Not everyone is cut out to be a doctor. In fact, only about 41% of medical school applicants are even accepted. But there’s a good reason why this field is so competitive. In most other jobs, small mishaps are understandable, and they can be seen as learning experiences. However, when you’re taking care of a patient, any mistake might cost them their life.
Doctors and surgeons have been opening up on Reddit about the most terrifying “Oh no!” moments they’ve had on the job. From realizing that a patient lied about eating breakfast to nearly dropping a newborn, this list is full of reminders that not even surgeons are superhuman. Good luck getting through this list without increasing your heart rate significantly. And be sure to upvote the stories that give you an even greater appreciation for all of the wonderful doctors you’ve had!
#1
I had an ingrown toenail. It was supposed to be a Quick fix.. I was 14 and had my mom with me. They let an apprentice do the surgery and he goes “oh s**t”. The doctor in charge Just laughed and said “No risk, No fun”. Turns out they f****d up my toe and I had to have 4 more surgeries to correct it. I cried.
Image source: misterpapabear, DC Studio
#2
Pathologist here. Biggest mistake I ever made was cutting myself during an autopsy on an HIV patient. Lucky for me, I did not acquire the virus, so everything had a happy ending. (For me, anyway. That guy was still dead.)
Image source: anon, stefamerpik
#3
8 years after finishing medical school and deferring student loans through residency and fellowship and realizing that I was closer to 40 than 30 with over $200,000 of debt.
#4
Not me but my uncle – he’s a respirologist and was supervising/sitting in on lung surgery to remove a tumor. Turns out the tumor was a rootball – some type of seed had gotten into the patient’s lungs and started to grow.
Image source: NoHartAnthony, DC Studio
#5
This is BY FAR the most responses from the actual profession that is being asked that I have ever seen. This is interesting. Usually they are like lawyers of reddit. Then 928484 people are like Im not a lawyer, but I train lady bugs and this and that.
Image source: chumbucket77, National Cancer Institute
#6
Doing a C-Section for this poor Mum who’d been in labour for hours. Baby wouldn’t come out of the hole we’d made, so more pressure was applied to the fundus (top of the uterus) and suddenly whoooooosh, baby zooms out like a torpedo, covered in lubricating vernix, zips over the surgical sheeting which has the texture of a slip n slide and almost rockets straight off the table. The baby’s foot was caught by the Reg who whipped her up in the air upside down like in old cartoons, but almost dropped her again due to gloves + vernix. Thankfully the midwife was ready with the towel and caught the baby to wrap her up. Mum and Dad seemed to think this was normal practice and didn’t notice but me and my colleague just stared at each other with a look of absolute horror. It still makes me shudder to think how close the baby was to hitting the floor head first. Never happened before or since.
Image source: Bustamove2, Jonathan Borba
#7
I was doing a corneal transplant when I had the “oh s**t” moment. During surgery, I cut off the patient’s own cornea and replace it with a new donor cornea. During that moment when the host cornea was off but before I could get the new one on, there’s literally nothing on the front of the eye except a tear film and aqueous humor. Anyway, the patient takes that moment to start vomiting.
The reason we tell everyone to skip food and drink is so they don’t aspirate in case they throw up. This patient lied about eating breakfast and started throwing up everything. The eye is still “open sky” at this time. Everything inside of the eye can now become outside of the eye. And she’s bucking and vomiting.
Those not in the know will say this is not good. Those really in the know will say “oh s**t.”
Anyway, I had to grab the new cornea and start stitching as fast as I could on a patient actively throwing up. I use 10-0 nylon sutures which are thinner than an eyelash. It turned out okay but not great.
Don’t lie about eating breakfast before surgery, folks.
Image source: seeing_red415, David Mosquera
#8
Happened at my hospital- a mentally ill young woman, who was pregnant at the time was in denial, locked herself into her room when she realized the contractions were coming. She basically didn’t push and the baby didn’t come naturally. Her family called 911 because of the smell. The ER realized her baby had died inside her and was basically rotting due to the smell. She was taken to the OR to remove the baby and apparently all the nurses and surgeons were vomiting because once they opened her up the smell was overpowering and it was traumatizing to see a rotting baby.
Edit: not a surgeon. I’m a hospitalist physician.
Image source: TheSunscreenLife, Daiga Ellaby
#9
Not a surgeon, thought I’d share this though.
Husband went in for a routine colonoscopy and as they were prepping him, anesthetist asks him if he’s a ginger. My husband tells him yeah. When he was a kid growing up, he had fire engine red hair, though it’s faded to a more strawberry blonde now. The anesthitist laughs and says, okay, i gotcha, we’ll give you the redhead dosage and winks. Well my husband thinks it’s a funny, until he wakes up at the tail end of the procedure (pun intended) and doctors are just chattin it up and what have you. Turns out it’s not a joke and redheads have some type of natural block to anesthesia. Dude had given him max allowable dosage and he still woke up. Happened a couple years later. They gave him ketamine and some other s**t to knock him out to get wisdom teeth out when he told dentist about the colonoscopy thing. He still woke up at the end of that one too.
Image source: Berty_Qwerty, Anna Shvets
#10
Surgeon here. I’ve dealt with loads of morbid stuff but one thing that made me stop and go “oh s**t” was a conversation with a young patient who had a perforated colon from diverticular disease, which is a common wear and tear of the colon. He was one of youngest patients I had seen with this condition and certainly the youngest with a perforation so bad as to require an operation. When I was counselling him on the operation, which involves removing the perforated part of the colon and giving him a colostomy, he told me his biggest concern was how he was going to have a**l s*x with his same-s*x partner. He would only have a small stump of r****m left inside, which would be at risk of perforation with any force applied to it. It made me really think about the implications of the surgery we do. The operation is the easy part!
Image source: andrewkd, Jomkwan
#11
When I was a new RN working the ICU in a large teaching hospital, I came into work one morning to a patient that was admitted that night, intubated (breathing tube in), sedated, Foley catheter (tube in pee pee hole) and all. Long story short, he was extubated (breathing tube out) that same shift and was completely alert and oriented.
