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Lawyers Describe Which Cases They Wish They Had Never Won

Regret is a real feeling....

Lawyers have a difficult job. Yes we make fun of them and often make their lives miserable but they are just doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. They are human... contrary to popular belief. They have plenty of moments and mistakes they regret. And in hindsight they often look back at a win as a fail.

Redditor u/Mr-Ard wanted to know if any of the law professionals out there were wiling to fess up by asking.... Lawyers of reddit, what case you wish you never won?

Was I happy I won? 

Client hired IT consultants from another consulting firm. The firm basically found qualified people and rented them out, sort of like a recruiter but they get fees forever (common in IT consulting). Client eventually thought he was paying too much (even though he agreed to it), and stopped paying. He owed $200k.

In NJ, you need to be licensed as a consulting firm. If you're not, you can't sue for your unpaid bills. They sued anyway, tried to argue some loopholes. We won, client paid nothing beyond my legal fees.

Was I happy I won? Meh. Gave me a great story, great for my reputation. Doesn't feel great helping out a douchebag though. I'm an underling who had no role in being able to reject the case, so that was a little bit of a consolation at least. CarolaMckey

No Coaching....

Giphy

Not a lawyer, but I became friends with one after my friend took USAA to court after they wouldn't pay a claim when their member rear ended her on her scooter after she stopped for a stop sign. Their lawyer kept talking to me to try to coach my friend on what to say, but she just wouldn't listen. He was a nice guy and wanted to help her since his client was obviously in the wrong. Unfortunately, USAA won and she was stuck with a $12k ER bill. AggravatingEducator4

Sorry....

I represented a man accused of murder. I was able to get him off on a technicality during his arrest but it was pretty clear he was guilty of the murder. I truly regret getting him off because he was most definitely guilty. 2stepgarage

None.

Giphy

Lifelong public defender, here. None.

I will also say that my feelings for a client are rarely impacted by what they are accused of having done. I've had accused murderers whom I enjoyed working with. I've had accused shoplifters I've wanted to strangle. aolowa

Pain in the Neck....

When I was an insurance defense attorney there was a guy who sued one of my clients after she hit his car and hurt his neck. He was legitimately hurt bad enough to where he couldn't do his job anymore. I had to defend her and I did a good job from her and her insurance company's perspective and all he got was his past medical bills. The jury should have given him a lot more than that, and I have felt bad about that for years. ipaywithlitecoin

Medical Issues.... 

I represented a foreign medical company, they have a worldwide monopoly in a treatment for a specific kind of cancer. They used to sell these treatments to hospital and other public organizations. They had a fight with buyers for the price of the treatment, they wanted to be paid way more of the price set up by the hospitals, so they decided to fake a shortage in some of the components needed and stopped producing this product worldwide, leaving a lot of patients to certain death.

After some time that they came back to produce that same product and their price demand were met. They had both criminal and civil consequences, but In the end I managed to reduce the their responsibility to just a small economic fine which was less than 0,001 per cent of the profit they made with this whole operation. Mim3sis

Looking at the Dying....

I won a case for a pharmaceutical company that was accused of selling contaminated products. My cases were all against people who had developed terminal illnesses and I fought tooth and nail to discredit the scientific experts that the plaintiffs put on the stand.

I started out losing cases and the sting of a loss lasted a day or two. The mistrials were best because we kinda "won," as in kicking the can down the road. Looking at a dying person when the jury read their verdict in my favor will never leave me.

I didn't show up at work for months, then kinda sat at my desk for a few months, then eventually quit. I'm living off my savings now (not as much as you'd think) and volunteering for organizations that need lawyers.

If I'd lost that case I would have stayed in my happy world indefinitely. I'm glad I'm out of that world but that win took its toll on my life. Cheef-Justice

'winning'

Giphy

Well once you've taken a case (more realistically, it was given to you) you have no choice but to do whatever you think is necessary for the best interests of your client. To do anything less open you up to a malpractice lawsuit.

Also, don't forget there are lawyers on both sides of the case with the same duty to their clients. So in the end the 'winning' side is simply the one that put forward a stronger case. shouldbhi

New Career.

Giphy

The one thing this post is teaching me is that I could never be a lawyer because I have a conscience.

And I mean no offense by this. I am sorry that you folks have to live with these things. I know I am not mentally strong enough. TheGoodGovernment

In a funky country....

None of them. I want to win. I knew though that I'd have a tougher time not being emotionally engaged with family law and crime and anything else really emotive and so forged a career where it's companies and cash at stake.

Now I work in-house as a litigator for a multinational co covering disputes throughout the world. I always do make sure that if we're thinking of litigating in a funky country that the penalties aren't inhumane. No interest in someone getting executed or flogged for messing with the Company. aolllllllll

"They found me NOT guilty??"

Giphy

I had a misdemeanor stalking case once. Client wanted a jury trial so we did that and I had to question the poor girl who was getting harassed by this guy. The jury came back with a 'not guilty' verdict, and my client turned to me and said incredulously, "They found me NOT guilty??" Yeah, that case. ThePrimCrow

Germany Tales... 

Right before taking my bar exam in Germany I was working in a small law firm as a law apprentice. There was one case which was given to me, because it was considered unwinable but the client insisted on pushing through. The case was about an elderly lady who sold her cat, because she was too sick to take care of her.

The buyer of the cat our client, a rather wealthy lady, took the cat to the vet right after buying it. Apparently the cat needed 2000€ worth of surgeries. She hired us to collect those 2000 from the old lady. She was really an unpleasant woman to say at least.

She acted without even the slightest bit of remorse or empathy. She knew exactly in what situation the old lady was, because she was the one who informed us about it. Nevertheless we won the case pretty quick even though our client didn't have a leg to stand on. CrystalDexter

big city in America....

I used to prosecute neglect cases for Child Protection Services. After a few high profile cases where young kids ended up dead at the hands of family members, CPS starting asking us to file on pretty much everybody (I understand why, but I wish they would have stood up to the bad press instead of allowing it to dictate who they brought to court).

From that point on, I would say about half my cases, even though a cause of action existed, I felt guilty for winning. folicfoil

Copyright Issues...

We took a copyright case to trial twice, and then an appeal, and won every time. The case was on contingency (the client doesn't pay unless you win). We have spent years trying to collect the judgment from the defendant so we can get paid (we have a judgment for our own fees that is close to $1 million), throwing good money after bad.

The Defendant hid his assets very effectively (put all hard assets into LLCs, got paid hundreds of thousands a year in cash and services to avoid banks, etc.). He died of covid19 on Friday, and was likely savvy enough to avoid probate.

All of this is a gross oversimplification, but the TL;DR is we won a case three times, and have never been paid a cent because the loser was very shady and died, so we will likely get nothing for the client or ourselves. 3choplex

We won.

Giphy

Was a labor lawyer for some time and we had a no-exception policy against using the company credit card for personal expenses. Everyone knows you get fired for it because they beat it into you with frequent training, make you sign stuff, etc. We fired a guy who was a few months from retirement, and his union filed for arbitration.

Arbitration is kind of a joke and any labor lawyer will tell you that no arbitrator would uphold that termination even if the guy wasn't near retirement. We won. Due to the way the pension worked, the fact he left before he reached 55 led to a massive pension discount, like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Oh, by the way his offense was fulling up his car with gas using company card because he had left his personal card somewhere and was going to run out of gas. (On the other side of the coin I had many employees do insane things like hide and sleep at work for 40 hours, lead to a 30,000 gallon gasoline spill, fighting, death threats, etc who all got their jobs back through arbitration). LenoreHalperin

Bills....

Seeing lots of armchair lawyers in here, but I can tell you the cases we often wish we lost: the ones where clients don't pay their damn bills. Actually getting paid is one of the most stressful parts of practicing. dustydeceiver

At a Loss....

Worked for a large law firm. We 'won' freedom for a suspected terrorist who probably did commit a very serious atrocity but politics got in the way of convicting him.

Sorry cannot say which case this was. sundialsoft

I'm used to do divorces....

I'm used to do divorces, mostly. I'm not cut out for that work but it's the job I could get out of law school. A guy came in for a divorce and seemed, by all accounts, really nice. He claimed that they had $50k in cash in their safe and that his wife had taken it out when she left the house. His ex wife never worked so seemed reasonable she would take the money to help pay bills, start over, etc. 6 months in though, when we were finalizing property, his true colors started to show. Refusing to let her have the toaster, arguing over giving her anything even though she hadn't worked their entire 15 year marriage, telling her she could have half of the expensive plants SHE tended to only if she came and got them herself without help.

