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Police Officers Share The Craziest Situations They've Ever Been In

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Police Officers Share The Craziest Situations They've Ever Been In

We do not give our friends in blue enough credit. They face situations we can only try NOT to dream of. Danger lurks in every second, every second of their shifts. And Lord do they have some stories of survival to tell. Being a police officer is a whirlwind of crazy. And we need to know more.

Redditor u/Yokeyoyo wanted to hear from all the brothers and sisters in blue by asking...

Police Officers of Reddit, what's the craziest situation you've been in?

Gloves Please.....

A guy on a sports team I play in is a drug squad cop and told us the following story. They had staked out a meth lab house for awhile and surveilled the house with pinhole cameras for some time. They'd noticed that the occupants were becoming increasingly erratic, someone senior suggested it was due to them not replacing the filters in their protective masks.

Anyway, at some stage they decide it's time to go in, so tactical enter and grab all the guys and clear the rooms. Then a chemical team go in to make sure everything is safe. Eventually my mate and his team go in to collect evidence with a few young uniforms to help.

The house is a bit of a shambles but nothing too unexpected, until one of the uniforms picks up a large rubber dildo and starts playing around with it in front of everybody. The senior then tells him: you know that while reviewing all the footage on this place we never saw any women entering or leaving this house... And why are you the only one not wearing gloves? bPhrea

Over Chicken?

Giphy

Not a cop, but a cop friend of mind in SE Washington, DC. He got a domestic disturbance call and arrived to a calm scene. The husband explained he and his wife had been arguing, and that she had gone over the top, but they were both fine now. The wife confirmed the story, but stated she didn't want the husband back in the house that night. My friend asked if the husband had a place to go, and he agreed to go to his mother's house for the night.

The husband left, then my friend and his partner left soon after. About an hour later, they get a call back to the same house. When they get there, the husband is in the kitchen dead. The wife explains that right after the police left, her husband came back and resumed arguing with her. He got in her face and she stabbed in the neck with a chicken bone, hitting his carotid artery. abbrollher

On a hot midnight in The Bronx about 330 am......

On a hot midnight in The Bronx about 330 am got a burg call. Me and my partner found it strange when central gave us the address because it was a funeral home. We arrive on scene of this brownstone building and immediately see the basement lights are on. We look at each other and say "no way ... someone actually broke in here????" So we enter through what is an open door and begin to clear each room of the funeral home/ house. When we reach the basement and open what is a brightly lit body prep storage and prep room we are immediately confronted with several bodies on tables covered in different stages of undress with bed sheets on them.

Our attention is drawn to a very startled naked man holding playing cards . I look at him and simply say "What the heck and who the heck are you?? He looks at me and my partner and nervously responds ... "I'm the Mortician" .... wait .... "Who are you?? And what the heck are you doing??? "I'm the mortician and I'm working and playing cards " "Playing cards ??? My partner says ... "Yeah cards ...see????"... holding his hands out displaying the deck of cards.

I look around and see each of the 4-5 bodies have their own hands dealt to them ...

We asked for His ID .... verified he belonged there and proceeded to leave with a queasy feeling laughing out butts off.

My partner looks at me and says how should we mark this job.... ????

Best job in the world..... I miss the clowns but not the circus. nforcr

Be Naked.

Giphy

Not a police officer, but I know one.

I'm sure he has a million stories, but my favorite that he's told me was the time he was called to a local Mexican restaurant. When he arrived, he was directed to a Cadillac in the parking lot that was a rockin', if you get my drift.

He knocks on the window, and a butt naked 80 year old woman gets out, pissed off that someone interrupted her getting laid. Her 80 year old husband was laying naked in the vehicle still.

This old woman stood outside of her vehicle, completely naked, for a solid 5 minutes, arguing w my friend about how she should be able to get laid whenever she wants.

There was more to the story of course, but as I'm not the first hand story teller, I can't do the story the proper justice it deserves.

He didn't arrest them, even though she stood naked outside for 5 minutes, so she got off easy (pun intended). alwaysmyfault

Still with me....

I babysat for a cop (2 toddler daughters)(10/10 kids, cute and very affectionate) and he told me of one story where he was called to this old lady's home. When they got there they found her husbands rotting body under a pile of newspapers. So apparently the lady had really bad dementia and had thought the husband was a robber and hit him in the back of the head with a rolling pin.

The poor dementia lady went back to bed and he was dead in the morning. She didn't know what to do, so she covered his body with newspapers and somehow managed to survive on her own for a few days. A neighbor started to worry and came to check up on them. The neighbor was the one to call the police. That story haunted me for like a month. ratsoh

"Woodchucks"

I just asked my dad, who was a cop for 30+ years.

He told me he pulled over a car full of "Woodchucks", older drunkards from a rural area in the Northeast area of the US. He was in his late 20's at the time, so in good shape compared to the drunks. I think there were 4. While my dad was processing the driver, he had him in the front seat of his car. Once the guy realized he was probably going to be arrested, he started ripping the radio and anything he could grab out of his car. He grabbed my dad and pulled him out of the passenger side of his vehicle and onto the ground.

My dad landed between this guy's legs and into some kind of leg-lock chokehold. The guy, during all this, has started to scream to his friends to get his gun and kill him. Once he has him in a leg-lock, he looks down and says "now I'm gonna kill you." before he starts to choke my dad with his legs. I guess backup showed up just in time, or had been there, the deputy at the time hit him in the head with a baton and sent him out. tenthplagueb

I went home and hugged my son.

Did a stop on a pretty obvious dope car. Driver is tweaking on meth. Passenger also tweaking and is a female that weighs 95 pounds while being 5'8 or so. She looked like a concentration camp victim. She's offering to provide oral services in exchange for her release. Obviously I decline.

Guy in the back appears to be asleep. I get his ID from the tweaking driver as my backup arrives. We get all 3 out, I can see needles all over the car. The guy in the back wakes up and gets out. Dispatch gives us returns, letting us know the back passenger is has a parole violation (he was released early from prison IYDK) for felon in possession of a firearm.

The dispatcher was supposed to warn us before giving the return out loud over the radio but didn't in this case. Old dude stands up and reaches in his waistband. I see this happening in slow motion and realize it's about to get real. My partner swings from around the other side of the vehicle where he was talking to one of the other suspects. I start to yell gun in time for my partner to straight up linebacker this dude, which we got into cuffs. Had a .45 in the waistband.

I went home and hugged my son, who was 1 at the time.

Edit: was out at a family function. I am about to start replying to all the messages. Thank you.

Second edit: I have a few more good ones if anyone cares to hear them. Also, I don't work patrol anymore. I'm a detective with my agency now.