He was an end stage renal patient meaning his kidneys didn’t work and he needed dialysis, and was only in his late 30s. Said he neve made urine anymore and didn’t need the Foley catheter so he wanted it out because it was hurting.
Now the catheter bag had been empty my whole shift which is normal seeing as how he didn’t make urine anymore, and this hospital had a nurse driven Foley removal policy, meaning while we needed a doctor’s order to insert one, we could remove one at our discretion, unless a Dr specifically put in orders not to. This patient had no such dr order, so I went to remove the catheter. They are held in the bladder by a balloon on the end that is inflated with 10ml of saline. I deinflated the balloon removing 10ml of saline, and pulled it out.
As soon as the cather left his p***s, blood started pouring out in a heavy stream. Turns out the nurse who placed it on admission hadn’t advanced it far enough since there was no urine production to indicate correct placement and had inflated the balloon while still in his urethra causing trauma.
It would not stop bleeding. I had to hold this man’s p***s “shut” to put pressure on it while my coworker paged the resident who came and looked at me with pitty as he told me to just keep holding this 30 something year old man’s p***s In my hands to staunch the blood flow until urology could get there to assess. It just kept gushing blood everytime I eased up to check. For over an hour total I held this mans p***s and tried to make polite conversation until the urologist arrived.
#12
I’m not a surgeon but when I was in med school there was an “oh s**t” moment for everyone including the surgeon’s, anesthetist’s, nurses and students. They were prepping a patient for surgery and put him under and the nurse said “ok, he’s out” before they were about to start slicing him open. The patient just had enough strength to move his head from side to side and said “no, I’m not out yet”. Everyone laughed it off but if the patient didn’t do that it could have ended badly.
#13
Not a surgeon, but was working in obstetric theatre in UK mid heatwave last year. This is important as maternity wards are kept quite warm as newborn babies aren’t good at regulating their temperatures. Combine this with a heatwave and the fact that in Britain we’re not exactly used to high temperatures and we have the perfect storm.
Mid emergency casarean the scrub nurse assisting the op starts feeling faint. This is unusual as this scrub nurse worked in these theatres full time so this was her bread and butter, so I can only conclude it was the heat. She has to step out so the SHO takes her place assisting the obs registrar with the section. This SHO looked extremely junior, as in first section ever. And they were trying to assist with the instruments in the uterus when they fainted. I had to jump in and grab the back of their theatre gown to stop them faceplanting the open uterus, and then sort of gently tug backwards to let them fall into me when someone else has taken over assisting.
This SHO was not exactly small. Thank God the baby was already out.
Image source: Dawn-of-Ilithyia, Getty Images
#14
My grandfather told a story about a clamp coming off an artery while he was pulling a kidney in rural Wyoming in the early 50’s.
The abdominal cavity was quickly filling with blood and the nurse fainted. He was able to push down with his elbow on the descending aorta and got the clamp back on. Patient lived, but I think he chose his surgical assistants little more carefully after that.
Image source: Spam-Monkey, velimirisaevich
#15
Not a surgeon but I was having surgery on my breast to remove what they suspected was cancer. It was benign. But either way I woke up during the surgery and I looked up and saw 4 people with scrub caps on, staring down at me. I looked at my b**b in pure horror and that is all I remember because they knocked me back out. Still makes me want to vomit thinking about it. I was only 13 :(.
Image source: anon, Getty Images
#16
The bony bit connected to the… stringy bit
The stringy bit connected to the… red bit
The red bit connected to my… wrist watch
oh s**t.
Image source: waxonawaxoffa, peoplecreations
#17
I woke up during a bronchoscope. That was interesting. Thankfully a scope and not an incision.
#18
I’m a nurse. I’ve given an anticoagulant ( blood thinner) to the wrong patient. Over the the next day his red blood count Dropped. He ended up in ICU.
Image source: stewyy
#19
I was the patient.
I had a liver transplant and was having an ercp done to place a new bile duct stent.
Well apparently my anatomy is different than normal, and my lungs go more down my sides.
So he accidentally caused a nick, which caused a hemothorax. So when I woke up I couldn’t breathe, they did an xray and had to do a chest tube. Eventually I was so exhausted I asked to be vented so he vented me. Apparently he cried he felt so bad about it all.
But it wasn’t him being malicious or negligent, it was simply an accident.
Image source: greffedufois
#20
5th year resident here. There are lots of bad oh s**t moments throughout training, such necrotizing soft tissue infections or take backs for bad complications or deaths during cases. However I’d like to share a recent positive “oh s**t” moment.
15cm kidney tumor with thrombus into the vena cava. Big incision, great exposure of the vasculature and the tumor. My attending and I are dancing around the aorta and vena cava. We are able to feel the tumor thrombus in the IVC. I was expecting that we’d need to cut and clamp the vena cava to get all the cancer out. But my attending literally squeezes the tumor out of the vena cava back into the renal vein, and then has me tie the renal vein off so the tumor doesn’t slip back into the vena cava.
Patient went home in like 4 days, margins were negative, and is still doing great.
First time I felt like ‘oh s**t. I’m a surgeon.”.
Image source: wenkebach
#21
Heard an “oh s**t” moment as a patient on the operating table.
A couple of years ago I was in labor for 28 hours, pushing for six, when my child started showing signs of distress. He had slightly elevated heart rate and I had the makings of a fever. My midwife at the hospital told me the doctor was coming in to check to see if a vacuum assist could help. She checks me and immediately stands up with blood on her hand and says we’re going to the OR now. At that time, I started feeling that zoomed out tunnel vision I know for me is shock. I had anxiety, but figured she knew what was best. She did. We got in the OR 8 minutes later and when they opened me up, I heard the surgeon say, “oh s**t. Look at this.” They say blood in my catheter bag and upon fully opening me up found my son was actually trying to come *through* my uterus. He had ruptured it. They got my son out. Those moments where he was stunned and not crying were an eternity. He cried and he was born a completely healthy baby. After I woke up and was back in my room the doctor came in and told me what happened. I knew a ruptured uterus sounded bad, but oh d**n I googled and started having a massive anxiety attack. A ruptured uterus is extremely rare and so very dangerous and often fatal. I read from the time it happens you have about 15 minutes before you bleed out and baby is dead. When I went back for my post csection follow up my midwife let me know as a practice that’s been around 35 years with over 30 midwives and doctors they had never once encountered that and it was such a big deal for them a few days after my birth they all got together to discuss my case.
