ emu314159
90s Genius
"Sliders is a show that was supposedly popular in the mid 90s yet is sadly forgotten. The first 3 seasons were awesome." ~ offspringphreak
Giphy"Sliders was awesome! I'll never forget the episode where he finally gets back to his timeline and left because the gate didn't squeak. Then a repairman comes out and says, 'I fixed that squeaky gate for you' to his mom. Thanks for the flashback!!" ~ PhatBallllzAtHotmail
Oh Sliders, talk about memory lane. Let's go get out binge lists ready!
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Reddit user CaptainLiv47 asked:
"What was the weirdest job you have ever had?"
They say it's never too late to make a change, so maybe there's still time for me to boop some sharks when I "grow up."
Clearly there are TONS of weird work options, though.
Exactly 12
"I used to work for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Weights and Measures Division— I was in charge of making sure all rulers were exactly 12 inches long."
- 0Ring-0
"I work in Quality in manufacturing. This is way more important than people think."
- WET318
"I picture you having this ruler made of pure platinum that is EXACT, then going to like school supply manufactures and just snapping random rulers off the production line to compare them."
"I also picture you with a big mustache and tiny glasses."
- dbatchison
GiphyShark Booper
"Underwater videographer for a National Geographic documentary shoot on Tiger Sharks."
"There were always two of us underwater for the filming. One with the camera and the other one just behind and above with a long aluminum pole with a crossbar on the end. We called it 'the Defender Pole'."
"If any shark came too close (these were some very large sharks) to the cameraman, you'd give it a gentle boop on the snoot with 'The Defender Pole'."
"The project was headed by a guy named Greg Marshall, who invented a device called "Crittercam" to attach to wildlife such as sharks, turtles, lions and stuff. He was the Nat Geo producer, and along with the amazing Birgit Buhleier, headed the documentary project."
"Monkey Mia in Shark Bay, Western Australia is a very remote beach resort famous for the wild dolphin population which comes in close to the beach most days. The greater Shark Bay area is home to a huge & diverse range of marine life - including a shitload of sharks of course."
"There is a resident group of international scientists who come from all over the world to study there (dolphins, sharks, turtles). One of the PhD candidates was studying Tiger Sharks (Mike Heithaus) and Nat Geo teamed up with him to film his research as part of the documentary storyline - including putting Crittercams on the dorsal fins of the sharks to see what they did in their natural habitat."
"The sharks would be temporarily caught on static lines, then measured, blood samples taken etc - and then the Cam would be temporarily attached to the fin."
"A lot of our filming work was to be underwater during the catch and release stage - Ian Kellett (the Head Cinematographer and great friend from then on) & myself, one of us filming, the other on Boop Snoot duties with 'The Defender Pole' as the shark swam away."
"The Crittercam would automatically release after some hours, we would retrieve the device and they would study the footage. It was fascinating."
- seavisionburma
GiphyGranny Stripper
"I once asked a guy what he did for work and he told me he 'drove a granny stripper'."
"I assumed this was slang for some road building or agricultural machinery, but nope... He was the driver for a 70 year old stripper."
"I think it was sort of a 'gag gift' situation, for example where she might be hired by the best man at a bucks night to gross out the groom. I can only assume she was ok with that."
- AnchovyMargherita
"I once had a job as a Stripper working for a printer. The job had nothing to do with removing my clothes."
"What that meant was that I took a brush and painted some stuff on tiny holes that would appear in the film they were using to develop the printing plates."
"The printer specialized in making those paper menus and similar things. ONE of our clients was "Busty Rusty" (or was it "Rusty Busty"? I forget...) an actual stripper that wanted some flyers put out on the tables at the strip club she worked for."
- RetiredEpi
GiphyOn-Call... Kinda
"I made $30k a year to be this guy's on call driver when he came to LA."
"He only came like twice a year for a day or two at a time and I got to drive his Bentley when he was in town."
"I wasn't an official Bentley chauffeur, though they do exist."
"I got my ARCA racing safety credentials at 16 and my NASCAR credentials at 18. Class A at 21 with every added credential possible and then I gave one of my buddies rich friends a ride home one night."
"We talked on the drive from Hollywood to Santa Barbara to his house and the next day I got a call from someone richer than him thanking me for getting his friend home safely and offering me the job."
- Toof-Less
GiphyFree Samples
"I once got paid to give out free samples of coffee at a gas station."
"I got there at 5am to be given this huge backpack with a giant container of coffee in it, and it had an air compressed nozzle that I would use to spray coffee into sample size cups."
"I was told to approach anyone pumping gas and give them one."
"It was a disaster. The air pressure was too much so the coffee would blast out every time and get all over my clothes. I kept burning myself as a result."
"It was a heatwave so no one really wanted them anyways and people laughed in my face."
"Multiple people also told me I should have gone to college, which I was in. This was just part of a summer job before my senior year."
"It was humiliating and I never went back."
- earthshifts
GiphyJapanese Cabaret Girls
"I used to live down the road from a cabaret club in Japan - like a place where you paid to drink with girls and talk to them, basically. Not overtly sexual but if the cabaret girl was willing it could be."
"I used to stay up late back then so often bumped into them coming back from work around 2-3am. Some of them were basically my neighbors and I offered some supper once."