I posted another story below. Thanks for the positive words. 99% of cops are out there every day doing honest work to keep you safe. copswithguns

67 Stitches In.... 

Not a cop, my dad was. Was backing up a situation where guy allegedly was shooting up on the street. When he came over, guy was arguing with the officer on scene, definitely not being aggressive in any way, or suspicious though. Long story short, the other two officers on scene got aggressive with him and grabbed him and slammed him multiple times into a car parked on the street and he had the get 67 stitches. My dad told the chief and ended up having to quit since everyone was pissed at him for doing so. madiison1461

No Answers. 

I legitimately considered law enforcement as a career path, and regularly chat up officers in public or social situations. I used to ask questions like this.

A former Vegas officer told me a story about he and his partner going to break up a party with some expected underage alcohol and narcotics activity.

While there someone brought up an unusual van down the street. They went expecting more kids nonsense. It contained gang members waiting to kill someone leaving the party.

He was shot multiple times. Spent months in the hospital. His partner was murdered. Dead before EMT arrived.

I stopped asking after this answer. official_fox_news

Hey Ace.

Giphy

Answered a disturbance call to find a drunk dude climbing in a car while his wife screamed at him. She smacked his windshield with a bat, destroying it as he peeled out. We followed him maybe .5 mile with the sirens and lights while he drove with his head out the window Ace Ventura style. Poor bastard didn't get his head back inside in time passing a UPS truck and his head pieces ended up on my windshield. SgtSavage110

St. Peter?

Responded with my partner to a welfare check on an elderly gentleman. Knocked on the door, walked in and couldn't find him. Went to his garage and found him sound asleep behind the wheel. He tried to commit suicide by asphyxiation. Thing is, he only had a small amount of fuel and it was a new Civic. He was pissed when he woke up that I wasn't St Peter. Risin_bison

Showing Up....

Showed up to a call once about a baby crying nonstop for hours and no sign of an adult being home. We went into the house and I followed the sound of the crying baby upstairs to find an 18 month old with her arms duct taped to her crib. I undid the duct tape and it was obvious this was not the first time it had happened. I brought the child downstairs and outside. The mom was walking up the sidewalk of the housing unit and flipped crazy on me.

I handed the child off to a patrol and cuffed her. It was the most satisfying clicking of handcuffs I had ever heard.

Edit: This happened when I was in the Army as an MP. The father of the child was deployed at the time. From what I heard, he was granted permission to return home and take custody of the child. They got a divorce and I believe he won custody. I don't know what happened to her as far as a sentencing or jail time. dogballtaster

Put it Back.

Giphy

My dad friend who is a cop in NC told me that some teen tried to steal an electric shopping cart from Target with a ton of crap in it and tried to outrun the cops but the cart only went 5mph for like 25 meters then the battery died. The cop just asked him to push the cart back since it died and return the stolen items. Bigbadballer88

With an Axe. 

Dad tells the story of a guy he knew who kept getting caught for writing bad checks. He was such a big guy he wouldn't fit in the police car so they would just meet him at the magistrate office and write him tickets. (I know, some trust) but a year or so after this kept happening, he got a call that there was a domestic dispute at the house. So they rush over there and he's got an axe in his hand sitting on the front porch all bloody.

They approach and tell him to put the axe down which he does and proceeded to tell them that his wife is in the bathtub, or at least her head is. But guy was completely open and cooperative, didn't run or anything. Asked if he could meet them at the magistrate office and dad was like yeah nah dawg you're gonna have to get in the car this time.

xfilesarereal

I was in shock....

While serving in South Korea, my team was on patrol in the local drinking village when we heard someone drunkenly singing the US national anthem. At a loss for where this individual was, we finally looked up and there he was.... tight rope walking on the ledge of a building 3 stories up. This is when precision of language is of vital importance...especially when dealing with a drunk. The sergeant on scene said, "Hey, come down here!" The drunkard said, "On my way!" And proceeded to step off.

Under the impression I was about to witness my first death, I was in shock. Through some bit of weird luck/science, he glanced the hood of a slightly misted Daewoo truck and slid down to the ground. We ran over to him and he said, "Hey guys, how's it going?" He had open fractures on both femurs and after some makeshift splinting and controlling the bleeding, he was transported to the nearest hospital. Soju is a hell of a thing. Reddit

"I'm not crazy!"

Giphy

Definitely the time that an older, mentally ill woman tried to burn her house down because she believed that was the only way to disarm the atom bomb in her attic. I got her to walk with me to my car and get in the back by telling her it was the only place she'd be safe. When I got in and started driving, she started yelling that I couldn't take her to jail because she hadn't done anything wrong.

I calmly informed her that we were going to the hospital, which prompted even louder yelling of, "I'm not crazy!" I replied, "I don't think you're crazy." She screamed, "Then why are you taking me to the hospital?!" I told her, "Well, you were next to that atom bomb, right? We gotta get you checked for radiation poisoning." Her eyes got wide and she said, "Oh crap! I didn't think about that, you better hurry!"

Wolfhound1142

For you Rookie. 

First time my brother arrested someone was really funny. He and his training officer were working the graveyard shift and got a call for suspicious activity at a house. They arrive and the homeowner says they're is someone sneaking around his house that shouldn't be there. So they start looking around with their flashlights, grass is really overgrown in the backyard and my brother notice one of those Fisher Price kid's car (yellow & red plastic car) moving on its own. They found their guy, naked and high AF trying to hide under the kids toy and crawl away. Training officer says,"Well, he's your's rookie", had my brother cuff him (guy didn't want to go to jail and put up a naked fight) and take the guy to jail. j2142b

In a bunny suit....

Attended a structural fire in a downtown high rise. Was tasked with evacuating local residents in case the building collapsed.

Third house I went to, the guy answers in a full bunny suit with gas mask propped up in his head. English wasn't his first language, and as I was trying to communicate that he needed to evacuate, it became clear he was running a meth lab inside. Arrested Asian Walter White, and then had to sit in the shadow of the structure fire keeping eyes on the house while waiting for CLEAR (clandestine lab) team to show up.

In that time fire trucks basically surrounded my vehicle so I couldn't move it, even after CLEAR team moved in. Walter had his lawyer call in my pc, and it was about 10 hours before we could head back to cells. I've never had to pee so badly in my life. Philosorunner

Situations.... 

Former PO, I'll try not to make this long: Early morning about 1 hour before I had to end my shift, dispatch said to go lights and sirens to an address. A pit bull was actively mauling an elderly woman. I get there and the woman is practically hanging on to life, blood all over the home. I tased the dog, twice before it responded. A K-9 unit had a muzzle and a strong leash. Dog was eventually put down, woman survived.

Second situation was an active shooter with officer down. It was a real crap show. Dude was off his rocker, shot at a fellow officer. This officer ended up retiring after this, but I and many others thought he was dead.