I was so incredibly fortunate I chose to labor in hospital, that the doctor just knew from my vitals and baby’s that something was off. They just didn’t know until they got me open.
I can’t even tell you how grateful I am for Dr. S. You saved my life and my son’s life and our family with forever be grateful.
Image source: anon
#22
Everytime I see a question like this it takes me back to one of the greatest Reddit comments in history:
*OR Nurse here. This is kind of a long one…*
*I was taking call one night, and woke up at two in the morning for a “general surgery” call. Pretty vague, but at the time, I lived in a town that had large populations of young military guys and avid m**h users, so late-night emergencies were common.*
*Got to the hospital, where a few more details awaited me — “Perirectal abscess.” For the uninitiated, this means that somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the a*****e, there was a pocket of pus that needed draining. Needless to say our entire crew was less than thrilled.*
*I went down to the Emergency Room to transport the patient, and the only thing the ER nurse said as she handed me the chart was “Have fun with this one.” Amongst healthcare professionals, vague statements like that are a bad sign.*
*My patient was a 314lb Native American woman who barely fit on the stretcher I was transporting her on. She was rolling frantically side to side and moaning in pain, pulling at her clothes and muttering Hail Mary’s. I could barely get her name out of her after a few minutes of questioning, so after I confirmed her identity and what we were working on, I figured it was best just to get her to the anesthesiologist so we could knock her out and get this circus started.*
*She continued her theatrics the entire ten-minute ride to the O.R., nearly falling off the surgical table as we were trying to put her under anesthetic. We see patients like this a lot, though, chronic d**g abusers who don’t handle pain well and who have used so many d***s that even increased levels of pain medication don’t touch simply because of high tolerance levels.*
*We got the lady off to sleep, put her into the stirrups, and I began washing off the rectal area. It was red and inflamed, a little bit of pus was seeping through, but it was all pretty standard. Her chart had noted that she’d been injecting IV d***s through her perineum, so this was obviously an infection from dirty needles or bad d***s, but overall, it didn’t seem to warrant her repeated cries of “Oh Jesus, k**l me now.”*
*The surgeon steps up with a scalpel, sinks just the tip in, and at the exact same moment, the patient had a muscle twitch in her diaphragm, and just like that, all hell broke loose.*
*Unbeknownst to us, the infection had actually tunneled nearly a foot into her abdomen, creating a vast cavern full of pus, rotten tissue, and fecal matter that had seeped outside of her colon. This godforsaken mixture came rocketing out of that little incision like we were recreating the funeral scene from Jane Austen’s “Mafia!”.*
*We all wear waterproof gowns, face masks, gloves, hats, the works — all of which were as helpful was rainboots against a firehose. The bed was in the middle of the room, an easy seven feet from the nearest wall, but by the time we were done, I was still finding bits of rotten flesh pasted against the back wall. As the surgeon continued to advance his blade, the torrent just continued. The patient kept seizing against the ventilator (not uncommon in surgery), and with every muscle contraction, she shot more of this brackish gray-brown fluid out onto the floor until, within minutes, it was seeping into the other nurse’s shoes.*
*I was nearly twelve feet away, jaw dropped open within my surgical mask, watching the second nurse dry-heaving and the surgeon standing on tip-toes to keep this stuff from soaking his socks any further. The smell hit them first. “Oh god, I just threw up in my mask!” The other nurse was out, she tore off her mask and sprinted out of the room, shoulders still heaving. Then it hit me, mouth still wide open, not able to believe the volume of fluid this woman’s body contained. It was like getting a great big bite of the despair and apathy that permeated this woman’s life. I couldn’t f*****g breath, my lungs simply refused to pull anymore of that stuff in. The anesthesiologist went down next, an ex-NCAA D1 tailback, his six-foot-two frame shaking as he threw open the door to the OR suite in an attempt to get more air in, letting me glimpse the second nurse still throwing up in the sinks outside the door. Another geyser of pus splashed across the front of the surgeon. The YouTube clip of “David at the dentist” keeps playing in my head — “Is this real life?”*
*In all operating rooms, everywhere in the world, regardless of socialized or privatized, secular or religious, big or small, there is one thing the same: Somewhere, there is a bottle of peppermint concentrate. Everyone in the department knows where it is, everyone knows what it is for, and everyone prays to their gods they never have to use it. In times like this, we rub it on the inside of our masks to keep the outside smells at bay long enough to finish the procedure and shower off.*
*I sprinted to the our central supply, ripping open the drawer where this vial of ambrosia was kept, and was greeted by — an empty f*****g box. The bottle had been emptied and not replaced. Somewhere out there was a godless b*****d who had used the last of the peppermint oil, and not replaced a single f*****g drop of it. To this day, if I figure out who it was, I’ll k**l them with my bare hands, but not before cramming their head up the colon of every last m**h user I can find, just so we’re even.*
*I darted back into the room with the next best thing I can find — a vial of Mastisol, which is an adhesive rub we use sometimes for bandaging. It’s not as good as peppermint, but considering that over one-third of the floor was now thoroughly coated in what could easily be mistaken for a combination of bovine after-birth and maple syrup, we were out of options.*
*I started rubbing as much of the Mastisol as I could get on the inside of my mask, just glad to be smelling anything except whatever slimy demon spawn we’d just cut out of this woman. The anesthesiologist grabbed the vial next, dowsing the front of his mask in it so he could stand next to his machines long enough to make sure this woman didn’t die on the table. It wasn’t until later that we realized that Mastisol can give you a mild high from huffing it like this, but in retrospect, that’s probably what got us through.*
*By this time, the smell had permeated out of our OR suite, and down the forty-foot hallway to the front desk, where the other nurse still sat, eyes bloodshot and watery, clenching her stomach desperately. Our suite looked like the underground river of ooze from Ghostbusters II, except dirty. Oh so dirty.*