For reference, these plants were in a green house and some weighed upwards of 100lbs each (she probably weighed 100lbs herself; extremely meek woman in her 60s). The other lawyer and I finally get everything settled except the $50k. My client says she took it, ex wife says she did initially but then put it back on the advice of her attorney. So we go to trial just on this $50k. I cross examine her elderly parents, treat them as hostile, really go all out. Up against a veteran attorney who had been doing this for 30 plus years while I was BRAND NEW, I had to show my worth.

In the end, the judge ended up declaring that the $50k was "lost money." No one, technically, wins. 1 hour later my client waltzes into the office and pays his $15k bill all in $100 bills. I just stared silently at the money while he smiled widely at me, thanked me for helping him and then left. I quit practicing law entirely 3 months later. I still think about his ex wife (who honestly seemed sweet and lovely) and hope she's okay. aworldofnonsense

Insurance Issues....  

one of our cases was trying to get the lowest possible amount for a guy who while doing his job in a stationary car was hit from behind at full speed (his car was off the road the other driver was impaired) and his car was slammed into the 18 wheeler he was helping. He is forever handicapped and in a home and our job was to get him way less than he deserved... I didn't want to work insurance defense anymore after that one. quint1993

irrefutable....

Giphy

I always thought it would be cool to be a lawyer until I had to pay 63K in attorney fees over the course of 2 years for custody of my daughter. Now I'm not complaining so much about the money, more so about watching her attorney try to turn a turd into a piece of gold, no matter how irrefutable the evidence against her was.

I wouldn't be able to live with myself or sleep at night defending on cases like that where I would potentially be trying to return children to drugs, abuse, neglect and etc. mienkio

REDDIT

Do you have something to confess to George? Text "Secrets" or ":zipper_mouth_face:" to +1 (310) 299-9390 to talk to him about it.

Annoyingly Dumb Patients
Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Medicine is a difficult profession. Thanks to the wonder that is human nature, healthcare workers are subjected to incredible Darwin-award-winning scenarios daily, so it’s no wonder that many of them feel the need to go home and scream into their pillows at night. From self-inflicted injuries to dangerous prescription misuses, these Redditors revealed the most facepalm-worthy patients they’ve ever encountered.

But be warned: They’ll all leave you wondering how we’ve survived this long as a species.

There Is No Plan C

white and red cross signPhoto by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I’m a pharmacist. One evening, I was working a relief shift (not at my usual pharmacy). A man comes in looking distressed. He tells me, “I had intimate relations with a woman I do not intend to pursue a long-term relationship with”. Yes, he said it just like that. I say, “Okay. I’m assuming there was an accident, or it was unprotected. How long ago did it happen”? He answers, “Last night, at 7 PM on the couch”.

Woah, TMI. I just needed to know the approximate time so I’d know if Plan B would work. I start to tell him, “We have this medication called Plan B, and since the incident happened within 72 hours—” but he interrupts me and I was thrown completely off guard: “Oh yes, I got that for her already yesterday, right after we finished. We want to know if there is anything we can do to know if she is pregnant now”.

I answer, “Unfortunately not. She’ll have to wait three weeks or so to see if she gets her period, and if she doesn’t, she can do a pregnancy test then. Theoretically, you could do a blood test for faster results, but that would also not be until a couple of weeks, at least”. He responds, “We’re just really anxious because she doesn’t want to be pregnant. Is there anything that she can take to prevent the pregnancy? Any multivitamin? Minerals? Food”?

I tell him, “She’s already taken it, which was the Plan B. There are some other options, but those are prescriptions. And no, there are no over-the-counter products she can take”. Then he asks, “What about me? Is there anything I can take now to prevent the pregnancy? Any multivitamins or minerals”? A little bemused, I just answer, “…No sir. There isn’t anything you can take now”.

V_imaginary

Get A Load Of This Guy

I’m 73, and I’m a former clinical microbiologist from LONG ago. Still, I found myself all over the clinical lab at times, not just infectious diseases. So, one day, this 20-something guy (with his wife and mom in tow) walks in with a paper request for an analysis of his “swimmers”, pre-computer era. Okay, not the most comfortable encounter, but I’m a professional, and I’d done this drill many times.

It turned out he had not been briefed by the doctor and had no idea how establishing infertility in males was done. Well, okay—this would be a challenge, then. I took him aside and, using standard medical terminology, told him how a diagnosis is made and what he needed to do to provide a specimen. He couldn’t believe that I was asking him to “do it” into that container.

Astonished! Then he played dumb as if the concept was unfamiliar to him. We looped through the medical terms and procedure again, and I eventually resorted to every word I knew to describe the “act”. It was like a George Carlin bit! A half-hour later, he emerged from the toilet with two inches of urine in the cup. God almighty.

The report came back: “Patient provided improper specimen”.

BrunoGerace

This Is How The Elderly Get Their Wrinkles

I’m a paramedic. I had an elderly woman complain that her mouth was dry and she felt a bit dizzy climbing the stairs earlier. So I go through the whole rigamarole of getting a medical history, vitals, and more detail on her symptoms. Then I asked her what she’s had to drink today. Her answer? A cup of tea—ten hours ago. I asked, “Any water”? She says no.

Guess what fixed it within five minutes.

SpatchcockMcGuffin

The Mother Got A Lot Of Heat For This

I was at the children’s hospital with my eldest when he was a toddler (ah, the day we found out he was allergic to penicillin) when a rushing team suddenly occupied the bed next to me with a limp, unresponsive infant. This happened on a hot day during the mid-summer. The baby was in a full Canadian winter-level snowsuit.

After they got the baby’s temperature down, I overheard the doctor losing his mind a little bit with the mother as she kept insisting she had to have her baby in the suit lest the baby risk feeling chilly. He explained that the minor discomfort of having to cry for a blanket did not trump the risk of it losing its life or the possibility of literally frying the kid’s brain.

He had to get quite nasty with his wording in that she had almost unalived her baby and might have given it brain damage.

kifferella

Mr. Hot Shot

I had a buddy who was an EMT, and he was called out to a location for a GSW. What happened was a father was mowing his lawn when he accidentally touched a part of the mower near the engine and burned his hand. He got mad at the lawnmower, pulled out his pistol, and shot it. The shot ricocheted and hit his son in the leg.

Kretuhtuh

Now, He’s Gonorrhea-Valuate All His Conditions…

a woman holding a stethoscope in her right handPhoto by Eben Kassaye on Unsplash

I worked in ED for 10 years. Every day. Every day people come in, and it shocks you how they’ve managed to evade unaliving themselves for that long. One of the worst was when we had a guy come in. He was a twin. He told us he needed to get checked for STDs because his sister just got one. We, of course, had to ask if he’d had intimate relations with her, and he said no, but they were twins, so whatever she has, so does he.

After a collective sigh of relief that this wasn’t some weird Alabama, your-my-sister scenario, we had to educate him on how that’s not how it worked at all.

Noname_left

It Was An Arm of Intervention

I got told to go introduce myself to a patient to get vitals, history, and more info on their chief complaint, before starting an IV and drawing blood for labs. She came in for arm pain, and it looked like she had a nasty bug bite on her arm. So her story was she was an exotic dancer, and her Adderall prescription wasn’t doing the trick. So, she had an idea of how to make it more potent.

She heard from a friend that if you crush it up, suspend it in water, and then inject it, it would be more effective. Except she used tap water to dissolve the Adderall before she injected it. This ended up causing a huge abscess and infection at the site of injection. She ended up losing her arm at the elbow...So now she’s a one-armed exotic dancer.

csgreen2k11

They Must’ve Gone Ballistic

I had a patient who had a bullet lodged in her leg. We had the surgeon come and assess her. Based on its placement, he suggested leaving it because removing it could cause even more danger. We discharged her. She immediately walked to the ER in the same hospital to complain of leg pain. She had prescriptions and wound supplies in her hand.

Still, they brought her back, discovered her injury, and called for a surgical consult. The same surgeon was on-call and came to assess her. Guess what?! The surgeon made the same suggestion to leave it. Then we educated her EXTENSIVELY about never getting an MRI or the metal will fly out of her skin. Eventually, she left.

She returned a few months later to a sister hospital complaining of a headache. She got inpatient admission, and you guessed it: They did an MRI. The slug ripped out, and the MRI machine was down for almost a week!

anoukdowntown

She Just Couldn’t Seem To Grasp The Conception

I had an 18 or 19-year-old girl come into my ER with some complaint that required an X-ray. It’s standard that we do a urine pregnancy test before imaging on any female of childbearing years. She insisted she’d never “done it”, and there was zero possibility of pregnancy. We did the test anyway, and it resulted that she was pregnant. We then did a blood pregnancy test to confirm the result since she insisted she couldn’t possibly be pregnant because she’d never had intercourse.