Third situation. I respond to domestic violence call, shootout with husband, he shoots me 3x and all 3 hit my vest. This was about 6 months after the second situation. I ended my police career after this. KingNebby

"ghost"

Giphy

I know a guy, who was a cop in Texas when I was in middle school. He told me about this one time this woman called 911 because her house was haunted. He preceded to put handcuffs on an invisible "ghost" and acted like he was putting it in the police car. austingarrett

REDDIT

The All-Time Worst Excuses People Have Ever Given For Cheating

Reddit user newlymoneyedrapper asked: 'What is the worst excuse you've heard from someone who cheated?'

When it comes to the dating scene, we all know there are going to be rough moments, from awkward dates to being ghosted to heart-shattering breakups. But the thing everyone hopes will never happen is to be cheated on.

After all, if someone has the intention or inclination to cheat, why would they choose to date at all?

Already cringing at the thought, Redditor newlymoneyedrapper asked:

"What is the worst excuse you've heard from someone who cheated?"

Not 'Meant' for Monogamy

"When they get caught, they try to play the 'humans aren't meant to be monogamous' card."

"I'm like, 'If you don't believe in monogamy, why did you even marry in the first place only to cheat later? You could join a free love hippies commune at any time. But that's not what you did...'"

- fepivo6620

Coming Out as Polyamorous

"I know a girl that cheated, and when she was inevitably caught, said she was 'coming out' as polyamorous."

"She was dead serious and fully expected our support and everything."

- fxckfxckgames

"The difference between polyamory and cheating is informed mutual consent among all parties."

"It's not a sexual orientation, you can't just 'come out' as polyamorous. It's something your partner(s) have to know about and (willingly, not coerced) agree to. Otherwise, you're cheating and making excuses for your s**tty behavior."

- spla_ar42

"Lmao (laughing my a** off), get out of here. Actual poly people would know how important communication is beforehand."

"I would have laughed in her stupid, cheating face."

- kosherkitties

So, Grief Is An Aphrodisiac Now?

"She said, 'It was the anniversary of my cousin's death and I wasn't in my right mind. You know how upset I was. Blaming me is classic victim blaming. You should be COMFORTING me!'"

"This was AFTER I offered to stay with her for the night but she said she wanted to be alone."

"I wish I could say I immediately left her, but it took two months and a second cheating incident. That time she said she was upset over a bad grade (seriously)."

"I walked away. And I blocked her. The bizarre part is how she kept trying to contact me for four years after that. She even confronted me in the parking lot on my first day of work, begging me to take her back. Why f**k around so indiscriminately if you want to be with someone?"

"Anyway, I stopped trying to figure her out long ago."

"It was my first relationship (age 15 to 18), and I was a naive fool."

"I'm not jaded now, but I know a h**l of a lot better."

- midnightsonofab***h

"I am sure her cousin would have been very proud of her using his death as an excuse to cheat and then call herself the victim."

- Acceptable-Stay-3166

Everyone Hates Mercury Retrograde

"My ex was very into astrology. She cheated and later blamed the great American eclipse of August 2017."

- henoney389

"SORRY I KEYED YOUR CAR, LOL (LAUGHING OUT LOUD). I'M SUCH AN ASPARAGUS."

- Skwerilleee

"I think you mean the MOON is in GATORADE."

- Zmb7elwa

So Sweet of them

"'I didn’t even enjoy it, because I was thinking about you the whole time, and I felt terrible.”

- fepivo6620

Those Undeniable Needs

"He said, 'You were at the hospital for two weeks. A man has needs."

- Wichita_Falls_Texas

"My girlfriend had a contagious skin infection for several months, and the post-infection management was even longer. We put off sex for about a whole year, and not once did thoughts of cheating occur to me."

"I’m sorry you had to endure that. Not all men are like him."

- Expensive_Presence_4

Growing the Family, and the Relationship

"They said, 'My wife was pregnant, so I wasn't getting any.'"

- tefama5759

"If I remember correctly, pregnancy is the time or one of the times when women are cheated on the most."

- RBNrando

"This breaks my heart."

- LoreGeek

At Least It Didn't "Matter"

"They said, 'It’s not like it meant anything.' Oh good, glad we cleared that up."

- fepivo6620

"Yet you threw our relationship away over it. So what I'm hearing is I mean less than nothing to you."

- LeRuseRenard

Increased... Appreciation

"He really said, 'I’m just on Tinder to confirm that there’s nothing better out there. It helps me appreciate you more.'"

- tivige8195

Getting a Jump on Things

"My previous partner told me that he cheated because he insisted that he 'thought I was going to break up with him anyways,' so he started seeing other women."

"I believe this was just another one of his manipulation tactics to put the blame on ME for his actions. To this day, I cannot fathom the mental gymnastics he had to do to justify his decisions... Lol (laughing out loud)."

- cuteemogirlfriend

"I wonder if he's familiar with the term 'self-fulfilling prophecy'?"

- Browncoat85

"Well, he is now."

- cuteemogirlfriend

Cheat or Be Cheated On

"My last boyfriend said he cheated because he thought I had already cheated. But I did not cheat on him."

"He felt like an a**face when he realized I didn't... But he lowkey still thinks I did."

- _mel-issa

For the Sake of the Relationship

"My college roommate would cheat on his girlfriend a few times a semester, and then feel awful about it and realize how much he loved his girlfriend."

"He started to rationalize that 'you need to cheat to stay faithful.'"

- henoney389

​Opportunities to Cheat

"Oh, this thread reminds me of my ex, who was just a complete s**tbag."

"He didn't cheat, but he nearly did, and he told me about it and said 'Hey, I was really drunk and still didn't cheat, everyone around was so so proud of me and said I must really like you. They all thought I did amazing for not cheating on you even though I had a proper chance to do it, so I thought I'd tell you about it.'"

"I just raised my eyebrow at him. I remember that I did hang up on him a few times and told him that it wasn't massively impressive when he was being a d**k. He was very abusive so I couldn't safely leave him, though. If it was safe to do so, I would've dumped his a** right there and then."

"I know he's on Reddit so he'll likely see this, and good riddance because he's a complete t**t. If you see this, you know who you are, and I think you can go to h**l for what you did to me."

- Complete-Mess4054

All About the Rush

"The answer is because cheaters get off on cheating. It gives them a thrill that a 'normal' relationship can't give them."

"This is why I say cheaters will always cheat, because they crave the excitement of it."

"They don't give a s**t about monogamy or non-monogamy; they just find it fun to cheat. They also enjoy chasing after other people who are in relationships because it's more fun for them to chase after someone who's already taken rather than to find someone who's not."

"In other words, they're sociopaths who get off on causing misery to satisfy their own selfish desires."

- MissGrim66

It's clear why these Redditors thought these were the worst explanations for cheating.

Not only do some of them not make sense, but they're a total dismissal of the cheater's accountability in the relationship.

