Ok that first one tops everything I have ever seen in the OR! You win!


And OMG thanks for the laughs!!!

One of my weirdest patients in the OR tried to get TV Reception (I guess that's what it was for anyway ) via an antenna shoved down the urethra of his penis.

Of course the team was pleased as punch to get called in overnight for that one.

My wife is an OR nurse in a depressed area of S.F.

They get their share of indigent, stories like this are unfortunately common.

I forwarded this to her, can't wait for her to compare it to her experiences.

OK, IMHO here is the reigning champ for bad call police stories, while not in the class of medical and ER stories, it is quite disturbing. I can verify it happened as I arrived as an assist car once the aid call went out.

In another city close to where I work, the Sergeant and a rookie officer went on a Domestic Disturbance call in the south part of the city, all other officers and the lieutenant were tied up on a shooting in the north part of their city. The male suspect, an asian male had apparently been on a combination cocaine/crack and meth binge for 5 days. Sarge and rookie arrive and see two women injured outside the house. Per the women's statements, the male got home and assaulted the mother in law by clawing her across her face. I kind you not, it looked looked she had been bitch slapped by a grizzly bear. The wife tried to intervene but the male grabbed her by one of her fingers and twisted it...and kept twisting it. The wife's finger was so badly shattered that they ended up amputating it later.

Sarge and Rookie enter the house and found super combative male. They both try their Tasers, which don't get good hits and the male ends up ripping his clothes off and getting more angry. They tried pepper spray which just sets him off big time. WARNING:This next part is not for meek and squeamish at all.WARNING

The naked male with just his hands, grabs a hold of his own scrotum and testicles........and RIPS it off. Yes, he tore his own ball sack and balls off. Upon seeing this, the sarge gets on the radio, screaming like a little girl, telling dispatch to send everyone. I arrive, look around and am going WTF has happened here. Sarge tells all the responding officers to stay the fuck back from the male. So eventually he comes down or bleeds out enough to become compliant. Ambulance and EMS roll in, the scrotum and one testicle are recovered....the second one went missing, our best guess is that in the confusion, the family dog ate it. I talk with the sarge while he is chain smoking and occasionally checking his own crotch area to make sure everything is ok. Both the sarge and rookie are pale and appear to be in shock so bad, that the extra paramedics are checking on them. Sarge said to me, "Jim, I screamed for help because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I wasn't sure about shooting him with our pistols, that just might have pissed him off more but I sure as hell wasn't going to let him get close enough to me to his hands on me, not after what he did to himself."

As far as I am concerned, This small quiet town near me has the Cop Trophy for Craziest Call Ever.......anything that can beat it, I don't want to be there when it goes down. Just saying.

quote:

Originally posted by Snapping Twig:
My wife is an OR nurse in a depressed area of S.F.

They get their share of indigent, stories like this are unfortunately common.

I forwarded this to her, can't wait for her to compare it to her experiences.

I don't know you or your wife, do know a bit of such areas of S.F. My sincere thanks to both of you. My son's internship was in downtown Philly, somewhat rough surroundings, they needed security escorts to and from the parking lot. My daughter was in the ER, is now is a dispatcher for airborne ambulance, has a myriad of stories from bizarre to humorous to devastating.

So thank you for your service to society.

quote:

Originally posted by jsbcody:
OK, IMHO here is the reigning champ for bad call police stories, while not in the class of medical and ER stories, it is quite disturbing. I can verify it happened as I arrived as an assist car once the aid call went out.....

As far as I am concerned, This small quiet town near me has the Cop Trophy for Craziest Call Ever.......anything that can beat it, I don't want to be there when it goes down. Just saying.

I don't know if I should laugh or cry (prob both at the same time), but I did twinge a bit at reading about the perp altering his anatomy.

quote:

Originally posted by jsbcody:

< rip >

Yes, he tore his own ball sack and balls off.

< rip >

I wonder how he felt about that decision after a some sober reflection.

That ought to get submitted to the Darwin Awards. It would also do well in anti-drug use ads.