That was positive too. We gave her a few minutes to herself to figure out what the heck happened, and when I returned to check on her a short time later, she asked me if she could get pregnant even though her boyfriend “didn’t go all the way in”. She 100% believed that as long as he wasn’t entirely inside her, it didn’t count as intercourse.

It took nearly a half hour of explaining reproduction for her to understand that, whether it’s halfway in or in, sperm travel.

NAMomx3

It Ultimately Wasn’t Very Fun-Knee

I overheard a conversation between a nurse, a doctor, and a patient in the ER. They were trying to figure out whether the patient was very stupid or had a head injury. It was both hilarious and sad. He kept telling them that he was there for a hurt leg, but he couldn’t explain why his leg was hurt, how it was hurt, or how he got there—nearly anything.

I heard them talking in a hallway to each other. The nurse was convinced the patient hit his head. The doctor, without skipping a beat, dropped his unexpected diagnosis: “No, he is just an idiot.” It turned out the doctor was right. They got ahold of the guy’s wife. She told them in the hallway he’s always this dumb, and if she left him, he would get lost in his own house and starve.

It sounded like the patient’s leg was visibly injured or swollen. But when asked what happened or how it felt, he gave nonsensical idiot answers. He wasn’t slurring, but answering in a regular idiot voice, saying things like, “It feels hurt”, and “I was talking to Jimmy, and we were doing our usual work, and my leg hurts”.

The doctor would ask, “Did something happen? What is the work”? But the patient kept responding, “Something always happens; you know how it goes”, or “I just want my leg fixed”.

MeatJumps

An Change Of Heart

man in white dress shirt wearing black framed eyeglassesPhoto by Usman Yousaf on Unsplash

This one came from a colleague of mine. So, this 60-something-year-old suffered from an acute complication and got a pacemaker to solve the problem. Everything went normally, and as planned, he recovered. Every care and medication that he needed to take got prescribed and explained and his medical appointments with a cardiologist/arrhythmologist were scheduled so he could get the follow-ups he needed. The man then proceeded to never show up to any appointments and never answered any calls from the hospital to know of him and reschedule.

This went on for around three years. Then one day, he showed up without former warning and asked to talk with the doctor who did the procedure to put in his pacemaker. People were weirded out, but since the doctor was present that day and this patient was in clear distress, they talked to him and managed to find a couple of minutes to have the doctor check on him. Inside the appointment room, the doctor noticed that the man was wearing a bra inside his shirt.

The man explained he’d been wearing his daughter’s bra for three months after his “problem” got worse. So the doctor asked that he take off his shirt…and there he stood, this shirtless man wearing his daughter’s bra, showing off the pacemaker that should’ve remained inside his body. It was now dangling outside of it, being held by the left bra cup, with a big infected open wound above it with the pacemaker leads still inserted into his veins and connected to his heart.

Nobody had any idea how the man let that situation come to be or how he didn’t pass from sepsis or any other health problem that might’ve appeared, for that matter.

MonkBigT

The Parents Were The Real Suckers

While working the midnight shift in the ER, a family brought in a four-year-old at 2am-ish. I asked them what was wrong. They said, “Ask him. He said he needed to see a doctor”. I further pressed, “Did he say anything was wrong”? They answered, “No. He said he needed to see a doctor, so we brought him”. A quick back and forth firmly established that they actually showed up to the ER at 2 AM, purely because the four-year-old said he needed to see a doctor and that they didn’t know why.

So I asked the child, “Why do you need to see a doctor”? His answer made me shake my head in disbelief: “The doctor has suckers”. To be clear, it was the parents who lacked sense and not the kid.

ToxDoc

A Very Delicate Condition

I’m a social worker, and one of my clients kept getting pregnant over and over after having kids. I had a frank conversation with her about birth control or getting her tubes tied because she kept going through horrific births only to get her kids taken away, and she said to me that she didn’t know that birth control or safe intercourse would save her from getting pregnant.

She didn’t realize that intercourse = pregnant because she was mistreated as a child, and her father told her that she could only get pregnant when she fell in love, and she had never been in love, so she didn’t understand why she kept getting pregnant. Intercourse was only a pleasure for her, so she didn’t realize that was what was getting her pregnant.

ThomasToHandle

The Answer Was At Hand

I am a dermatologist in India. As is the culture here, people eat with their hands, and almost all of our curries or even other dry side dishes have a lot of turmeric. It is common knowledge to anyone born and brought up in India that this means the nails of your dominant hand (statistically, the right hand) will be yellow-stained because we have seen this happen since our childhood.

Usually, this wears off in about a day and a half if you wash it a couple of times. Cut to the first patient in my OPD, a young girl in her early 20s, very anxious. I ask her, “What brings you here today”? The patient says, “Doc, my right-hand fingernails keep getting yellow-discolored”. I take a look and confirm, “Only your right hand”? She answers, “Yes, and only after meals”.

So I ask her, “Erm…do you eat with your hands”? The patient confirms, “Yes, always”. I then explain to her, “So...you know it’s just turmeric, right”? And she goes, “Yes, but can you make it stop happening”? Perplexed now, I just tell her, “For God’s sake, use a spoon”! But she’s still not quite getting it. Surprised, she asks, “So you mean there is no medicine to make it stop”?

I just stared at her while she looked at me expectantly. “NO”! This might hit home more with people of South Asian cultures or people who habitually eat turmeric-cooked food with their hands. Anyway, for a grown person to complain about this was just…well, surprising and a little ridiculous.

Classic_Dust_8431

This Guy Wasn’t Very Treat Smart

I work in emergency medical services. I had a diabetic in his 30–40s who refused to take insulin since 2012. It was 2020 at the time. When I took his blood sugar, it only read as “HI”, meaning it had to be over 700 for the glucometer not to read it. Upon seeing this, he asked me if that was high and then went, “Is this because of all the ice cream I ate”?

He was playing a Facebook Messenger video with his girlfriend the entire time. I met him later on in the parking lot after he got discharged, and it took this man less than fifty paces from the ER door to rip off the bandage covering his IV and play with the IV wound until it started bleeding all over the place again.

He then knocked on our ambulance door and asked for a bandaid to fix it. We had to walk him back into the ER and bandage his entire arm with gauze so that, hopefully, by the time he got it off, it would’ve clotted enough for him not to end up exsanguinating himself.

TaTenk

Rubbing Salt In The Wound

brown and white shell on orange round platePhoto by Arnold Antoo on Unsplash

My sister told me a story of a woman with chronic blisters and lesions on her lips. They couldn’t figure out what it was for weeks. It would heal and come back, heal and come back. The truth was disturbing—it turned out she would jam out on like three bags of salt and vinegar chips a day for weeks at a time until the sores hurt too bad to continue, then she’d go to the doctor.

The-disgracist

Details Make A Difference

This was one of the funniest yet cutest ones from when I was a student doing a shift in andrology/reproductive health. Doctor: “So, you’re trying to have kids but not managing to. Do you have any other kids”? Patient: “Yes, Doc. I have one”. Doctor: “Okay, so we need to do [this and this and that]”. Patient: “Okay, great”.

Then he proceeded to visit him and stuff, after which he went away. But after a couple of seconds, he knocked on the door again, saying: “Hello, Doc. My wife told me that it would be relevant to you that the son I have is adopted, but that makes no difference to me. I’ve always considered him my son”!

Albablu

Do No Farm

I’m a physiotherapist. For those who don’t know, after a total knee replacement, you have a six-week window after the surgery to regain the range of motion. If you don’t regain the range in those first six weeks, it ain’t coming back. I had a patient who was a farmer who was very enthusiastic about regaining the range because he needed to be mobile for his work. I saw him for the first time about five days after his surgery.

I showed him all the basic exercises, told him not to do any farm work for at least six weeks, and told him to come back to see me once a week for the first six weeks. He disappeared and came back about eight weeks later. His range was non-existent, maybe 30 degrees of range in total. He was visibly mad at me as if it was my fault. He was shouting and calling me incompetent.

Our conversation went something like this: Me: “Have you been doing the exercises”? Him: “No”. Me: “How often are you doing farm work”? Him: “Every day”. Me: “Why haven’t you come back since the first appointment eight weeks ago”? Him: “Too busy with farm work”. Me: “So, to summarize here, you did absolutely nothing that I told you to, and this is somehow my fault”?

I never saw him again.

VeryAttractive

A Jaw-Dropping Encounter

As a pharmacist, I often encounter a lot of people who lack common sense; namely, everyone who comes in to buy homeopathic stuff, especially for serious things. Once, a lady came in with a prescription from the dentist for some heavy antibiotics and painkillers due to an infection that threatened to damage the jawbone.