While realizing that a partner you loved was cheating is already bad enough, it seems that receiving a terrible, ingenuine reason for the act would only serve to make it worse.

Think about the last time you were sick; the ritual of checking WebMD, thinking you have a life-threatening illness, then finding out it was a harmless rash that was causing you all that stress. Regardless of the symptoms, we’ve all been there—but what of the unlucky few who actually did have some sort of ill-fated, isolated illness?

A Bad Bridge to Cross

red and white massage chairPhoto by Atikah Akhtar on Unsplash

In dental school, I had an emergency patient come in complaining of sore gums. Upon examination, I found a massive calculus bridge (google it for pictures) behind her lower front teeth. She only had about 3 remaining lower teeth, but they were all connected with a whitish brown mineral deposit that was about the size of a golf ball. She had never had her teeth cleaned and she was probably 55 years old or so.

I basically performed an emergency cleaning. She could speak so much better afterward. Of course, I had to play it off like it was normal, but in my years of practice, I still haven’t seen a case that bad again. Get your teeth cleaned people. Even if you can’t afford every 6 months, once a year, or every other year is a heck of a lot better than never.

SirNobealot

The Neighbors

An elderly lady came into my practice asking if there was anything she could be given to help her sleep, as the Irish terrorists in the flat below were keeping her awake at night. She was reassured that terrorists were not planning to blow her up, or Cannock (a small inconsequential town in the West Midlands) for that matter.

On the second visit, she insisted that they were going to blow something up soon and expressed paranoid thoughts. A full mental health review was conducted by the GP and the community psychiatrist. She came up clean. That's when we contacted the police, a couple of days later the flat below our patient was raided and found to be full of explosive equipment and real IRA members.

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

chasealex2

Just a Nibble

When I was on peds ID, we had a young girl come in with a rash on the bottom of her feet. She was also having headaches and joint pains. We spent close to an hour interviewing the girl and her mother. Her history was essentially negative. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, I pulled out the weird questions you ask in med school.

I asked if they had any unusual pets, as we had already ruled out normal pets. They said actually they did just return a pet rat for biting her. They thought that this wasn't really relevant. Bam! Rat bite fever.

psilord34

Pill Problem

I'm not sure if this counts as a rare diagnosis but it was a neat one. This fellow was at dinner with his wife and some friends when "all of a sudden" he slumped forward into his entree and went unconscious. I saw him as a hospitalist in the IMCU. Despite being unconscious, his labs and vitals were all stable and he appears to be adequately protecting his airway.

The wife was initially understandably distraught and not able to offer the best of histories, but as the patient gradually began to wake up, I was able to put together a few facts. The patient had pancreatic insufficiency and thus needed to take six pills with pancreatic enzymes before each meal. He also had a prescription for Ambien. They were both white pills...you can figure out the rest. He recovered fully without any long-term effects.

wastelander

Hoofbeats

I diagnosed a patient with acute intermittent porphyria. He had a history of psychiatric admissions with depressive symptoms associated with nausea (though not much in the way of pain). I saw him as a medicine consult for the psychiatry service and ordered urine porphyrins just for completeness as it apparently had never been tested before. Lo and behold, they come back positive.

There is this old adage in medical school, "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras." Which while perhaps relevant to a medical student, is actually the opposite for what is needed from a skilled practitioner. The common stuff is easy...practically reflexive. In our case, a better adage would be, "When you hear hoofbeats don't just assume it’s another horse." Too often physicians just hear the hoofbeats and ignore the black stripes.

wastelander

A Staple Food Source

man in blue dress shirt sitting on yellow chairPhoto by Mark Williams on Unsplash

I worked as a mental health tech to get through undergrad. A 15-year-old female in the adolescent ward claims to have swallowed a staple. Eh, but whatever, as I’m taking her down to x-ray, I tell her about the dime I swallowed when I was a kid. It happens. Well, turns out she underestimated the number of staples by around a hundred.

Every printout given by the therapists had been a swallowed staple. She had gotten staples from the other kids. The x-ray of her abdomen looked as if it were a weird staple-y snow globe. And yet, somehow, she was back to trying to take psych ward staples a week later. Never did figure out how they removed them all.

UnfairCanary

No Face

Baby born without a nose and with non-functioning eyes. Diagnosed with Bosma Syndrome. It was kind of crazy, I saw the baby a few months later and it was doing fine. Children with Bosma Syndrome grow up without any cognitive disabilities, it's very interesting.

SamDaManIAm

Spinal Tap

I am an anesthesiologist now, but was a doctor in charge of a small rural hospital in India about 20 years ago. An elderly lady was brought to the hospital by an irate husband who felt she was faking an illness. She would lie in a room all day with doors and windows shut and complained of a headache. She refused to do housework or look after the kids. Other doctors who had seen her before me had treated her for pain with no improvement.

I examined the patient; who complained of severe headaches and just wanted to lie down and refused to open her eyes. I admitted her to the hospital and performed CSF tap (A needle into the lumbar spine to get a sample of fluid surrounding the spinal cord). As expected, it was tinged yellow (Cerebro-spinal fluid should be clear). These days we have CT scans to diagnose sub-arachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding around the brain); but it was a difficult diagnosis once upon a time.

drdeeppakjoseph

One in a Million

The morning report was a good one today. We had a 59-year-old male come in with lower leg swelling. Within 3 days he becomes confused, febrile, and stiff. We put him in the ICU, thinking he had meningitis and got some CSF cultures and started antibiotics. Two days later, the cultures were still negative and he wasn't improving.

His wife then says this whole event seems similar to her husband’s (the patient’s) mom. She had Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and passed from it. It's a 1 in a million (literally) diagnosis and our tests are still coming back for it. Really rare case most doctors will never see.

corf1

The Living Dead

I had a lady come into the ER listed as “Multiple Medical Problems”. This usually means diabetes and the issues stemming from it, or maybe bleeding issues from another disease or maybe odd blood tests results at a clinic. I hadn’t seen the patient yet, but the doctor came to the nurse’s station asking who had room 15. I jumped up and followed him into the room.

I walked in and saw what I thought was a corpse. Then the patient’s eye swiveled over to look at me. She truly looked like one of the people they found in a concentration camp. I could see every bone, and her body was twisted in a decorticate position with her jaw locked open. Then the smell hit me: rotting flesh and body fluids. I struggled to keep a neutral face and not gag.

I tried to place a blood pressure cuff on her arm and her skin just started flaking off in my hands. I gagged. The doctor started removing her clothes to examine her. Her feet were black to the ankles. Her hip bones were poking through her skin and were black. The skin around her ribs was worn away to oozing muscle fibers.

Her calves were incredibly swollen and the skin was splitting like ripped pants. I removed her Depends, and there was excrement coating her entire genital area. Then the doctor went to remove a large bandage on her lower back. Her entire sacrum was exposed and the bones were BLACK! The skin around it was a black liquified mass.