*I stepped back into the OR suite, not wanting to leave the surgeon by himself in case he genuinely needed help. It was like one of those overly-artistic representations of a zombie apocalypse you see on fan-forums. Here’s this one guy, in blue surgical garb, standing nearly ankle deep in lumps of dead tissue, fecal matter, and several liters of syrupy infection. He was performing surgery in the swamps of Dagobah, except the swamps had just come out of this woman’s a*s and there was no Yoda. He and I didn’t say a word for the next ten minutes as he scraped the inside of the abscess until all the dead tissue was out, the front of his gown a gruesome mixture of brown and red, his eyes squinted against the stinging vapors originating directly in front of him. I finished my required paperwork as quickly as I could, helped him stuff the recently-vacated opening full of gauze, taped this woman’s buttocks closed to hold the dressing for as long as possible, woke her up, and immediately shipped off to the recovery ward.*
*Until then, I’d only heard of “alcohol showers.” Turns out 70% isopropyl alcohol is about the only thing that can even touch a scent like that once its soaked into your skin. It takes four or five bottles to get really clean, but it’s worth it. It’s probably the only scenario I can honestly endorse drinking a little of it, too.*
*As we left the locker room, the surgeon and I looked at each other, and he said the only negative sentence I heard him utter in two and a half years of working together:*
*”That was bad.”*
*The next morning the entire department (a fairly large floor within the hospital) still smelled. The housekeepers told me later that it took them nearly an hour to suction up all of the fluid and debris left behind. The OR suite itself was closed off and quarantined for two more days just to let the smell finally clear out*
Story by u/banzaipanda.
Image source: FunnyUncle69
#23
When I was younger, I had a rather complex external fixator (cage) applied to my leg.
it had three rings, two large 360 DEGREE rings around my leg (one in the upper middle of the shin, one n the lower0, which had humongous rods to keep the cage fixed to my leg, and a third one, which was a horseshoe type ring around my ankle, which threaded all sorts of pins through my ankle. each pinned set in a certain wa. the point of this external fixator was to relocate and fix the positioning of my ankle., so it wouldn’t be so f****d, basically. I have/had a birth defect called talipes (club foot) equines.
a lot of bone got removed before the fixator was put on, so this way it could all grow
it was a 9-hour surgery, and my doctor, who I won’t name, was pretty chuffed with himself after seeing it all installed on my leg.
this was until he looked closer. the pins I spoke about before, with the numbers on them (almost like those sizing things on cheap coathangers) were all coloured and numbered, set for my dad to do every morning and night.
he was looking at the pins, and the numbers. he looked glance away and looked back with a stressed face on. after a few seconds, and a slight hand on head gesture, he whispered ‘s**t’.
in his mind, he had organised the pins in an incorrect way. he was stressed beyond his mind for a few minutes. he was worried he f****d everything up
luckily he hadnt. he just needed to move one or two numbers
1 year later, 8 months after the frame was taken off (which was in for 6 months) I ended up having my leg amputated. the surgery didn’t work how we wanted it too, or at least how I wanted it too (which we were sort of expecting). the goal was to get me walking. the amputation got me running.
bare in mind, the amputation was MY call. i was 12 when it was done. best decision i ever made.
Image source: SpiralAunt685
#24
During my third year of medical school i was stitching up the wound after breast cancer surgery and the anesthesiology nurse woke the patient too early as i was making my last stich and i felt the patient moving her arm and trying to sit up. Patient was still covered in surgery draping and cables and still intubated. Luckily most people do not remember much from the first moments after waking up but i got quite nervous from the patient starting to move.
Image source: Ankuzi
#25
When I was in pharmacy school I was doing my internal medicine rotation in my final year. My preceptor and I were doing med reviews in the ICU when one of the pulmonary docs was basically like “hey you wanna see something cool?” They were trying to extract a foreign object from a guy’s lung in one of the rooms. So we go in and watch for a bit. About 6 people in the room. Tube down the guy’s throat. Little grippers at the end. Two doctors watching a monitor and trying to control the grabbers and get it like a claw game. I watched for a bit then after a while I lost interest and went back out to what I was doing. A few minutes later I hear:
“Got it!”
*Cheers from the room*
“Oh it’s a tooth!”
Dude aspirated his own molar. Doctor walks out with his trophy in a jar and it’s a completely intact tooth root and all.
Image source: Boondok0723
#26
Just an RN here. I was working in the ER and had a patient brought in by her husband. Apparently the woman had a fall a week prior and injured her face but refused medical care. Her husband finally forced her to come in. As soon as I see the wound on her face (from across the room) I think, “that does not look like any wound Ive seen.” I approached her and realized maggots had infested the wound and were eating the rotting skin. A really simple and quick fix but I cant imagine her living conditions.
Image source: Whahappon2020
#27
Sorry in advance for this being so long.
Not a surgeon, but my mom had to have a kidney removed due to her waiting for almost 2 years to go to the doctor about her pain in her back. The doctors found out it was a large kidney stone and that her kidney was infected and had lots of gross pus shutting it down. After draining the fluids through tubes, over the course of a month and a half. she was finally ready for surgery.
Cue last Wednesday, the day of the surgery. She was ready to finally be done with it. They removed the stent put in and the tubes no problem, next was the kidney.
Here comes the “Oh S**t” moment. As they get ready to remove the kidney, there was complications. The kidneys infection had spread to a portion of her lung and a major artery, making them fragile as toilet paper. As the surgeon removed the kidney, a hole was tore in the lung, and even worse, the artery was severed. At that point it was a race to save her life and stabilize her. I don’t remember much about how they fixed her up there, but they had to fly her to a different hospital and have a heart surgeon fix the severed artery in a more permanent fashion.