When I asked if she knew how to take them, she went: “Oh, I’m not gonna take those; they’ll go right into the garbage. But I gotta buy them so that my dentist is happy. I’d rather stick with [insert name of homeopathic stuff here] instead of harming me with some devilish chemicals”!

Throughout the years, I’ve learned to just shrug and accept those Darwin-award candidates instead of arguing with them. It just infuriates me when I see that they’ve got children or/and pets…

pharma91

That’s Never Gonna Heel Now

This was circa 1983, and I’m a nurse (retired). I had this one guy in his early 20s who went swimming hammered in a notoriously nasty lake in our area. It was a “don’t drink the water” kind of lake, and he went in without shoes, stepped on an old booze tab, and cut his foot open. He didn’t go to the hospital or try to clean it at all for about a week. His girlfriend said he kept saying, “It’s fine, it’s just a cut”, when she pressured him to get it seen, so of course, he showed up in the ER with a foot that blew up like a balloon.

Healing it took two and a half months in the hospital, with his foot completely laid open in surgery, doing debridement and packing, which I can honestly say after over 30 years in healthcare stands as one of the nastiest jobs I have ever had to do—and I had been dealing with things like bedsores and open wounds from radiation treatments and cancer for about seven years at that point.

It was bad, but that's not all—on top of this, he was obnoxious, disrespectful, and, when the opportunity presented itself, cruel. Other nurses, you know the type, they’re everywhere. Hopefully not as open about it these days, but yeah. I had a student nurse I was training come running out of the room in tears and refused to go back in and would not tell any of us what he said, but I can imagine.

Eventually, we finally got it cleaned out, and it’s responding well to antibiotics, and the tissue is granulating well. He gets sent home with antibiotics and strict instructions on how to care for it and to keep it clean and dry. THE DAY he left the hospital, he went back out to the same lake, got inebriated, put on some nasty tennis shoes, and went swimming.

He showed up on our floor again a week after being discharged. He lost the foot. His girlfriend left him.

lisa1896

Fortunately, They Caught Him Red-Handed

man in blue scrub suit wearing blue stethoscopePhoto by Bruno Rodrigues on Unsplash

I don’t know if a cleaner in a hospital counts, but this one time, I got to work early on a Saturday morning, and we immediately received a request for help from the ER and got sent over by my boss. When I got there, the first thing I heard was yelling from this guy behind one of the curtains. He was shouting at the nurses, “Don’t touch my downstairs”, and “I didn’t use any substances”!

Then I smelled iron in the air, and then I found out there was blood all over the hallway, with hand prints in blood against the wall. Almost the entire floor was covered in blood, with actual puddles in some places. What happened? The guy pulled out his catheter, causing arterial bleeding, and he decided to run away from the nurses who were trying to help him.

It seems like he lived through that. I had never seen that much blood before that day, nor after.

Apprehensive-Emu-570

Thinking Against The Grain

I am a medical professional, but I have two really good ones about my ex-fiancé. Laugh at me all you want; this relationship was not my proudest moment. For starters, at our baby shower for my son, he asked if we were going to pick “innie” or “outie”. I looked at him like he was insane, and he started getting angry and just repeated the question louder until I shushed him and took him aside to explain to him that we don’t choose how the belly button looks; it just happens.

Another time, he had really bad eczema and went to a doctor who suggested oatmeal baths during flare-ups. He bought a couple of boxes of Quaker Oats Maple & Brown Sugar and would dump the entire box packet by packet into the tub. It was a couple of weeks before I found the wrappers and questioned him about it.

He told me (angry again) that he wondered why he was so sticky after getting out and why the freaking literal brown sugar was making his open wounds fester. I explained that an oatmeal bath is not flavored oatmeal and that he had to buy either plain oats or actual oatmeal bath packets. He was furious that I expected him to just know better.

When I asked him why he picked maple and brown sugar, he said he didn’t want to smell like strawberries or peaches after his bath. After our son was born (and we had broken up, thank God), my son also had some occasional eczema, but not nearly to the same degree. The pediatrician recommended oatmeal baths, and GUESS WHAT THIS FREAKING GUY BOUGHT?

He said he only remembered what happened the last time when he picked my son out of the sink, and the towel stuck to him. When I started to scold him for being so stupid, he looked at me like I was an idiot and told me he only used one packet since we were still bathing the kid in the sink instead of in an entire tub.

coulsonsrobohand

The Patient Had A Med-ley Bag

I’m a pharmacist. I had a woman bring in a literal sandwich bag that she kept all her meds in, unseparated. She needed help seeing which meds she was low on or out of and was asking different questions about the medications. When she pointed to an Apoquel and stated it was her blood pressure medicine, I immediately became concerned as to why pet medicine was in her bag (and also why she was mixing all her meds in a bag in the first place).

It was then that I found out that she had been throwing her pet’s meds inside her bag of medicine, too. So Lord knows what she’d been giving her dog or taking herself. I immediately stressed how important it is to keep medicine in its original container to protect both the medicine and herself and to know the directions of how to take it.

I’ve seen her a few times since then, and I’m glad to see she has since taken my advice. But how any pharmacist or doctor hadn’t advised her on this before is beyond me.

DigbickDandit

They Didn’t Air On The Side Of Caution

I used to be a medical oxygen tech, mostly doing in-home work. One guy was on such a high concentration that he would have drawn nearly zero oxygen from breathing regular atmosphere. This required two heavy-duty machines hooked up in tandem just to keep him barely alive. This was explained ad nauseam to him and his wife with fully signed documentation of every conversation.

What they did was absolutely ridiculous—they’d shut one machine off because they decided it was too loud. He’d take his mask off because he decided it was too cold. She would unplug the hose if she decided it was in the way. So on and so on. They did everything you could think of that would restrict or cut off his oxygen intake. Then they would panic and call our emergency service when he started to react to no oxygen intake.

I lived not even five minutes away, right beside our EMS station, and calls would always come for me to “fix” the machines at random times of the day and night, 3–7 days a week. They refused to call 9-1-1 because they “didn’t want to make a scene”. This went on for ages, well over 18 months, until he was having trouble sleeping one night, and they shut the machines off before going back to bed.

It’s been years, and I still see the wife around town. She always glares at me as if I’m the one who unalived him.

TheAgentLoki

She’ll Just See Herself Out, Now…

I’m an ophthalmology surgical technician. A glaucoma patient in her late 50s was going blind despite her drop therapies for the past six months. Her pressure was consistently in the 30s and 40s. I asked her if she was using her drops regularly (twice daily), and she said yes. I asked, as politely as I could, if she’d missed any doses in the past month. She said no. I asked if she was using them properly, and she got super offended.

She asked me very rudely, “Do I look like an idiot to you”? I said, “No, but I just need to be sure. Sometimes patients think they’re doing it right, but they can easily miss it. Can you show me how you use your drops”? So she took out her drop bottle, gave it a good shake (so far, so good), looked up at the ceiling (also a good sign), opened her MOUTH, and swallowed two drops.

I got in trouble, but my OD backed me up and told her that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever seen in 25 years. She cried and said we were being mean to her and that the drops burned her eyes, so she didn’t want to put them in there, and since the eyes, ears, nose, and throat are all connected, why did it matter where she put them?

That’s not how glaucoma therapy works. She needed a shunt implant, and we were able to save about 30% of her visual field. But yeah, she was drinking her drops and going blind.

madleyJo

That’s Ill-Advised

a woman in a white shirt holding a stethoscopePhoto by Alexandr Podvalny on Unsplash

I used to volunteer at a free medical clinic to take vitals and histories. A woman came in with pneumonia and wanted to know why her normal treatment of drinking half a bottle of Listerine and inhaling a pack of cancer sticks a day wasn’t working. I asked why she thought ciggies were a good treatment for a lung infection, and she said, “Indians used to purify the ground by burning all the weeds away before planting, so I’m puffing to purify my lungs”.

I left that one to the doctor.

MicturitionSyncope

Seeing Red

I’m an optometrist. I had a patient booked in for an emergency appointment with a raging red eye. It was very painful. So I looked under the microscope, and the cornea was not happy: wobbly reflexes, haziness, the works. So I asked, “What happened”? The patient said, “It’s my niece’s wedding this Saturday, and I wanted to tint my eyelashes to match my hair, and the color scheme of the wedding is light blue, so I used the same dye for both to match the color”.