I have one I can tell in mixed company. Long, long ago, I was at Pitt with the transplant program. We flew to St. Louis one night to recover a donor liver. The local transplant team would handle the kidneys, and a heart team from the East Coast would fly into to recover the heart for transplant. This was all a routine occurrence.

When we arrived, a local orthopod was operating next door doing a hip or something.

Well, we dealt with a hostile local general surgeon who was pissed that we invaded his O.R. late at night and made the case a real bitch.

Then the anesthesiologist looked at me and said "Hey, I'm the on call and I need to go put in an epidural. You look pretty smart, you take over." and left the room.

So we got to the end, got the liver out and packed it up. I went to the locker room to change and the orthopod came in: "GODDAMN!! I have never seen that before!" What I said, a donor procedure? "No" he said, "They dropped the Goddamned heart!" I put on my scrubs again and went back to the O.R. The looks on faces told the story.

The resident was packaging the heart up in what we called "gut bags", a large clear plastic bag with a draw string closure normally used to protect the intestines during long abdominal procedures.

The process was to partially fill the bag containing the organ with cold preservation fluid, squeeze the air out and then tie the top securely.

The resident got a little too physical with the bag and violated the basin rule. You always held the bag over a table and a basin to catch things should the worst happen.

Well the worst happened; the seam of the bag split and heart and fluid hit the floor.

Needless to say, that ended the heart team's night.

Just one tale from some damn long nights out there.

RMD

It would be very hard to top that one... and I won't try.

This doesn't come close but back when I started in EMS we didn't always have rubber gloves and pocket masks for CPR were a luxury. Masks, goggles, safety glasses were years away.

When talking to the new guys about CPR we used to tell them that you have to be careful positioning the patients head, if you don't get the airway open you'll fill the stomach with air and the patient will vomit in your mouth.

The inevitable question is: "what do you do"

Answer: "Spit it out... reposition the head and keep going"

Often someone from the back of the room would toss in "unless you like what they had for lunch, then swallow..."

The worst thing about the OP in this thread, is that there was a link to a MUCH longer Reddit thread. More than 2500 comments.

I had to read the whole thread. Some of the sickest shit you can imagine. It took me more than 2 hours.

Thanks OP. Ugh. Why did I read that Reddit?

I have a bunch but one of my favorites involves a rather interesting fella who got his wife mad at him by getting a tattoo of his girlfriend on his arm...naked. While he was sleeping off a night of drinking and misadventure she decided (the wife) that it was time to get even. So she did the only sensible thing and smashed him in the head with a machete. It lodged into his skull with the handle sticking straight up. When Mr. Intelligent was awoken from his slumber by the worlds rudest alarm clock he decided it was best to seek out medical attention. He tried to get in his truck and drive himself to the hospital. The low roofline of his Pickup up would not allow him and his machete to comfortably fit inside the cabin of the vehicle. "Oh nertz" he thought to himself. Now he was in a real pickle! At this point it hit him like a bolt of lighting...The only sensible thing to do was right in front of him the whole time. Now imagine the dismay on the face of the security guard outside the ER when he saw a man riding a bicycle into the ambulancr bay with a machete sticking out of his head. Not to mention the man was quite out of shape and was on a girls bike. Gotta love the ER

quote:

Originally posted by chongosuerte:
After that...I've got nothin'. Lol

+1

I can't top the OP, however I have always laughed about this call.
A few years back I was acting LT on the rescue truck. We get a call for a motorcycle accident on the highway. We get there and find a male patient in his early 20's being cared for by a bystander. The bystander identifies himself as US Army and according to him the patient had a "small cut" on his stomach. i removed the cloth covering the injury while my partner did the rest of the assessment. I don't know if it was sleep deprivation, or what but I turned to the patient and said "you had corn today didn't you?" He looked at me and said yeah why.
I told him well it's now all over the ground.
Patient ended up cutting his stomach open on the vertical post that holds the guardrail.
Medics arrive, start an IV and we get the patient loaded. As we are loading him up he asked am I going to make my final I really can't fail this class.
My partner, myself and all 3 medics started cracking up and one of us I can't remember who, told him no you'll be in surgery.