Anyways, the heart doctor saw the grave situation and said she’s got a 1 percent chance for her to make it. But he did such an excellent job, that my mom is still alive, and getting stronger each day.
The moral of this story is: If you have insurance and are experiencing pain, go to a doctor as soon as you realize it. You may save your life, and also save some doctors from an “Oh S**t” moment like this.
Image source: anon
#28
Not a surgeon but when I was in nursing school I was observing a tonsillectomy when the power went out. Everything switched over to the backup generators except for the suction which is incredibly important for any surgery but particularly in the throat (aspiration risk). They ended up having to connect a giant syringe to a length of suction tubing to suction manually while someone went to the other side of the building to find portable suction. Luckily ours was the only theatre that had started operating that morning!
Image source: godricspaw
#29
As the patient, I hope if the oral surgeon is on Reddit they posted this story.
Wisdom teeth removal, all 4 impacted, gotta break out the heavy hardware. I’m knocked out, don’t even know the dentist entered the room. I wake up, but not able to move, just eyes open awake but my limbs won’t react to my brain. I can feel the dentist hammering a chisel into my tooth to break it for extraction. My jaw is just coming undone on every hit. My eyes are wide open, jaw even wider with some evil metal contraption. I’m staring at the assistant begging for her to see me, and after about a dozen hammers to my jaw she glances over and drops the suction, jumps up and shrieks. The dentist stops to look at her, then looks at me and I see him say “oh s**t”.
Next thing I know I’m waking up post surgery. S**t that nightmares are made of.
Edit: lot of replies, so this was a military dentist, yes they put me under and no insurance involved, not sure what they used for anesthesia. Yes I could feel pain from the impact but not nerve pains in the actual tooth.
Image source: Anon_Rocky
#30
Former medical student here. Rotating through General Surgery was mainly an enjoyable time. I remember one young patient, 22 years old, was re-visiting the ER, where he’d been seen 6 weeks prior for sustaining some abrasions and bruises after falling hard off a skateboard. He was all scraped up everywhere but had healed up OK.
But now he’s in the ER again, feeling awful sick, vomiting and with a fever. As the 3rd year med student I was dispatched to the bedside and hung up the CT films on the lightbox, to much finger pointing and grunting among the surgeons. I had no idea how to read a CT at the time – wasn’t even really sure what part of the body had been scanned. So when the surgical resident barked “prep him for surgery” I was nonplussed, decided to disguise my ignorance and just go for it, as was the approved way for students at this busy public hospital way back when.
We got him gassed and prepped and I scrubbed in. Surgeon said “Open” and I raised the #15 blade. He’d been prepped for a midline laparotomy but I guess I exposed my ignorance when I spoke up to confirm same – this was decades before timeouts, before “wrong site” became a “never event” – because everyone laughed.
I opened and it went uneventfully, reflected the omentum with its lovely arcades and exposed the viscera. “You remember how to perform the Kocher maneuver?” the attending barked. “Yes sir.” “Well do it!”
I slid my gloved hand up into the splenic flexure, getting well ready to grab the entire sack of intestines and move it up and over – the opening salvo of the Kocher maneuver – but met unexpected resistance. I peered up, seeing in my confusion that everyone was edging away from the table. “What’s the trouble young man, get your hand up there and complete the maneuver! Push harder!”
A spongy sort of barrier gave way and with a sickening stench, immediately recognizable as the locker-room aroma of *Staphylococcus aureus*, a gushing cascade of 2 liters of grey-brown, bloody pus roared out of the incision, soaking my gown, scrub pants and shoes before splattering on the OR floor and walls.
The splenic abscess, doubtless caused by the transient bacteremia from his skateboard accident, had been lysed, ruptured, evacuated and mostly cured. The attending finished up with the splenectomy and after some abdominal lavage the patient was good as new. I had to throw out my shoes.
Image source: sockalicious
#31
Not mine, but my fathers. He told me this back when I was 10, so I’m sorry if it doesn’t fully make sense. He had a 21 year old patient that needed to have a penectomy . He had cancer of the p***s. There were two “Oh S**t” Moments for this. The first is a common thing. He wasn’t fully asleep. The second however, is funny and humiliating. They are about to start the surgery. Suddenly, one of the nurses that was there suddenly threw up and left. A test later, and boom! She got knocked up! Halfway through the surgery, the other nurse leaves for a call about her father. My dads just standing there, a half gone p***s in his hand. He calls for help, and is standing there, a guys p***s in his hand for thirty minutes.
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#32
I was a 4th year resident and I was on call that day, around 5pm I went to do rounds and as I got to the first room I came in to find the 1st year resident on top of the very recently neck operated patient (that morning he had a tumour removed from his parapharyngeal space), the resident was kneeling next to the guys head with his hands and clothes completely covered in blood, there was blood on the roof on the sheets, on the bed, dripping onto the floor, you name it. I was instantly petrified, I went to OMFG I have never ever repaired someones carothid artery I am completely unqualified to help this guy! Someone please HELP US! I was the senior resident so I was the only one on call at the time and besides none could get there in time to help this guy, he was bleeding out so it was up to me alone to help him.
So I took the guy to the OR as fast as we could and I opened him up, all of the time praying and telling myself Its OK I can do this, I can do this! I was s******g my pants while everyone was looking at me to fix him, I open him up and I see the freaking facial artery loose, spraying blood all over so I clamped it, put a knot around it and that was it. We closed him up, bandage and transfuse the poor guy and I went to collapse on a stool.
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#33
We operated on the carotids of a patient, like gaping hole in his neck, when the patient woke up. Easy fix was shouting at the anesthesiologist…which wasn’t there.
Had to hold don’t the head with my elbow so he wouldn’t move too much an hurt/k**l himself.