I inquired, “Does that hair dye contain ammonia, by any chance”? The patient answered, “I think so. Do you think my eye will be better by Saturday? Will it match the color scheme”? I just responded, “Unless you can convince them to change the color scheme to red, no”.

the_topiary

This Grave Mistake Takes The Biscuit

I heard this story from a sibling; I don’t think he’d mind me sharing it just on the off chance it prevents someone else from making this mistake. Lots of surgeons have a similar story, but thankfully this one doesn’t end in someone’s demise. According to my brother, these parents claimed that their child hadn’t eaten anything before surgery, as they were carefully directed. But it turned out they thought the surgical team was just being cruel to their child.

So when she said she was hungry that morning, they detoured on their way to the surgical center and got her a full Southern breakfast. The result was triggering—she dang near passed from aspirating biscuits and gravy. I’ve rarely seen my brother so angry and disgusted (somehow, biscuits and gravy look even more nauseating the second time around) as he recounted what had happened.

I do not doubt that he tore a strip off the parents once their five-year-old was stabilized, and they probably still felt justified and angry at the surgeon for telling them what they could and could not feed their child right before anesthesia. The parents did feel justified and hard-done-by, although, as far as I know, they didn’t express anger at my brother (knowing him, they didn’t get a word in edgewise).

There was no acknowledgment or realization that they could easily have unlived their own child or that they’d made a bad decision. I remember they were annoyed by her whining for food.

andante528

The Outcome Suited Them Just Fine

I’m a pharmacist. One time my coworker, another pharmacist, got served with a lawsuit while I was there. The patient suffered a fall resulting in a concussion, and she claimed it was because her Lisinopril (blood pressure medication) got increased from 10mg to 20mg and that she’d not been informed and passed out as a result. She was suing the pharmacist, the pharmacy, her doctor’s office, and the doctor.

It eventually came out in early discovery that she was at a rave and had a BAC of 0.18, THC, and MDMA in her system. The case against the doctor’s office, doctor, and pharmacy fell apart right away, so she decided to go all-in on trying to sue the individual pharmacist. The pharmacy’s POS system confirmed that she checked, “I decline pharmacist consultation at this time”. So the case was eventually dropped.

Floor_Fourteen

He Had To Take A Pregnant Pause

I work in the ER. I have so many stories. The one that left me dumbfounded was a woman who was brought in by her sister for pelvic cramps and amenorrhea for three months. Lo and behold, she’s pregnant. The sister informs me that she sleeps with the Brazilian construction workers building the condo complex next door. I ask if they have any questions.

The patient then asked me if her baby would come out speaking Spanish. After a long pause and her sister staring at the ceiling, I told her, “No, because they speak Portuguese in Brazil”. The patient seemed relieved, and the sister hustled her out of the ER before I could discharge her.

AMostSoberFellow

It Cost Them An Amen And A Leg

man in white dress shirt holding black tablet computerPhoto by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

I worked in cancer research/surgery a couple of years ago. There is a good amount of people who will refuse to have a small removal/surgery because they think holistic medicine or praying it away will work. They always come back, and we always have to remove so much more. One time a patient had melanoma on their calf, and the doctor wanted to do a simple wide excision, but they left because they wanted to pray it away.

They came back a couple of months later because it got bigger, and we had to amputate their leg. I’m pretty sure they had positive lymph nodes at that point too.

Green0996

They Gave Her A Herbal Warning

A lady brought her baby into the ER with a rectal temp of 103. The kid had tachycardia (i.e. a fast heartbeat) and looked awful. The worst part? The lady refused all medications. She said she didn’t believe in them and wondered why her herbal tea (she brought a jug of it) wasn’t working. She wanted us to just check her out. She thought a children’s emergency room just checked them out. I tried to explain why the kid needed an NSIAD. She kept refusing. She said she didn’t know what was in it.

I brought up the fact she had her kid in a hospital and that she received medication herself (IV, epidural, etc). The lady didn’t budge. Only concerned for herself, I told her that when the kid has a seizure or goes unresponsive and she calls 9-1-1, she can expect the medics to give the kid everything it needs regardless of whether she likes it or not.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, so the doctor threatened to contact social services for child endangerment and mistreatment. Only then did she start to listen…for, like, five whole seconds. She then left against medical advice. People like this exist.

CaptAhat_Savvy

Words Cannot Expresso How Ridiculous This Call Was

I’ve been a firefighter for 18 years. People call 9-1-1 for the dumbest things ever. But the one that takes the cake? It was a guy who called 9-1-1 to say he was choking. He answered the door as high as a Georgia pine with a lit joint in his mouth. I asked him who was choking. He calmly said that he was. He said he swallowed an ice cube, and now he couldn’t breathe.

Just to be sure and partly out of morbid curiosity, I looked in his mouth and then asked him to take a few deep breaths...which he was able to do easily. He still insisted he couldn’t breathe. So I told him to make some hot coffee and then drink it. He asked me, “Why”? I told him that the coffee would melt the ice cube, and he’d be able to breathe again. “Oh, cool. Thanks, man”.

Then I left.

SpeedySpooley

How Heartbreaking

I work in clinical research at a hospital. Basically, for patients who have cancer but don’t have other standard-of-care options, clinical trials, or “experimental treatment”, are a viable option for many. Some people have a negative view of research, but it’s highly regulated and not as scary as it sounds. Anyway, we went through the consent form with this one patient who had a history of substance use.

We don’t know everything about this new medication, but one thing we DO know is that using coke while taking this drug will make your heart “explode”, in layman’s terms. This patient “promised” they were off the sauce and that they “totally wouldn’t do coke while they’re on the trial”. Two weeks later, they relapsed, and well…You can figure out the rest of the story.

Garden_Circus

Wrestling With Logic

My brother did a rotation in an ER before med school. Paramedics brought in a man with a lacerated neck. He was inebriated and fell into a fish tank. His equally inebriated buddies called 9-1-1. When the paramedics arrived, they realized his friends had put a very tight tourniquet around his neck to stop the bleeding. It turned out that the guy and his buddies had been playing a boozy game of WWE.

He had a two-inch glass shard stuck in his head in addition to the neck laceration, but the dude came into the ER with no idea the glass was there. Four different firefighters had to hold him down as he screamed prejudiced remarks at the female doctor. My brother said that when they removed the glass, blood shot out about 10 feet in the air.

My brother, at that point, silently “noped” the heck out of medicine. He went on to attend Berklee Music School and is living his best life as a musical producer and engineer, and is not arguing with rednecks about whether or not there is a glass shard in their head….

Smelli24u

Shear Stupidity

a close up of a person laying in a hospital bedPhoto by César Badilla Miranda on Unsplash

I’m an ER nurse with seven years of experience. The list of dumb things I’ve seen is nearly endless. People coming in with massive burns because they smoked in bed is not as rare as you’d think. But the one that got me the most was a guy who came in for chest pain and fatigue. An EKG revealed he was having a really bad heart attack.

We activated the cath lab for emergency stents to hopefully save the guy’s life. They almost always access the patient through the groin for the procedure, so one of our jobs in the ER is to shave the patient’s groin to prep them for the cath lab. We got the clippers out, as we don’t use actual razors anymore, and informed the guy we needed to shave him. This is when things got annoying.

He refused. No problem, we figured we woul adjust let the cath lab do it once he’s knocked out. Nope, the guy refuses to sign the consent for the stents because he doesn’t want his downstairs shaved.

After trying to educate him, pleading with him, and contacting every goddang lawyer the hospital had, the guy signed himself out of AMA and went home.

He would rather die than have his curlies shaved. We looked up his address, and we weren’t the closest hospital to him, so if he passed at home, the medics would have to take him to a different hospital. I doubt he survived the day.

ChaplnGrillSgt

Paws For Thought

I’m a vet. A few years ago, I had a client bring his young cat in complaining of lethargy. Besides being a bit underweight, the physical exam was unremarkable, so I asked more questions about the cat’s diet. I asked him, “What do you feed the cat”? The owner answered, “I feed him [online trendy raw food brand]”. I asked, “How is his appetite? Does he finish what you feed him”? The owner replied, “Yes, he always eats everything”.

Pressing further, I asked, “How much do you feed him”? The owner said, “Half a cup”. For clarification’s sake, I then asked, “Once or twice daily”? What he said next absolutely floored me. He answered, “Once every three or four days”. Shocked, I replied, “…You only feed your cat twice a week”? The owner explained, “I believe in a more natural feeding approach, and based on my research, that’s how often cats eat in the wild”.

This owner was slowly starving his cat into oblivion based on some cockamamie idea he’d made up while watching National Geographic. I had to explain to him that domestic cats are not tigers and that small wildcats eat 10–20 small meals daily. Surprise, surprise, the cat’s lethargy and weight improved with regular feeding.

birdlawprofessor

Always Double-Check

I once heard a story about a particular patient receiving radiation therapy. It was impressed upon her that she couldn’t miss her fractions of radiotherapy, even if she were busy, so she needed to inform us if she really couldn’t make the appointment. Well, one day, she couldn’t make it. But instead of just informing us, she sent her twin sister to receive the radiation therapy in her place.