We went back to the firehouse and one of the engine guys had made corn as a side dish for dinner

Oh I almost forgot about the human skeletor. This one I have photographic evidence of. It dates back to my days in Trauma ICU. A heroin addict shot up and was out for like 2 days. I'm guessing he came close to death but didn't die. That's not the nad part....he forgot to leave food out for his Rottweiler. Now you know what they say...eyeballs and ears are like bacon to a hungry dog. This fucking guy was not only alive but totally conscious when he came in. From the bridge of his nose up he was basically a skull. The dog ate his left eye, both ears and all the soft tissue above that. It licked bone clean...literally. The whole top of his head was just shiny white skull. Moral of the story....don't do drugs.

I was a ICU nurse for about 6 years. Worst thing I ever witnessed was a bowel obstruction so severe the patient was vomiting feces. I was more shocked then grossed out. Saw a few maggot infested wounds. One thing that I was thought more cool then gross was leach therapy trying to save a guys ear after MVA.

Wow...where to start?

I have one similar to the OP except in the ER. Big nasty perirectal abcess and the ER doc decided to lance and pack it. Guy up in stirrups, doc on a stool right in front of him, #11 blade hits it's mark and a stream of pus went straight up the docs shirt to his neck and across his face. He did have the foresight to put on a mask and glasses, but still needed a shower afterwards.

I believe that I've seen over the years everything that could possibly happen to the human body traumatically. Two, though, stick in my brain. The first was a couple who pulled out in front of an 18-wheeler on a Honda Goldwing. When we landed and walked up to the scene, one of the deputies walked up to me with something in his hand and said, "I don't think we're going to need you". He was holding a heart.

The second was one night we got called to a suicide attempt. Arriving on scene we learned that the guy was upstairs but hadn't done anything yet. Just as I was thinking to myself (it's 0300 by the way), "why in the fuck did they call us then?", a shot went off. I ran upstairs to find the guy who had turned his head into a canoe with a 30-30. Basically, the front of his head was gone. Well, not gone really, it was just now dripping off of the ceiling. I was really hoping that he didn't have a pulse, and thankfully he didn't.

A humorous one happened last summer. We went back to the OR to remove a rectal foreign body. It seems a fella had somehow inserted a cucumber in his ass. It was all fun and games and good natured jokes until the foreign body was removed. Cucumber? Nope. It was a whole zucchini. Damn thing was nearly a foot long.

I could go on...and on...and on.

quote:

Originally posted by Scoutmaster:

quote:

Originally posted by Snapping Twig:
My wife is an OR nurse in a depressed area of S.F.

They get their share of indigent, stories like this are unfortunately common.

I forwarded this to her, can't wait for her to compare it to her experiences.

I don't know you or your wife, do know a bit of such areas of S.F. My sincere thanks to both of you. My son's internship was in downtown Philly, somewhat rough surroundings, they needed security escorts to and from the parking lot. My daughter was in the ER, is now is a dispatcher for airborne ambulance, has a myriad of stories from bizarre to humorous to devastating.

So thank you for your service to society.

Thanks for the kind words, I'll pass them to my wife.

She laughed hysterically and related to several similar stories when she read your story.

I fix appliances, so other than making people happy by doing what I said I'd do, showing up when I said I would and charging what I said I would charge, I got nothin.

True story - one of many from my wife.

Working in a large hospital in SF, there's a lot of ER visits involving rectal insertions.

Several times there have been vibrating ladies pleasure devices.

Admittance and prep taking as much time as it does, add that to how long it was up in there before they decided to go the the ER and you have yourself a bucket full of hours.

So, every time one was removed - still running - they opened it up and found DuraCell batteries.

So, and this is no shit, I only buy DuraCell now. If they can run that long under "field conditions", that's the battery I want in my flashlights.

I have a couple of horror stories, from back when I worked at a dive Vegas Casino and Hotel.