Image source: Vulsruser
#34
Doctor here. I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of responses. The average non-medical person just doesn’t understand how certain things happen, and it seems egregious that [Dana Carvey had a coronary bypass to the wrong artery](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/784389) even though it’s pretty d**n hard to find a specific vessel at a specific location on the heart. I’m impressed this isn’t a more common situation.
Then, after an incident like that, people just think that the doctor should “lose his license for that!” Never mind that the physician may have spent 15 years in extremely rigorous training, went hundreds of thousands into debt, and has committed his life to the profession. My entire identity is partly wrapped into being a physician. That’s like saying a parent who makes a serious parenting mistake should simply lose their children forever (and yes, I am a parent as well).
Plus, there are patient privacy laws, non-disclosure arrangements from lawsuits, and a lot of other things. I think malpractice is a wholly flawed concept. **A surgeon in the following specialties has a 99% chance of being sued in his career: neurosurgery, thoracic cardiovascular surgery, general surgery, orthopaedic surgery, and plastic surgery.**
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#35
Not me, but my mom. She just retired as an ob/gyn and she told me about a time early on in her career when, while not a real medical mistake, she still almost ruined the operation. She was performing a c-section I think, and she dropped her scalpel on the floor. Before she could think, she blurted out “oh s**t” as a reaction. The mother, thinking something was wrong with the baby, started panicking. It took a team of nurses, the husband, and the mother of the patient to calm her down.
Edit: This was very early in her career, and she practiced for another 25 years without major incident.
Image source: monstercello
#36
As a very young doctor in training I misdiagnosed a woman with epilepsy. Some years prior she had sustained a gunshot wound to the frontal area, damaging the underside of one of her frontal lobes and severing an optic nerve to one of her eyes, as well as some of the muscles that rotated that eyeball. Surgery saved her life but the frontal lobe was scarred and the eye was blinded and always pointed down and at an angle away from her nose.
A few years after that she began having spells of a bizarre sensation, altered awareness, a pounding in the chest, and she had to sit down, stop what she was doing, and couldn’t speak. These were odd spells and I assumed she had developed frontal lobe epilepsy from the scar on her brain. Increasing doses of anti-seizure d***s seemed to work initially, but then the spells came back.
A couple years after my diagnosis her endocrinologist, who treated her for diabetes mellitus, checked a thyroid. It was super-high. The spells were manifestations of hyperthyroidism. She drank the radioactive iodine cocktail which ablated her thyroid, got on thyroid replacement therapy, and felt well thereafter. No permanent harm done and she was able to come off the anti epilepsy d***s.
She was obese – not the typical skinny hyperthyroid patient – and if she developed thyroid eye disease, I couldn’t tell because her one eye was already so messed up. I see how I screwed it up. but in retrospect I have never been sure what I could have done differently, except test her thyroid at the outset of treatment. Hence, a *lot* of patients – thousands – have had their thyroid checked by me since then. Every so often I pick up an abnormality and it gets treated.
The lady was an employee of the hospital where I trained and I ran into her one day;she gave me a hug and let me know how this had all gone down. She made a point of wanting me to know she didn’t blame me “because I always seemed to care about her and what happened to her.”
I think about her, and how I screwed up her diagnosis and set back her care, almost every day. I am a much better diagnostician now but I always remember this case and it reminds me not to get cocky or be too sure that my working diagnosis is correct.
Image source: brainotron
#37
I’m a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and “feeling drowsy”. We start the usual workups and this dude’s blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within 10 minutes of walking through the door. Turns out the “scratch” was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round. The guy didn’t even know he’d been shot. When the coroner’s report came back, we found that he’d been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could’ve done, but that was a serious “what the f**k just happened” moment.
Image source: pause_and_consider
#38
PharmD here. Couple different quick stories.
Heard of a pharmacist who filled a fentanyl patch incorrectly and the dose was so high that the patient went into severe respiratory depression and died. They’re still practicing.
Worked with another pharmacist back in the mid 2000’s when I was still a tech who filled a script for Prozac solution (concentrated it is 20mg per mL. Average adult dose is 20 mg.) instead of 1 mL once daily he filled it for one teaspoonful (5 mL). The child got serotonin syndrome and almost died. He is no longer working to my knowledge.
Image source: chucktpharmd
#39
I saw a patient once years ago for abdominal pain. She had had an IUD placed back in the 70s, a dalkon shield. Upon follow up, the gyn couldn’t find the string so he told her she must have passed it. Well guess what- she passed in alright. We found it in the retroperitoneal space near her right kidney 17 years later!! She wanted to sue him but he had retired.
Image source: MatrixPA
#40
Not a surgeon, but the patient, I was around 13-14 and undergoing gall bladder removal, almost unheard of for someone my age to have gall stones bad enough to need a removal.
But anyway, I was extremely underweight and sickly, the anaesthetist gave me an adult dose of anaesthesia and knocked me out for about 8 hours when it took the surgeon about 40 minutes to complete my surgery so there was a lot of panic that day because no one could wake me up.
And I was pissed off when I woke up because I couldn’t feel my left arm with the IV in and I really needed to pee, tried to get up to go toilet and ended up on the floor instead lol (they also got me a p**s pot that I refused to use).
Image source: DJayoreo
#41
Not a doctor, but my grandfather was scheduled to have double knee replacement surgery when he was in his 70’s. They go through a bunch of health screenings to make sure your body can take the stress of the surgery, and during one of these screenings, the cardio doc found an aneurysm in his aorta, running basically the length of his torso. The doctors were shocked he was still alive with that in his chest.
He ended up having to have stent surgery in his aorta first, and then, a few months later was cleared for his knee replacements.
Image source: _cocophoto_
#42
“Not a surgeon, but” when I was a nursing student, I was on theatre prac. We had a guy in who needed humerus and elbow repair. I was pretty useless in everything but emotional support (as I wasn’t qualified), so was chatting to him before he went under. He admitted to having an (un)healthy m**h habit. I informed the surgeon who shrugged it off. Apparently I should have told the anaesthetist, because this dude woke up mid surgery and was trying to reach for his open arm that the surgeon was working on. Super “Oh s**t” moment as we scramble to contain this guy’s arm and stop it from touching anything sterile.