Of course, the twin answered yes to all the ID questions and had the same birthday, etc. She was only found out when the radiographers had trouble matching her to the CT. The CT was of a person who had undergone a mastectomy, while this “patient” still had both her mammaries. This story, many years later, is still told to new staff during training to reiterate the importance of ensuring correct identification.

You would be stunned by the number of people who try to skip the queue. The number isn’t high. But it isn’t zero.

Kenobi_01

It Took Some Arm Twisting

I work in orthopedic rehab. I had a patient with a common fracture of the wrist that a doctor sent over because she was inexplicably getting stiffer and stiffer. I spent 17 sessions with her one on one, 40ish minutes each. But nothing I did worked. For whatever reason, instead of just bending her wrist, she would contort her entire body.

She was married, raised kids, had a career, and was a seemingly functional adult. I tried everything to get her to actively use her muscles to move her wrist. I put her in front of a mirror, filmed videos of myself doing the exercise or her doing it, and tried to get her to spot the difference between moving your shoulder versus moving your wrist.

The last time I saw her, I even strapped her arm to a chair, and she still didn’t understand that she should’ve only been trying to move her wrist. I will never understand it.

dumptrucklegend

There Was No Sugarcoating It

I work at a vet clinic. We get a lot of this sort of thing, oftentimes with diabetic patients. One of the worst I’ve seen was an older owner come in with an extremely overweight, diabetic dog. The owner says the dog has been slow, tires easily, and has been “flopping around”, which is odd for her. The doctor checks the dog’s blood glucose, and it is so high it is literally off the charts.

Normal blood glucose for a dog is around 100 or so. The dog's reading was shocking—it was beyond 1000. We asked the owner how it got so high. Was she eating? She was because she was obese. Were you giving her the insulin? The owner then proceeds to say that they think she’s probably fine without it since she’s a “strong and hardy dog”.

Ma’am, your nine-year-old 80-pound Dalmatian is currently half-alive on the floor because you don’t give her insulin. How they kept that poor dog alive for that long was astounding.

vol-au-vents

Are You Kidding Me!?

a person is holding a picture of a babyPhoto by Amr Taha™ on Unsplash

When I was an intern posted in the obstetric department, I saw a 42-year-old pregnant woman who came for an antenatal checkup. This was her seventh pregnancy, and she had only one living child. So she had five pregnancies previously, which failed (three spontaneous abortions and two stillbirths). The sixth one had been high-risk too, and she’d needed to get a cervical cerclage done (they stitch the cervix because it is too weak to hold a baby in until term).

When the OBGYN asked her why she would put herself through pregnancy again instead of being content with her daughter, she replied, “My in-laws want us to have at least two children”. It was the biggest Pikachu-face moment of my life.

centaursandsteths

Jesus Took The Wheel Years Ago

I’m an optometrist. I had an elderly patient come in surrounded by concerned family members because the patient ran over one of those pop-up tents on the side of the road that the telephone engineers use to protect themselves from the rain. Luckily no one was hurt as the worker was on lunch. Worried as to how the elderly driver missed seeing a large, red, and white tent in the middle of the day, it was then that the elderly relative admitted to having spent the last three years driving from memory.

the_topiary

Trying Hard To Be Patient

I had a patient come to see me in the clinic on a Monday; everything was fine. By Tuesday morning, she’s on the hospital census with a pending consult for me. When I see her, she says she’s fine and doesn’t know why she was admitted. She then walked out of the clinic, called an ambulance from across the street, and got taken to a different hospital.

She reported her problems were uncontrolled, and nobody was taking her seriously. They transferred her back overnight because I don’t work at that other hospital. She then gets discharged Wednesday morning. On Friday morning, she is again back on the census with a pending consult. I go to see her, and once again, she says she’s fine, and she’s not sure why she’s there.

This time she had a friend pick her up from the hospital and drive her to a small outlying hospital without the services she needed. She walked into the ER and said she was in distress but that nobody was taking her seriously. Yet again, she gets admitted and transferred back to my hospital overnight. She gets discharged on Friday afternoon.

Sure as heck, she came back on Saturday morning. I asked her, “Why do you think you keep getting admitted to the hospital”? She has no clue. Completely baffled. I tell her it’s because she keeps going to hospitals and telling them she needs help. No lights come on. I ask her, “Why do you keep going to other hospitals”?

Finally, she tells me, “I didn’t know what else to do. My apartment is a complete mess. My caretaker won’t clean my apartment because I’m supposed to learn how to do it, and I just don’t want to do it”. Please note that she is not a ward of the state but still gets most of the services, like coaches, guardians, drivers, etc.

So, I follow up with, “But why do you keep telling them that I’m not taking you seriously”? What she said next is forever burnt into my brain. “If I don’t, they just send me home in a cab”.

Semi-Pro_Biotic

False Wisdom

I’m a dental nurse. My favorite story involved a 30-something-year-old woman who came in for a checkup at the low-cost emergency clinic I worked at. Her teeth were broken and almost black, and her gums were angry, swollen, bright red, and bleeding by just moving her tongue against them. She needed multiple scaling and hygienist appointments and a debridement.

An X-ray showed she needed work on all but her wisdom teeth, and the results made me raise my eyebrows—she needed 10 fillings. She also needed root canals to try and save some teeth and extractions for, I think, three teeth or possibly more if the root canal treatment didn’t work. I explained everything and did the usual explanation of proper oral hygiene.

I then asked her if she had any questions, to which she said, “It’s okay if I lose this set of teeth; my others will come through”. The dentist and I just looked at each other, probably a lot longer than we should have. No words. I couldn’t think of anything to reply to that comment. I had a lot of weird and disgusting things happen at that clinic. I miss working there.

darkerthanmysoul

When You Just Can’t Sulfa Fools

I’m a paramedic, and I had this call while working on a rural fire/EMS service. A call came in for an allergic reaction. I arrived at a rural farm and found the patient in the kitchen on the ground, wheezing. Her husband said she took sulfa, which she’s allergic to, and after grabbing her blood pressure, we hit her with epinephrine (which is the same as an EpiPen) and Benadryl.

Her breathing improved, and she started to be able to answer my questions. First, I confirmed her allergy by asking, “So, you’re allergic to sulfa”? The patient says, “Yeah”. I reply, “And you took sulfa”? Again, she goes, “Yeah”. So I asked, “Was it mislabeled or in the wrong bottle”? She answers me with a simple “No”. Okay…

Needing more information, I inquired, “Was it your husband’s prescription”? And unbelievably, she tells me, “No, it was for our horse”. Huh? Feeling a lot more confused, I respond, “Was...Wait, did you say a horse? You took sulfa prescribed for a horse”? She then clarifies, “Well, I only took half”. Sure, that makes it better.

Still trying to follow her logic, I guessed, “...You only took half because a horse is much larger than a person”? The patient confirms, “Yeah”. Uh-huh…I’m still not fully understanding, so I respond, “...Okay. Were you intentionally trying to hurt yourself”? And the patient indignantly answers, “No, of course not”. Exasperated now, I pressed, “But you know you’re allergic, right”?

And she goes, “Yeah. I just have a cold and thought it would help me breathe better”. I couldn’t believe it. Incredulously, I then summarized the situation back to her: “So you took horse sulfa—which you’re allergic to—because you had a cold and thought it would help your breathing”? “I took half a horse sulfa”, the patient corrected me. Good Lord.

I just responded, “Sorry, half. Gotchya. Let’s go to the hospital”.

MrGeneParmesan

This Patient Was In A Jam

opened white and orange travel trailerPhoto by Muhammed Abiodun Mustapha on Unsplash

I’m a paramedic and was called out for a stroke. The man was having a stroke; upon doing a stroke screen, it looked like the patient had something large in his mouth. Thinking maybe this guy had some sort of oropharyngeal cancer or mass, I asked his wife if this was indeed the case, and she looked at me with a very puzzled look.

She said no, and then I asked, “What is in his mouth”? His wife then says it’s a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that she shoved in there. When her husband’s symptoms started, she thought it was just that his blood glucose was low, so she tried to force-feed this poor man an entire sandwich before she called 9-1-1. Ah, job security.

DGSDE98

It Was An Oxidant Waiting To Happen

There was a 24-year-old patient who was brought in from a prison in a rural county. He was working roadside cleanup when he found a bottle in a ditch that he thought contained booze, and he quickly chugged it down. To be fair, it did look like booze. It wasn’t. It turned out it was a substance that contained sulfuric acid. Its pH was less than 2.5...It just ate up the litmus paper. So shortly afterward, he gets to the ICU, and he is in excruciating pain and vomiting blood.