It smelled like nothing I’ve ever smelled. I can’t even describe it. The doctor told her family I would clean up her ulcers and wounds in preparation for surgery (liar, no surgeon would operate on her). I had no idea how to clean dead bone tissue and liquified skin (they don’t cover that in nursing school). When I went to clean her sacral area, all the liquified skin separated and oozed all over the bed. I really struggled to keep myself together.

Afterward, I needed a moment in the supply closet to cry it out for a second. I had no idea the human body could break down so much without dying. I still think about that woman sometimes, and what led to her living like that. It still breaks my heart. My guess is that she had some sort of traumatic brain issue or a stroke.

Family members were taking care of her, and I think they were treating her absolutely horribly. I think as her skin deteriorated, she developed terrible pressure ulcers that never healed. The swelling was probably due to starvation and a lack of protein in her diet. I’ve had nightmares about her face since then. Once, I dreamed she crawled into bed with me.

I freaked the heck out and ran into the hallway. My toddler walked out after me, rubbing his eyes, asking why I ran away.

cohen14722

Catching Zebras

zebra standing on wheat fieldPhoto by Jeff Griffith on Unsplash

My first rotation as a medical student was psychiatry. I was really nervous, and made a flashcard for each psych condition and a list of diagnoses to consider. One of the patients being discussed on rounds was psychotic (think: KGB is after me!) but was otherwise put together. He was really into doing art and was very, very religious.

I looked at my flashcard for psychosis and casually mentioned that we should consider temporal lobe epilepsy, which presents with religiosity and exaggerated artistic ability. An EEG showed that he had it. I've caught a few zebras since, but that was my favorite.

implante

Cat Calling

A six-month-old baby was not getting bigger and dropping off the growth charts. The baby wouldn’t move and cried all day long. I couldn’t figure it out. I was making preparations to transfer the baby to the university hospital for admission. One of the clinic nurses commented that the baby's cry sounded like a cat. Ding, a bell went off in my head.

Cri du chat syndrome or cats cry syndrome. Very rare. I looked it up on UpToDate and the baby had a high probability of having it. I referred her to genetics and they confirmed it. The attending called me and marveled at my clinical skills. I chuckled and told him the nurse diagnosed it. Good news, the baby had a small deletion of the 5p chromosome and managed to stay somewhat healthy and functional.

stheonlyone

Socrates’ Demise

We had a young fellow come in who worked as a landscaper. He showed up in the ER with severe GI distress. The diagnosis was almost entirely from history. Apparently, he forgot to bring lunch so decided to munch on some "wild carrots" he found while he was out working. I Google "wild carrot dosing" and quickly figured out the diagnosis (this was in the this was Northeast USA by the way). I will give you a hint...a certain Greek philosopher also had an affinity for the substance...it was hemlock. AKA: Not good for you.

He recovered fine, though he did get a night in the ICU for observation.

wastelander

The Worse of Two Evils

We had a good case a few years ago. An otherwise healthy, 40-year-old migrant worker from Central America started coughing up blood intermittently. Everything suggested tuberculosis: History (they were from an area with lots of TB), chest x-ray looked like tuberculosis, illness script looked like tuberculosis...but his tests for it (sputum/quant gold) were all negative.

I decided to test his urine on a whim to rule out pulmonary-renal pathologies. Ding, ding, ding! Blood. Lots of blood. The patient never noticed it, and his kidney function was superb, so this was a tricky diagnosis. Turns out he had granulomatosis with polyangiitis (Wegner's). Kind of a sad story, because TB is largely curable, but with Wegner's he'll be on chemo for a very long time with this disease. I'm glad we caught it before irrevocable damage to his organs, though.

gettheread

A Bad Prognosis

As a third-year medical student, I had a patient come in with four years of worsening balance issues and garbled speech. She had gotten a crazy work up at an outside hospital system with every sort of imaging possible, biopsies of random sites, and a number of very expensive tests. She was at our university hospital for the first time.

When I first entered the room, I reached out to shake her hand, and from her wheelchair she had to raise her head at me because she couldn't look up with her eyes. This was the first red flag. I also asked her if she had the sensation where one of her limbs would move without her controlling it, and she said yes, suggesting something called Alien Limb Phenomenon.

I diagnosed her with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy with features of Corticobasal Degeneration, a very rare disease on the spectrum of Parkinson's plus syndromes, and my supervisors agreed. Unfortunately, it was a bad prognosis, but the family was consoled by the fact that at least they had a name for what was happening.

yourredditMD

Hard to Miss

person in blue denim jeans lying on bedPhoto by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

A woman came in with severe opiate withdrawal and some shortness of breath. Because she was so insistent about how miserable she was, everyone sort of wrote her off as drug-seeking. The morning I rounded on her, I decided to do a thorough physical exam. Lo and behold, she has a hard non-mobile clavicular lymph node...it was so big that it was impossible to miss if you just did the exam.

Immediately we got a chest x-ray and then a CT scan. There was a perihilar mass. After a biopsy, we learned it was small cell carcinoma (lung cancer).

eatonsht

A Hard Revelation

I was visiting a friend’s house when I was introduced to his dad who had no medical issues. He was a hard-working farmer, but looked a bit too thin. Something told me there was something not quite right, and so I asked him if I could examine him. I promptly discovered hard lymph nodes in several areas. Further investigations revealed he had disseminated cancer. He kicked the bucket less than a year later.

drdeepakjoseph

The Meat of the Issue

A patient came in with an itchy rash that would not go away for weeks, and a new swelling of the mouth and tongue. She had "hives" all over her body and the only thing that had helped was repeated steroids. She was a mid 40s female who worked with dogs, so we assumed that she had a new allergy to pet dandruff, fragrance in a shampoo, flea medicine, or something along those lines. We discharged her home with an appointment for the dermatologist to do a biopsy of the lesions. But that wasn't the last we'd see of her.

Later that day, she turns back up in the Emergency Department with swollen lips, increased rash, and trouble breathing. She started having these problems 15 minutes after eating a roast beef sandwich. Someone on the team remembered that she works with dogs and asked if she'd had any recent tick bites. Sure enough, she had been bitten by a tick a few weeks ago and identified a picture of a Lone Star Tick.

Turns out she had developed an allergy to red meat after a bite from that tick. This allergy is called an alpha-galactosidase allergy, and is a reaction to a carbohydrate carried on the outside of cells (think like the carbohydrates on red blood cells for ABO blood type) by all other mammals except humans and monkeys.