Image source: NecessaryFlamingo
#43
An “Oh s**t” moment happened to me when I was a toddler but I barely remember it. They were operating on my lungs and forgot to give me enough general anesthetic so I woke up five hours too early in the middle of the procedure. Luckily they only were doing minor slits into my stomach. They noticed the problem straight away and gassed me back asleep. (They couldn’t inject me like they previously did because I was in the middle of the procedure).
Image source: xull_the-rich
#44
Not a surgeon but a biomedical scientist. My office mate had his md and was working on his PhD.
He did an appendectomy and cut into this persons abdomen, only to find no appendix, and started freaking out. The support nurses in the room started snickering at him because they knew right away what it was.
Occasionally they see someone with a rare genetic disorder in which all their left-right asymmetries are reversed. The appendix was on the other side.
Doesn’t seem so funny to me because the patient would have come in saying where the pain was.
Image source: SatanScotty
#45
I was the patient. It was a kidney biopsy. I was d*****d up and out of it, but still awake. Laying on my stomach as my kidney doctor worked behind me. He warned me, “You’re going to hear a click and it will feel like Mike Tyson punched you in the back.” “Oh, Kay?”
I hear, click, feel the punch, then hear, “Oh, S**T. Get So n So on the phone now.” A nurse came up near my face to calm me, and maybe keep an eye on me. I don’t really remember everything.
Apparently he had knicked a blood vessel and I was bleeding internally at an alarming rate. I got to spend the night in the hospital and pissed what seemed like pure blood for about 24 hours.
Never try to fit your kidney biopsy in on a Friday before the doctor leaves for vacation.
Image source: jvhero
#46
I’m a scrub nurse.
Doing a lap nephrectomy.
Urologist mistook the abdominal aort for the renal artery.
Placed the staple gun on the aorta.
DID NOT wait the recommended 30sec before slicing.
Cut the abdominal aorta clean in half.
Patient immediately crashes.
Activate massive transfusion protocol.
Patient was (some how) alive when they went up to ICU.
Definitely an oh s**t moment.
Image source: CreativeSun0
#47
My grandmother has had diabetes for about 20 years, and takes a handful of meds to help control it. About 10 years ago, she developed a persistent cough. It wasn’t bad, she said it felt like a constant tickle in the back of her throat.
She went to her doctor to find out what was going on, and he ordered a battery of tests concerned that she was developing pneumonia, lung cancer, etc. All the tests came back negative, so he prescribed a cocktail of pills to help combat it. Over the span of 5 years, she had tried about 35 different meds and none helped.
One day when she went it for a routine check-up, her normal doc was out and she saw one of the on-call residents. He looked at the barrage of pills she was on and asked why. When she explained, he replied, “Oh, the cough is a side effect of this one particular d**g you’re on to regulate your insulin. If we change you to this other one, it will go away.”.
Image source: silence1545
#48
Doctor here. I assume we mean medical errors and not general life decisions. No comment on life decisions. For medical error, I will not use a throwaway because I strongly think we should feel free to disclose our mistakes in order to improve quality and learn from each other.
My first week of my intern year (year one outside of medical school, when you’re on call overnight and all that, AKA “Season One of Scrubs”), everyone “signs out” their team’s patients to the doctor on call overnight. So that doctor (intern, with an upper-level resident also present overnight to supervise) is covering many patients they hardly know, maybe 60 or more. The situation was that a patient with dementia, unable to really communicate with people and clearly ‘not there’ but conscious, arrived from a nursing home with I think some agitation as the original complaint.
Basic labs ordered in the ER show the kidney function is worse than usual, which could be due to many things, but what really MUST be distinguished is between ‘not enough blood pumped forward to the kidneys and rest of the body’ (e.g. heart is failing and it’s backing up into the lungs) VS ‘not enough liquid in the blood TO flow’ (e.g. due to vomiting a lot or something). This is critical to distinguish because for the first you give medicine to make them pee out the extra liquid, and in the second you give more fluid. Either treatment for the opposite problem is catastrophic. Fortunately it’s usually easy to distinguish ‘wet’ from ‘dry’, based on listening to heart and lungs, chest x-ray (is there ‘congestion’ evidence?), blood pressure and heart rate (tend to drop BP and raise heart rate upon going from laying down to standing positions if you’re too ‘dry’), looking at neck veins while sitting up at an angle (they bulge if too ‘wet’), and so on. This patient was unable to cooperate with exam, answer questions, and the X-ray was sort of borderline (unchanged from the last x-ray maybe several weeks ago). My resident instructed me to sign out the patient with instructions to continue a 500mL saline inflow, then re-assess to see whether the patient looked more ‘wet’ or less ‘dry’. I signed this out, and forgot to make the order to stop the saline after 500mL, so it ended up running slowly in all night. The intern on call (also first week as doctor) forgot to re-assess at all or shut off the saline if it had been noticed because so busy with new admissions. We’d also ordered 3 sets of ‘heart enzymes’ meant to diagnose a heart attack, one reason for a patient suddenly getting ‘wet’ (i.e. heart pump failure), since the EKG was not interpretable (had a pacemaker which makes it impossible to tell). Lab f****d up too, because hospital policy was that if the first set of ‘heart enzymes’ was negative, apparently the 2nd and 3rd sets, each traditionally spaced 6-8hrs later to catch a heart attack if it starts to evolve and become detectable by blood test, were both cancelled.