"They rarely ate properly if at all and drank too much at work so they took to the supper with the type of gusto you only get when you're drunk-peckish."
"I guess they liked my cooking. And I was a decent listener I suppose, so they hung around more and more and got guilty about eating too much of my food."
"That turned into me getting this weird gig where I got paid to essentially make food for 5-6 cabaret girls per night and let them drink bottled tea and bitch about their clients till they sobered up."
"Sometimes they puked or had to crash at mine because they were too wasted; if that happened they often paid me a bit more out of embarrassment despite me insisting they didn't have to."
"Some of them made BANK. 10k to 15k USD per month on average. I was paid like 40 per head so could make 200 per night in cash usually. Did that 2-3 days a week while I was living in Japan. Weird but really not all that bad and supplemented my living costs nicely."
"At the end of the day, they just wanted someone to talk to after a long day and homemade food to come back to."
- threechance
GiphyThe Intern
"Internship at a sex shop…. Don’t ask me how but my school managed to find a spot in the financial sector at a sex shop."
"I kid you not, the lady was the only person working there and she had 4 interns managing the whole business whilst she was maybe a few hours each week at the shop."
"At one point she even said f*ck it, you guys are managing the shop as well."
"We had no idea wtf we were supposed to do."
"One time a customer came in and asked us if we could sell some weed. We said we don’t sell that here, he went away and we called our boss explaining what happened. She yelled at us through the phone for not selling him drugs because apparently she sold drugs."
"Note that drugs are allowed in our country but only to be sold at verified stores."
"After that (this was like 1.5/2months into the intern ship and we were supposed to be there for 9 months) we were all like hell no, we ain’t getting paid so we won’t deal with this shit."
"She was unstable as f*ck shouting at us if we did something wrong if she was at the office/shop. We left a note on the door that the shop was closed, locked the door, informed our school and left the fuck out of there."
- Nutella_Cooki
GiphyInventing Stories
"I spent the summer working a night shift as a writer/editor on the tv series Big Brother. Very strange. I felt like Ed Harris in the Truman Show."
"But the best thing was, we were all at desks on the big sound stage at Elstree Studios, where films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were made. Under my desk in yellow chalk, it said GOTHAM CITY WEST as they’d just finished filming a Batman film there."
"My job was to follow everything as it happened via a huge bank of loads of monitors. Then write up 'stories' that would go on the site and then be picked up by national tabloids and other websites."
"The problem was, if two housemates had an argument at 2.15am and I wrote about it and uploaded it, then other media would pick up on it pretty much instantly and then the Big Brother TV programme the next evening would have to cover that and show footage."
"So I was essentially the first line of deciding what got on the show the following day. And I would see everything totally live and unedited. Including at one point a drunk woman sticking a wine bottle up herself."
"But there was a lot of narrative shaping as well. You could make someone look funny by only covering the funny things they said/did. Or make someone look clumsy by only showing the times they were clumsy. Or stupid, etc."
"If they filmed you or I for 24hours then it would be easy to pick out the things we did at certain times and create a narrative about us."
- fletchindubai
GiphyStand-In
"I was a stand-in boyfriend for girls to take home during festival periods. Just so the girl don’t have to deal with the parents / grandparents grilling them for being single / leftover woman."
"Was a fun gig, I got free food, meet some nice and interesting people."
"I stopped now that I’m married, but my wife still wants to pimp me out for that extra $ LOL"
"This is actually very common where I'm currently based (Hong Kong). I hear same stories in China also."
"There are markets for male and female where I have heard people do trades where people go to each other families and after the dinners they go back to their normal life."
"But sometimes people pick people who are more presentable or even speak another language, I don't know why but I assumed it's for a exit strategy to tell parents we broke up afterwards?"
- Icewing
GiphyBeing A Table
"Human buffet table."
"I went to a sex convention to visit some friends who were working and ended up getting tossed a spare vendor badge. Spent the whole weekend hanging out in the Dungeon, chatting with slaves and their Masters and watching the live stage shows."
"Went for a smoke and ended up chatting with a lady who ran a pole dancing studio (they were doing fully clothed pole dancing demos on the stage all weekend) and we were just chatting when her phone rings and it's her employee bailing on a private event in like 2 days."
"She starts complaining about it, and I guess she was hired to MC a new year's event for a BDSM group at a strip club. Her staff was entirely former pro strippers so she had hired a couple of them to be human buffet tables, but everyone bailed. I jokingly said "fuck, that would be cool!" and she offered me the job."
"I got free tickets ($75/each) for me and my boyfriend at the time to the party and had a blast. Then at 11:00, I went in a back room, stripped to just my thong and was wrapped head to toe in saran wrap."
"I laid on a table, they layered all the food on me and then I got carried out on the table like a fucking queen by 4 big bouncers."
"I was told to have fun with it, so I would talk to people a bit as they grabbed the food. A lot of them had no idea it was a real person and thought it was a blow up doll or something until I would say hi."
"I scared a lot of people. Lmfao"
"At 11:45 I got ushered to the strippers change room, removed the saran wrap, had a quick shower, got redressed and went to keep partying."
"I made $750 and met so many awesome people."
- purple-paper-punch
GiphyYou've read what Reddit has done for weird work, but what about you?
We know our readers aren't all working 9-5 jobs.
It's your time to shine, you wonderful weirdos, so tell us what you do!
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