The tick had bitten one of these and kept some of the protein in its digestive system, and then after biting her, her body developed antibodies to the carbohydrate, causing her to have a new allergy to meat.

thepunctuator

Unexpected Guests

Ordered an abdominal ultrasound on a refugee from Iraq via Syria, expecting to find gallstones because she felt full easily after eating and was having pain in her right upper quadrant. Instead of gallstones, there were two, 7 cm cysts in her liver. Hydatid cysts from a tapeworm.

kgjohnson2

More Than Meets the Eye

As a fourth year during my rotations, I noticed my patient had a vertical subluxation of her crystalline lens during a dilated eye examination. The part of the eye that develops a cataract later on in life was shifted significantly up. She had severe myopia and astigmatism (-14.00 - 5.00 x 180 OU), and her 6'1" tall body along with disfigured teeth led me to believe she had Marfan's Syndrome.

She had never heard of it, never seen a cardiologist, etc. A few lab tests confirmed. She can live a normal life; she just needs some meds and education. She had very long fingers that jumped out at me and braces on her teeth. As an optometrist, I focus on glasses and contacts, but I see (no pun intended) and treat an unbelievable number of systemic diseases that manifest in the eye or retina.

Permalink

My Old Mother

woman wearing eyeglassesPhoto by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

One of my favorites is when we had an 85-year-old man in for cellulitis or something, and everyone was documenting he was confused—in part because he kept talking about his mother; his mother was going to be so worried, he had to be discharged to take care of his mother etc. He became agitated and was actually getting ready to be dosed with Haldol because he was insistent he was going to leave to take care of his mother.

Note, the standard is to play along, tell the patient something like "Oh, we already called your mom, she knows you're here" that sort of thing, but he wasn't buying it. Finally, the nurse asks him if we can call his son to make sure the patient's mother is being taken care of (really, just to placate the patient), and the patient agrees. We call the son, the nurse explains the situation, and the son informs us that the patient's mother is indeed alive at the age of 101, but that he is staying in his father's house assisting in her care.

Poor patient was legitimately worried about his mom, and we all thought his infection (or just old age) was causing him to be confused!

Permalink

On a Hunch

ED referred a guy to me who had a platelet count of 2. The guy looked bloody sick with abdominal pain, petechial rash, feverish, diaphoretic, and he was a bit confused and drowsy too. I talked to my boss who said to give him prednisolone and he'd see him tomorrow, but I was convinced this guy had a really rare condition called TTP (Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura) and so I called the major hospital in my area and sent him to their ICU for a procedure called plasma exchange.

I ordered a test called ADAMTS13 to prove the condition, and still have a paper copy of the result (he had none of this chemical) because it's the best diagnosis I've ever made, it helped save his life!

sam_galactic

Growing White

Menkes kinky hair syndrome. I was called to see a 3-month-old boy with hard-to-control seizures. His most remarkable exam finding was his hair: he had been born with a full head of black hair (he was Hispanic), but at the time I saw him, the first 3-5 mm of each hair shaft was nearly white, with an abrupt color change, still black on the tips. The hair was a giveaway for this disorder, almost no need for confirmatory testing, but the admitting team had already ordered whole exome sequencing.

This was not a fun and exciting diagnosis to make, more a sinking feeling upon discovery of the hair (neurodegenerative disorder due to a defect in copper metabolism that is irreversible once symptoms appear), but it was interesting to see at that transitional stage. I had only seen older boys with Menkes before, once the hair was already pale and brittle all over. Usually the hair has changed long before the diagnosis is made.

Allyeknowonearth

Ignoring the Issue

I'm an anesthesiologist. This happened when I was a resident. It changed me for life. We had a 29-year-old male in for finger surgery. We had an uneventful induction maintained on Sevoflurane. Within 20 minutes we started to have rising ETco2. I called my attending after trying to hyperventilate the patient (She was a young Harvard trained peds anesthesiologist).

She comes in and asks me what I think is going on. I tell her things seem strange. She tells me to chill. Five minutes later, the ETco2 is over 100 and I'm freaking out! I call her and tell her this is MALIGNANT HYPERTHERMIA (easily fatal reaction to certain anesthetics caused by congenital aberrant sarcoplasmic reticulum receptors).

She says that I'm being ridiculous when I tell her I'm afraid this is the real deal. My pages get ignored by her. The patient’s temperature starts to rise. I'm bugging out and call the board runner (supervising Anesthesiologist for all the operating rooms). He's old. He knows me well and trusts me. Comes in, looks at the monitor—and his face went white.

Needless to say, we save the patient after many dozens of vials of Dantrolene. Six months later I'm made to do an M&M and the young Harvard attending insinuates I did something wrong in front of the department. Most of the rest of them come to my aide. She leaves the job shortly thereafter. I will soon be at her fellowship.

Weird.

Awesam

Flippant Flipping

I didn't diagnose it, but I have a patient with primary Ciliary Dyskinesia with Situs Inversus, aka Kartagener syndrome. The cilia in the body don't move well, and this mainly affects the respiratory cilia/lungs, although it also causes infertility, related to the cilia inside the fallopian tubes and the sperm tails not working well.

Situs Inversus is when the organs inside the thorax are mirror images of normal, the heart is on the right side instead of the left, etc. I was looking over this patient's old medical records and one of the radiology reads of a chest x-ray said, "There has been interval development of dextrocardia. Since this is physiologically impossible, the film has been flipped."

Probably the original film the radiologist had been comparing to had been incorrectly flipped to look "normal," maybe by someone who assumed there had been an error. Another chest x-ray report just read: "The film has been flipped" and then went onto the rest of the interpretation.

Kirsten

A Quick Diagnosis

person holding baby feetPhoto by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

I once saw a child with mosaic trisomy 8. It was a complete mystery why he had speech apraxia, and the geneticist I was working with took one look at his feet, saw that they had super deep creases lengthwise, and ordered a karyotype with mosaic trisomy 8 in mind. Sure enough, he was right. I was amazed how spot-on he was predicting that.

blizpix

Caught in Her Throat

Primary doctor here. Had a two-year-old refugee child (whose parents couldn't communicate well) who swallowed a button battery and it was stuck in her throat. For clarity, I didn't know it was a button battery, but something just didn't feel right, so I sent her to the ED. If she had gone perhaps one more day, she might not have made it—it had already destroyed a good amount of tissue in her esophagus and was apparently somewhat close to perforating.

I feel like it would have been very easy to just say she had a sore throat from an illness, particularly with the language barrier. I'm glad that something felt weird to me—she didn't look that bad, but was just holding herself and breathing weirdly.

En_lighten

Rare and Terrible

Wolman Disease. A genetic disease that affects about 1/200,000 kids, terrible outcome. It leads to calcification of the adrenal glands, which is how I picked it up on a chest x-ray on-call (I'm a radiologist). The kid had failure to thrive and a big spleen so I brought it up. He got further testing which confirmed the diagnosis.

Bottom line, don't forget to look at the adrenals or ribs on peds x-rays!