The first one was one day we had a tour bus come in, full of some people from an LA church. One of them was a very large (like 400 pounds) man who said he didn't feel well. We put him in a room and he went to sleep, and never woke up. My boss was a 30+ year military vet, ex Korean War POW, and the most amazing fighter I have ever seen. He destroyed people, and worked as a bouncer until a couple of weeks before he died of prostate cancer at 69. We got called to the front desk and told the guest appeared to be dead in the bed. As we went up to the room, my boss started sweating and he said, "You're gonna have to check him, I can't touch a dead guy!". I said, "Are you serious?". He sad he was. I laughed, until we opened the door, and smelled what had come out of him. Yep, he was dead. We called the police and told them we had a dead guest and soon the squad came and the paramedics confirmed he was dead. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get him onto the gurney, so they asked us to help. They handed us gloves and my boss looked like a little kid that was just told a monster was coming. He said, in a really soft voice, "I..I..can't! I can't do it!". The paramedics both knew him and they laughed and said, "Come on, you can do it! Weren't you in combat in Korea and 'Nam?" He shook his head and said, "That's not the same, I can't do it!", and then his teeth started chattering like he was freezing. He gets on the radio, and calls the other one of us working up to the room, and as soon as he got there, the boss takes off. We finally managed to get the dead guy on the gurney, and then all four of us started retching from the smell of about 10 pounds of liquid shit. After they carted him off, we called housekeeping up to the room, and I remember one of the women who cleaned the room up bursting into tears when she smelled it. We went down to the security office and gave the boss a hard time about it. I told him I couldn't believe he was scared of that dead guy like that. He just said, in that weird soft voice, "I just can't touch a dead body!". Guys with rotten chicken bones in their hair? Sure. A guy that stunk so bad we couldn't keep our eyes open? Yep. But a dead guy? He was a mess. About a year later, he went to pieces again when an old lady keeled over dead about 10 seconds after shaking hands with him.

The bloody deal was kind of funny. We had a family come in from LA on a plane. The mom and dad, a 25 or so year old daughter, and a more than deranged 30 year old son. He wasn't too bad at first, but as the days went on, he acted more and more strangely. On the 5th and last night they were going to stay, he finally went off the deep end and somehow had a .357 revolver, and decided that his parents and sister were plotting to kill him. He was in the room screaming at his parents while holding the gun to his dad's head. The swat team was called in and they tried and tried to talk him into surrendering. Nothing seemed to work, and he threatened to kill "All of them, and me too!" several times. Finally, they brought in a soon to be retired police dog, who had a reputation of being prone to really chew suspects up. This reputation was well deserved. He was a Lab mix of some kind, mostly black with a huge head. The police told him that if he didn't surrender, they would send the dog in. He got really angry and said, "I'll kill him too!". The cops got into position, right around the corner from the room, and the plan was to let the dog "get him", and when he was dealing with the dog, go in and "take him down". So they let the dog go in, and the guy shoots at him. The bullet went under the dog's skin right between his eyes, over the top of his skull and out the back of his head. It did nothing but make him really, really, really angry. About a second after the shot went off, the crazy guy started screaming. I've never heard anything like it, it was like a dog yelping. We thought it was the dog, but it was him. The dog was chewing his groin, and he had dropped the gun. The cops took his family out of the room while the dog was still chewing on him, and he kept screaming. Finally, he stopped. The K-9 cop comes out with the dog and the other cops are looking at the dog's head with their flashlights, and I could see the hole between his eyes where the bullet went in. He was covered with blood, and most of it wasn't his. He had powder burns on his corneas, and was still pretty angry. They loaded him up and took him to the vet and soon the paramedics brought down the son, with a sheet over his groin. He was moaning and groaning, saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!". They took him away to the hospital. The two cops who originally got the call went to the hospital too. The next day, they came in to pick up some moron we had in the office who had warrants, and they told us the dog had really done a number on him, partially tearing his ballsack loose, and just chewing his thighs all to hell. The doctor came into the room, and put an x-ray of his groin area up on the light thing, and said, "Where the hell are the pellets?". He was floored when the cops told him a dog did that, not a shotgun. About a week later, we saw the entire family getting into a cab to go to the airport in front of another downtown hotel. The son was moving very carefully and slowly. He wasn't charged as he was fine when on his meds, and the damage he took was more than enough punishment anyway. The family sent a huge load of candy to the police thanking them for not killing their son.