The gastroenterologist took him to do an EGD (basically a procedure where they can look at the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum with a camera attached to a flexible tube), and the pictures were horrendous. You could see his stomach and esophageal mucosa eroding. He had to be sent off to another hospital where they had an esophageal surgeon who could repair the mess.

He, of course, needed multiple surgeries and had a very long hospital stay. I saw him a few months later when he was admitted for another issue. He was down to 90 lbs (from about 150) and was getting fed through a PEG tube. He was very lucky to be young and otherwise healthy (but not very smart).

LedRaptor

A Rash Decision

I’m a pharmacist. This story comes to mind, although I’m sure there are plenty more I’m not remembering. A woman came in, claiming that her medication was making her vomit. She said she couldn’t remember what it was called. So, I looked up her profile, but there was nothing recent, just some one-off antibiotics and an anti-fungal from almost a year ago.

I asked her if her medication was over the counter, and she said that it was and pointed me to the Monistat cream. I thought it was incredibly strange that a cream meant for “lady parts” had made her vomit, so I asked her how she had been using it. That’s when I learned the disgusting truth—much to my surprise, she’d been taking it by mouth.

She explained that she would fill the plunger with the cream, shoot it to the back of her throat, and swallow it so she wouldn’t taste it as much as putting it directly on her tongue and swallowing.

Floor_Fourteen

What A Meathead

I’m a rural ER doctor. A 35-year-old female walked in with right-sided jaw/neck swelling. She says, “I think it happened because I ate some meat yesterday that my body is reacting to…” Then suddenly, 10 minutes later: “Oh yeah, and I accidentally swallowed a bee, and it stung me in my mouth right before this happened. Sorry, I forgot to mention that”.

Shoeflinger

When Urine Need Of Some Whizdom

I had an adult male patient who needed a Foley catheter. His mother was in the room, and they both lived together in the backwoods of Tenessee. I informed them both of the order for a catheter, how it worked, and why it was needed. His mother stated, “Well, he’s still a virgin, and I’m not sure I’m comfortable with his virginity being taken in a hospital”.

blue_monkeys

Person holding newborn baby
Photo by Jill Sauve on Unsplash

In the United States, it's no secret that sex education for minors is inconsistent at best.

But some people learned very unexpected stories about how babies were made, and those stories had a way of making a lasting impression.

Curious about other's stories, Redditor ILoveYourCat asked:

"How did you think babies were made when you were little?"

One Time's the Charm

​"I knew babies came from sex as a fairly young child. My parents never sugar-coated that. But for some reason, as a kid, I thought you only had to have sex once to have multiple pregnancies. I seriously didn't fix that misunderstanding until early middle school."

- Crazey1988

"At some point, when I finally accepted that you had to have sex to have a baby, I thought the only time people have sex was to make a baby, and it only took one time to get the job done."

"Then when I figured out teenagers were having sex, I thought you had to be married and have sex to make a baby, but then when my unmarried cousin got pregnant, I was just confused."

"But I was sure my parents only had sex four times, and then when my mom got pregnant with number five, I thought, 'Wow, they did it again.'"

- Raw_Combination_438

Stealing Storks

"A stork delivered them, of course. What the f**k, lol (laughing out loud)."

- Dells51

"Storks... I thought people trained them to steal babies from a factory and you would leave special treats on your doorstep as payment and encouragement for the stork to steal one for you."

"I was scared to death of birds for the longest time and would have a tantrum at the zoo when I saw a flamingo."

- No_Finish_3144

Young Conspiracy Theorist

"The government. I used to think that we lived in a totalitarian society and that the government was in complete control of everything."

- bebotak**t

"I thought the President sent people their babies when asked by mail."

- GustavoAlex7789

Scheduled Baby Delivery

"The women in my family explained to me at the age of six that a doctor calls you sometime after reaching adulthood at the age of 18 to schedule a baby delivery date."

"The husband either pays to schedule the appointment or the government does after verifying that you have been married and financially stable for quite some time."

- Lokikat00

Marital Kissing

"When two people kissed."

- Short-Reality7353

"I thought the same thing, but I understood that when my mom gave me a kiss, there was no risk. Being someone raised in a very Christian background, I assumed that when you got married, God made kissing a reproductive act."

"Since I made this assumption, I remember questioning why teenage pregnancy could possibly be an issue."

- meuserj

The Ultimate Christmas Gift

​"I thought Santa was bringing them."

- NorskoTheScorpion

"He was. I mean, Christmas comes but once a year..."

- Nouveauuuu

"I MAY NEVER ENJOY CHRISTMAS AGAIN."

- NorskoTheScorpion

A New Meaning to 'Forest Friends'

"When I used to ask my dad where I came from, he'd say he found me under a rock in the forest. Of course, I would go look for babies under rocks, too, but all I ever saw was dirt and those rolly-polly pill bug thingies."

"It was so gross thinking babies were just found THERE that I was actually relieved to find out how they were actually made!"

- melodie-artist

Pregnant By Proximity

"I thought women got pregnant by just being around a man, and I was always confused about what would happen if a woman still lived with her parents or dad after she’s an adult."

- ILoveYourCat

Coming of Age Story

"I thought it was a 'just happens once you reach a certain age' sorta thing. As a woman, I was terrified because pregnancy sounds like the most awful thing, lol (laughing out loud)."

"(I know the end result is worth it but even as a 31-year-old, I'm like, nope.)"

- BansheeShriek

Sounds Plant-Based

"I thought they grew like a seed inside the mother's belly."

- maclaglen

"Technically, that’s true."

- ManagementFresh4960

"Watermelon seeds."

- bravovice

"Well, not like that."

- ManagementFresh4960

The Power of Marriage

"My mum told me you couldn't have a baby if you weren't married. Note that she said 'couldn't', not 'shouldn't'."

"When my unmarried cousin was sleeping a lot my mum told my aunt 'she's having a baby'. I thought 'she can't be having a baby, she isn't married.'"

"A couple of weeks later she had an engagement party, quickly followed by a registry office wedding. She had a baby a few months later."

- MolassesInevitable53

Baby Trees

"I thought they grew on trees. True story."

- 8inchsalvatorre

"Baby trees, lol (laughing out loud)."

- ILoveYourCat

"I was surprised when I learned how it really happened, lol. I was like, 'You mean there are no trees?' And Mom just shook her head."

- 8inchsalvatorre

They Were Just There

"I don't recall a time where I gave the matter any thought without knowing the reality of it."

"Like, literally, until the day I was first introduced to the concept of birth, I don't think I cared where babies came from."

- N_Who

"Right, the little guys just EXISTED."

- Mizar97

Educated Is Best

"I asked my mom and she told me the truth."

"Educate your kids, folks. They can handle it."

- Bite_Me_23

Spontaneous Babies

"I didn’t... They just showed up, honestly."

- badguywindow

"That’s what I thought. I was terrified as a little kid that I’d wind up being a teenage mother because I thought it just happened spontaneously."

- dinosore

"Exactly what I thought would happen. Like one day you were just, boom, six months pregnant."

- badguywindow

While these responses might be funny, it's an important reminder of an area in the educational system that's often lacking.

But in the meantime, while the system's curriculum is getting sorted out, at least we can take comfort in the fact that we weren't alone in believing these tall tales.

View of eye chart through a pair of spectacles
David Travis/Unsplash

One of life's many challenges to being successful and happy is to work hard and stay focused on our respective goals.

There are many obstacles that can discourage us, but persistence and a drive to overcome can be rewarding.

Unfortunately, there are some things that are simply beyond our control, and it has nothing to do with fate.

It's the qualities we're either born with or without that can impede us or prevent us from ever achieving what can only be seen as a pipe dream.

Curious to hear examples of one of life's cruelties, Redditor G00dR1ddance asked:

"How did your genetics f'k you over?"

These Redditors were unhappy with appearances.

Uncooperative Vision

"Lazy eye, and a total lack of depth perception."

– Crow_of_Judgem3nt

"Same. Do you struggle with driving? I just moved to a big city and I can’t drive here bc navigating all the traffic is too hard with no depth perception. It’s so scary!"

– Subnautica24

The Worst Parts

"Moms Family: Perfect teeth, male baldness. Dad's family: Terrible teeth, perfect hairline."

"Me: Sh**ty teeth, bald before 25. My 2 brothers: Perfect Teeth, Perfect Hairline."

"Feels FN bad."

– Yogannath

"They should all chip in for a trip for you to Turkey for a cheap hair transplant and dental work."