Proxyfloxacin

Dr. Google

Probably Stiff Person Syndrome. Technically it was paraneoplastic antibodies causing a case of mild stiff person-like syndrome, but it was basically a lady who had glutamic acid decarboxylase antibodies which caused her to be really stiff. How'd I figure it out? Well, she was really stiff and it was very odd. I was out of ideas and literally googled "stiff person" and got the result of a disease I'd probably heard mentioned in passing in med school but is so rare you forget about it: Stiff Person Syndrome.

Yes, it's real. I thought it was a joke at first—but it's all too real. Ordered the test, it was positive. Later, after more research, I learned that you can have similar antibodies and symptoms with paraneoplastic syndromes, so I did a scan, and found a lung tumor. Boom. SPS is really rare. Paraneoplastic syndromes are less rare. She was somewhere in the middle.

Digitlnoize

Miracle Porridge

I made a clinical diagnosis of fairly early-stage necrotizing fasciitis (the infamous flesh-eating bacteria) in West Africa which was pretty cool... The patient was a young adult male who was writhing and screaming in agony as he was carried in. He spoke a tribal dialect and I spoke ugly French, so it was basically impossible to get any information out of him or the friends who brought him in.

I laid him on the table and did a rapid trauma assessment. When I stripped off his shirt, I saw a small patch (maybe 4" x 6") of blackened tissue below his left nipple along the side of his ribs. It looked like a chemical burn to me at first glance. I realized that some of the skin had torn off the area when I removed his shirt, and when I touched the lesion to examine it, I could feel the skin separating from the tissue below it.

The technical term is "desquamating." It had a horrible odor like spoiled meat/rotting garbage mixed with 100 degree west African heat and 100% humidity. Putrid. His temperature was over 40C (104+ F) and his O2 saturation was terrible. The rotting garbage smell indicated anaerobic bacteria, the skin peeling off indicated connective/soft tissue involvement, and the disproportionate pain (relative to the size of the lesion) is a hallmark of necrotizing fasciitis.

I ran back to my room and grabbed the Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine (highly recommend if you work over there in medicine) to double-check because I had never seen a case of flesh-eating bacteria in person before and didn't want to screw up the diagnosis and move things in a different direction if I was wrong. Sure enough, everything matched up and the chief of medicine stopped by to confirm the diagnosis. He basically said, "Oh yeah we see these fairly frequently, people get a cut or a bug bite and then rub dung or dirt into it and the infection takes hold."

The craziest part was the outcome. In the United States, patients with necrotizing fasciitis in one limb frequently die or suffer amputations of both arms and both legs—even in the best ICUs. Here we were in the middle of West Africa at a remote bush hospital and this guy has it on his chest, which pretty much wrecks the standard aggressive surgical approach since you can't exactly amputate the chest.

We loaded him up with high dose IV ampicillin a few times a day and his wife forced him to eat multiple bowls of porridge...miraculously he made a full recovery and left smiling 10 days later. I'm convinced it was the porridge.

greedo4president2016

Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve

pruning topless babyPhoto by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

I diagnosed a little girl at birth who had Ectopia Cordis. It's a birth defect where the heart is located outside of the chest or thorax (yet it's still underneath the skin). It only happens to about 5-7 per one million live births. Warning, if you plan to search up "Ectopia Cordis," the images available may not be for the faint of heart.

Say No to Drugs

Today I took care of a man who believed he had been bitten on the abdomen by a baby rattlesnake that had fallen out of his ceiling vent, crawled up his abdomen under his skin, up his throat, and was currently coiled and rattling in his brain. Diagnosis: methamphetamines. Just say no.

2ThineOwnZelphBeTrue

Against All Odds

Five years ago, I spent six months working in a small rural Zambian hospital in the medical ward as part of a volunteer/outreach program. I have done mostly family medicine, and some surgery in my early days, but decided to mix life up a bit. The hospital was typical third world—a few basic medications, rudimentary clinical tools, a small lab on site which was usually broken.

No resuscitation tools whatsoever. HIV, TB and malaria were rife—it would not be uncommon to encounter a loss per day despite our best efforts. On one of my first days there an unconscious person was carried in by a mob of locals. I could smell him before I saw him. He had been in a house fire and his skin was cooked—completely black around his chest, face, and over his legs.

He was still breathing on his own and maintaining his airway but we had no doubt he had inhaled a lot of smoke. With no way to intubate or provide oxygen we merely had to hope that he didn’t swell up and close off and deal with the rest of the burns while he was unconscious. Two colleagues who worked in the hospital came over urgently.

We all kept our cool externally and got the nurses to translate to the man’s family that we were going to do everything we could to get him better. In reality, all three of us knew his chances at survival were in the single-digit percentages. We decided that due to the extent of his burns we were going to have to do an escharotomy (cutting the burned skin to prevent it contracting and stopping him from breathing).

Turns out I had the most surgical experience so despite having never done one before I gave it a go, hoping for the best. We got an IV into a neck vein and got fluids going. The local nurses dressed his burns. We gave him whatever pain relief we had. He was unconscious for a couple of days but eventually came to.

Each day we were expecting his kidneys to pack up but to our surprise, gradually he got better. He was with us for just over four months recovering. He came out severely scarred but he had beaten the odds and survived.

drcopperfield

A Rare Talent

I've diagnosed anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis in a patient that was thought to be withdrawing from an unknown illicit substance. Then, not two months later I had another patient with the same disease. I was talking to a neurologist recently and he thought it was a condition that is far more common than we thought it was, but still a pretty good catch for an internist.

I've caught a few conditions that were rarer, but it's nice to talk about one that's treatable.

throckmortonsign

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

I'm PhD, not MD. The weirdest to me was a bloodstream bacterial infection that looked sensitive to antibiotics in the clinical lab, but the patient could not be cured. We got samples of the bacteria and turns out it was "tolerant" to antibiotics in a biofilm (heart valves) but not sensitive in the clinical sense. Opened my mind as a microbiologist to how insanely adaptive bacteria can be, and how they're more a population than individual cells. The most interesting paper I ever published, and unexpected.

aussie-vault-girl

Subtle Symptoms

man reading papers in front of computerPhoto by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Not super rare but sort of diagnosed/missed Myasthenia gravis. I was an intern in the emergency department. A woman presents with the classic vague symptoms of fatigue and weakness. Notably, her father had very recently passed. Full blood panel was normal, her examination was almost completely normal but I did find she had proximal weakness (her upper arm strength and thigh strength were poor but her hand and feet and shins etc. were normal).

I presented to my superior and we decided to send her home because we couldn't diagnose her with anything and we can't admit someone to hospital for fatigue. She was upset that we couldn't help her. After she left, I couldn't shake this terrible feeling. I asked my superior, what about Myasthenia Gravis? Well, too late now, besides the testing takes weeks.

She represented a week later (I didn’t see her). She was admitted this time and seen by a physician. More tests were ordered and eventually she was diagnosed and treated for Myasthenia Gravis. I saw her 6 months later and she remembered me, she was doing much better and wasn't upset that we missed the diagnosis.

It can be very hard to diagnose some things because of how non-specific the symptoms are. In this case I had a feeling she had a real disease especially with her proximal weakness but there wasn't much we could do about it.

DudeWhoSaysWhaaaat

Jaw-Dropping News

I'm not sure if I count because I'm a veterinarian, but I saw trigeminal neuritis in a dog. Basically, the dog can't move his lower jaw, but it's not stiff or painful or anything, it just hangs slightly open. It looks like the dog has just received some unbelievable news, basically. It goes away on its own in 2-4 weeks, but the dog can't eat or drink very well, so you have to syringe feed them, do elevated food bowls, etc.

cloud_watcher

Benadryl to the Rescue

I had a patient transferred to our hospital for a STEMI (major heart attack). When they arrived, I noticed they looked a bit red and asked them, other than the chest pain, what symptoms they were having. The person said that they had been having a rash for a few days as well as nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Those symptoms go along with a condition called scombroid poisoning which you get from eating old, dark meat fish (tuna, mackerel, etc.).

I asked the person if they had recently been eating fish and sure enough, they had been eating salmon for the past few days. Assuming they had it, I treated them with Benadryl which fixed the rash, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. They were taken by the cardiology service to get a cardiac catheterization (how you find clogged blood vessels in the heart) for the heart attack and the results came back normal (no vessel occlusion).

Best I could tell, the condition stressed their body and made them tachycardic/hypotensive which made their heart work harder. The increased demand on the heart + an already weak heart led to the heart attack. Also, was pretty awesome to see the EKG go from showing a clear heart attack to normal after being treated with Benadryl!

1llumina

Face-palm Parenting

I'm a nurse and I work in a pediatric ER. A young woman brought her baby in to be seen for vomiting. I ask her to put the baby on the scale. While on the scale I notice a strong odor of bug spray so I asked about it. Her response made my blood run cold. Mom: "A roach crawled into her mouth so I sprayed a little Raid in there." She said it in a matter of fact tone, like it was no big deal.

Queue up calls to the police, CPS and a 1:1 sitter for the child and the mom. When all was said and done the baby was fine and turned over to her grandmother so no worries there. I have no idea what happened to the mother. I don't believe she was intending to hurt the child. I think she was just completely ignorant.

TomTheNurse

Non-FDA Methods

We had a case a couple of years ago that still gives me chills whenever I think about it. A younger girl goes to her family doctor in a small town outside of the bigger city where I live. She had persistent headaches, which just started a few days prior. No past medical history of anything similar or really at all about her that stood out as relevant.

Unable to diagnose or treat her headaches (which were rapidly growing more severe), she was sent to our hospital (X state's Childrens' Hospital) for evaluation. We ran her through the typical gauntlet of testing for common causes, CBC/CMB/CT/MRI etc. still with no clue. Nothing came up on blood cultures either. At this point she was in the PICU rapidly deteriorating, with high fevers and periodic losses of consciousness.

After eliminating all the horses, we had to start looking for zebras...and quick. We collected a CSF sample for culture thinking it might be one of the rarer forms of bacterial meningitis. While this was cooking (cultures usually take at least a few days) we tried again to get any other possible info from her parents...that's when we learned the whole story.

For the first time, they mentioned that they had visited a local waterpark a week or two before the girl’s symptoms started...and this was in the middle of summer. For any Peds doctor, or especially ID doctors in the room, those words made their hearts sink. Sure enough, the cultures came back, positive for Naegleria Fowleri, the pathogen responsible for Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM). Which up until that point, I don't think there was a documented case of a patient being diagnosed with PAM who survived.

It’s the incurable brain-eating amoeba that lives in warm stagnant water and can enter through the cribriform plate at the top of the nose if the patient gets water up there...which happens all the time at waterparks. Anyway, long story short, we basically cook up a (very non-FDA-approved) drug cocktail as a sort of Hail-Mary attempt at fighting this infection, as nothing else in any other case had ever worked.

In addition to this, we basically stick her in a Mr. Freeze chamber, lowering her body temp to below what N. Fowleri can usually survive. Unfortunately, most people can't survive it either. But for some reason, (though in an induced coma the whole time) she steadily improved. When we took her out of the deep freeze and allowed her to wake up, it was incredible...

She was alive with no apparent neuro/cognitive deficits, and the new cultures showed no growth of N. Fowleri. It's not too hard to figure out where this occurred, as it may still be the only successfully treated case in the US.

duck_doctor

Like Flipping a Switch

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

I can't remember all the details though so bare with me. I'm at a big tertiary hospital, and had an elderly veteran brought to us one day after being found unconscious in a park. He had alcohol in his system and a quick look at his records showed that this was an ongoing problem with him. He was a sweet old man who was very grateful for our help, up until day 3 of his hospitalization. That's when things took a dark turn.

He developed pneumonia-like symptoms and became somnolent for a few days. Then, out of nowhere, he became very inappropriate—he begins grabbing the nurses and repositioning them, touching himself, and constantly licking his lips in a disgusting manner when anyone even looked at him. He went from a sweet old man to a deviant almost overnight. We even had to wrap his hands up in bandages to stop him from touching himself and others. Oddly though, he hit on anyone and everyone (women and men) except for me. I guess I wasn't his type.

We ended up diagnosing him with Kluver-Bucy syndrome, caused by HSV encephalitis (herpes). Symptoms include hypersexuality and hyperorality. It's pretty rare and I haven't seen it since, but as you might imagine, it left a lasting impression on me. He improved with treatment though, and was incredibly embarrassed after finding out what he had done.

DrTapioca

Factitious Disorder

When I was an intern, we had a 22-year-old man with persistent abdominal pain, all studies negative. His symptoms were unexplained. His mother was constantly at his bedside, and his medical history, which was extensive according to his mom, included multiple hospital stays with no definitive diagnosis. I noticed that he would frequently take ill after meals, which his mother brought from outside the hospital.

It eventually became clear that he was a victim of Munchausen by proxy. His mother was making him ill. I'd had a patient with Munchausen's when I was in medical school (she was injecting her own waste into her IV), so I was particularly tuned in. Both cases were very sad.

Milesman1971

child being fed
Tanaphong Toochinda on Unsplash

We may have many fond memories of childhood that center around food.

A favorite meal, a special celebration dinner, simple comfort foods, baked goods enjoyed with grandparents or holiday feasts.

But not everyone is blessed with culinary talents. And some cooking impaired are responsible for feeding children.

For those kids, memories of meals might be more trauma than beloved tradition.

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