– turboprop123

Made For Farming

"All 4 grandparents were farmers. I look like I was bred to farm and f**k to make more little farm workers. Broad shoulders, big boobs, no waist, no @ss worth mentioning, and thick legs. I just look like I was bred to work forever until I die. 120 years ago."

– bwvdub

Stop With The Flattery

"I too am sturdily built. I am not tall but I am muscular and broad with the big boobs and the broad hips and sturdy legs. I could carry very heavy sacks of feed from when I was very small. My family nickname was 'the forklift truck', so that's.. nice."

– LibraryOfFoxes

Room For More

"My mother’s OB said she had a pelvis ‘you could drive a bus through’. I was a natural breach birth and share those genetics. You could host the last supper on my a** and have room for plus ones."

– Elephant_axis

These Redditors are living on borrowed time.

Cardiovascular Health

"Bad heart. I'm the first male in at least 4 generations to make it to 40. And that's only because I was finally properly diagnosed and treated. I wouldn't have made it to 35 if I didn't find the right cardiologist."

– socteachpugdad

"Bum ticker - dad’s aorta exploded when I was 11 and my brother died from the second heart at 41. Just hoping to see my 60s."

– poontong

Being Kept At Bay

"I have a blood condition where I retain iron. It's slowly killing me. Destroyed my liver, pancreas, and led to a massive heart attack."

​"Fortunately, I live in the 21st century where modern medicine can keep me going with...bleeding."​

– Objective_Stick8335

"Sad Aspect" Of A Family

"Huntington's disease"

– alc1864

"My oldest uncle married a woman who had Huntington's, but they were very young and she wasn't symptomatic yet. In the 70s so no genetic testing or much public awareness. They had 5 daughters. My aunt and their eldest have long since passed away, and the remaining 4 are in various stages of the disease. It's always been a sad aspect of our family. A truly cruel disease."

– Wasyloosker12

BRCA Genes

"I’m BRCA2 positive, giving me roughly 74% chances of developing an incurable genetic breast cancer in my life. It also gives me about 22% of having an ovarian cancer."

"On the other side, double mastectomy lowers my chances to about 3%, but it should ideally be done before I reach 30. I will also need a hysterectomy in my 40s."

"I had 50/50 chance of getting the BRCA2 gene mutation so well, genetics did f'k me over!"

– PoutineMaker

Redditors share more of their crosses to bear in life after being blessed with these traits.

"I'm more attractive to mosquitoes than most people. If I'm out when mosquitoes are around, I end up covered in bites (which I'm also allergic to, so I end up with quarter sized welts that itch for daaaays after the fact)."

– p1013

It's sobering to realize the ailments your parents struggled with are starting to become our own to bear. ​

High blood pressure, arthritis, and predisposition to atherosclerosis are some of the undesirable parts of my family's genetic makeup that I never really thought about until I noticed how fatigued and in pain I've become with age.

Although I have so much gratitude for surviving every year I get to celebrate my birthday, getting old still sucks.

Silhouette of man leaving an office carrying a briefcase
Photo by Roth Melinda on Unsplash

Being let go from your job is never a pleasant experience.

Particularly if it comes out of nowhere, without any possible warning that this was a possibility.

Even if it isn't any more pleasant, generally speaking, most people have at least an inkling of why they were let go.

Budgetary reasons, dissolved departments, being told you weren't meeting company standards, or bad blood with the boss.

As well as some less common, highly unusual reasons which at least might make a good story down the line.

Redditor Sweetlo123 was curious to hear from people who were let go from their jobs, and why they were met with this fate, leaving them to ask:

"What did you get fired for?"

For Standing Up For What's Right.

"We were told we get OT for night work."

"The new 'company manager' let it slip that we don't actually get OT for night work, so when I was scheduled for five nights in a row working on a transmission line cell site I mentioned that I expect everyone working from our company on site get OT."

"Once it was said that we won't get OT and that it wasn't an actual policy (was written in employee handbook), I forwarded the email chain to the entire company and leadership at Verizon."

"I was canned, but now everyone gets OT for night work."

"My life is better now anyway and got my people what the deserve."- drklunk

This Was Never Going To End Well...

"Aggressively squeezing breakfast muffins lol."

"I was a few days into working at Mcds and someone complained I gave them a muffin that was too hard-they bake them at like 3 am and sit in a warmer all day."

"This was before they had the full bakery menu, I think muffins was the only thing baked and maybe cookies."

"So my manager told me to squeeze them before I hand them out."

"Me being a dumb teenager squeezed the s*it out of these muffins and got another complaint."

"They stopped scheduling me, haha."- eatmyknuts

You Have To Do The Work To Get Paid...

"I just stopped working and began only attending meetings."

"Lasted almost 9 months that way before they let me go."- frantictossing

martin freeman sleeping GIFGiphy

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

"I was fired after a month into my first job at a local pizza joint when I was 16."

"They called me during the Super Bowl and said I had to come in."

"I told them I was out of state without a car so no way I could make it."

"They said I should’ve known this was one of the busiest days of the year and I should’ve stayed in the area."

"I came in to work my next shift and they just gave me my paycheck and said they had to let me go for not being a team player."

"10 years later I was fired from a job in tech because I refused to move out of state."

"This one hurt a lot more."- seventyfive1989

Hard Not To Say They Had It Coming...

"The company's timeclock software ran off of the computers time, so when I was late I would just close the software, change the time back to before shift start and then clock in and change it back."

"The supervisor who showed me the trick fired me."

"A day or two later he saw me pulling in late, and when he went over the time info that day, it showed me clocked in on time."

"He knew why."- Grief-Inc

Nepotism Always Screws Someone Over...

"Worked at a gas station and was a sucker for the free soda."

"I would drink a few 24 oz glasses of Dr. Pepper (don’t judge) per shift and had to piss relatively frequently."

"I usually worked with the same lady every shift and every shift my drawer came up short even like $10-20 bucks."

"One day my usual co-worker was off and I worked with another lady who warned me to watch my drawer around the other and hers had been short when she was around."

"That got me to thinking."

"The next shift with the usual lady I stuck some receipt paper into the lip of the bottom of my drawer and hit the bead."

"When I came back the paper was on the floor."

"My drawer was short $20 at shift change and my boss fired me."

"I told her of my findings and asked her to review the security tape."

"She told me to f*ck right off the other lady had been there years."

"I left heart broken and rented some VHS tapes to indulge in and recover."

"One of the movies was Casino and man is that a good movie."

"Come to find out the usual lady was the boss lady’s cousin and they f*ckin told people I knew I got fired for stealing money."

"I though about calling a lawyer but also, I was in high school and was delusional I suppose."

"I got out of that town after high school and rarely return, especially considering all my family moved off."- woohhaa

Snl Smiling GIF by Saturday Night LiveGiphy

The Age Old Story Of Men In Power

"Caught the boss stealing."

"So he fired me."

"His word vs. mine and it didn't go my way."- freezingprocess

People Tend To Get What They Deserve

"Embezzled almost $500,000 from the doctor's office I worked at."

"Oh no, wait."

"That was my former supervisor who did that...26 years after she fired me for taking home a left over slice of pizza after a drug rep hosted a pizza party for the office staff."

"Karma can take a long time, but it always comes through."- YourFront

Late To The Game...

"Being the last hired when they instituted layoffs."- BubbhaJebus

Some Plans Can't Be Cancelled

"1970s YES 'Close to the Edge' tour."

"I had my tickets and had the request approved for time off, they changed their mind at the last minute and would not let me off."

"Pfft."

"Left anyways and was genuinely surprised when I got back on Monday and they informed me that I was fired."-AmandaBRecondwith

Treat Others Like You Want To Be Treated

"My boss was talking sh*t about me to employees, and I confronted her with 'how would you expect the people below me to respect me when you show them that you don’t?'"

"She didn’t like it and literally went crying to the owners, who then fired me for 'causing problems'.”- Successful-Snow-562

For Literally Doing What They Were Supposed To

"I got fired for slacking off and underperforming at work by taking my legally required lunch."- 10leej

Hungry Lets Eat GIF by TRTGiphy

They Couldn't Have Waited One Day?

"Worked as a QA tester for an online game company."

"Found bug while on my personal account at home."

"Came in the next day and reported the bug."

"I was VERY clear I found the bug while playing at home on my personal account."

"It was a nasty bug that let you duplicate very expensive items."

"A few weeks later someone in customer service was checking the logs for people exploiting the bug."

"They found mine and the company decided to fire me on my birthday."

"That was around 15 years ago but it still upsets me every year, on my birthday."- PedanticCyborg

While most believe "ignorance is bliss", anyone handed a pink slip deserves to know why.

Even if sometimes the reason gives no closure whatsoever, and instead only results in even more questions.