I came in and first thing in the morning checked on this patient, who was screaming things nobody could understand and the nurses had chalked up to dementia and agitation. I checked the labs and saw the second and third heart enzymes hadn’t been done. I went to the bedside and saw the IV fluids still running. I immediately ran to the overnight intern, who said things had been so busy and nobody had called to notify that things were wrong. We stopped the fluids, immediately got a heart enzyme test, learned this patient was by now having a massive heart attack made much worse by the addition of IV fluids all night to this frail failing pump. I can’t get the screams out of my head, and cried a lot and was pretty depressed for a few weeks at least after this. The patient died because the status ended up being decided as not to resuscitate based on what the nursing home had on file, although no family members were known at all. This patient was totally alone, and spent the last night of their life in physician-induced agony. But I acknowledge the failure of two interns, the nurses, and the lab. Ultimately the blame fell on the lab and I think someone was fired, but I made clear to everyone that I felt to blame and wanted quality improvements made to prevent future errors, or at least catch them early if they happen. That’s I think the best you can do when you make a mistake.
There’s a Scrubs episode where as I recall at the end there’s a brief scene where the ghosts of dead patients representing medical errors follow around the physicians like little trains. It’s very poignant, but I can’t find the clip. That’s what it’s like though.
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#49
I missed a gunshot wound once. A guy was dumped off at the ER covered in blood after a rap concert. We were all focused on a gunshot wound with an arterial bleed that was distracting. The nurse placed the blood pressure cuff over the gun shot wound on the arm. We all missed it because the blood pressure cuff slowed the bleeding.
I was doing the secondary assessment when we rolled the patient, and I still missed it.
We didn’t find it till the chest x-ray. The bullet came of rest in the posterior portion of the thoracic wall without significant trauma to major organs.
The patient lived. But I still feel like I f****d up big time.
Image source: disposable_h3r0
#50
This thread is pretty depressing, so i’ll lighten it up a bit. A few months ago, I accidentally ran a creatinine test on a patient when a comp metabolic wasn’t ordered. It turns out that the guy was in renal failure, and no one knew. He was about to go in for surgery ( I believe it was a bypass, but could be wrong), but I got the results in in time to stop them from putting him under. S**t could have been messy. I’m glad I screwed up, and I’m sure he has no idea that he could have died.
Image source: bazoos
#51
Not a big mistake but definitely awkward at the time.
I was gluing up a lac on a 14yo girls forehead.
Anyone who has used dermabond before knows that stuff can be runny and bonds very quickly.
I glued my glove to her face.
Her mum was in the room, and I had to turn to her and say “Im sorry, I’ve just glued my glove to her face”.
Image source: pikto
#52
Throwaway, obviously. I’m also going to eliminate pronouns to further de-identify the circumstances.
This didn’t happen to me, but a doctor I worked with a long time ago.
Doctor saw Patient regularly for medication management. Patient came back for a follow up appointment with a very telling side-effect from a very low dose of a medication and no improvement in symptoms that the medication was intended to target.
Because this particular side-effect is relatively mild early on and can also be caused by many other variables, Doctor was not duly suspicious of the medication being the cause of the side-effect and increased the dosage of the medication.
Patient became very gravely ill several days later, and died a few days after that due to complications of the side-effect of the medication.
It was a huge mistake and I can’t help but think if I had been the doctor, I wouldn’t have overlooked the side-effect, and Patient would still be alive.
Image source: throwaway54602
#53
Dentist here. I was performing a simple extraction and preparing for the case when I didn’t realize that I had the xray flipped the wrong way the whole time. I was viewing the film backwards, and pulled out the wrong tooth. When I realized my mistake I started freaking out, only to find out that by some dumb luck, the tooth I extracted had to go as well.
For the record, this happened in dental school, so safe to say it was a learning experience. It was my first and very last time to make that mistake…. And yes, we are doctors.
Image source: YoureOnlyLameOnce
#54
As an ICU nurse, I’ve seen the decisions of some Doctors result in death. Families often times don’t know, but it happens more than you’d think. It usually happens on very sick patients that ultimately would have died within 6 months or so anyway, though.
Procedural wise, I have seen a physician k**l a patient by puncturing their heart while placing a pleural chest tube. It was basically a freak thing as apparently the patient had recently had cardiothoracic surgery and the heart adhered within the cavity at an odd position. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came to the realization of what had happened. You rarely see people accidentally k**l someone in such a direct way. Heartbreaking.
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#55
ER resident here using a throwaway: I have 2 (that i know of)
tried to protect the kidneys of a gentleman who had to get just a TON of contrast. ended up giving him too much fluid and pushed him into pulmonary edema. spent about an hour on bipap but did OK after.
did an FAST ultrasound on a trauma patient. thought it was negative, but in retrospect had a small pericardial effusion. He coded about 30 min later after said effusion expanded. had so much head trauma everyone told me he wouldnt have lived anyway… but still feel awful about it.
EVERY resident and doctor makes mistakes and the ER is basically a perfect storm of the factors that contribute to errors (multiple patients, constant interruptions, fast paced environment, lack of familiarity with patients, ETOH/d***s, incomplete histories, and multiple providers). you just hope that when they happen your mistakes are small.
Our hospitals and programs try VERY hard to have a blame free work environment as when you review common medical errors they are usually caused by a culmination of circumstances rather than one person just not doing their job right. Residents routinely present M&Ms (morbidity and mortality conferences) that go through the scenarios that led to the mistake and analyze the reasons and fixes that can be made. Its universally thought of as our best conference because you can often see how very easily one could have made the same mistake in the other persons shoes.
as has been said, we try our best to do right by patients and to get the right answer. I work with incredibly smart people every day who are driven, committed, and who have excelled their whole life in order to be incredible doctors. unfortunately errors are part of the job. We just need to do your best to recognize them, learn from them, and most importantly prevent them from occurring more than once.
Edit: grammar.
Image source: morbidity_mortality
#56
Here is a good one I didn’t cause but “saved the day” as a resident that was surgically assisting. C-section for failure to progress and ugly looking fetal strip…all went perfect, time to take cord blood and I am to fill up the test tube..surgeon looks at it and it has one very large chunk of glass broken off of the rim (3x4cm)…there is an open abdomen in front of us with blood clots everywhere. So as safely as possible we are sticking our hands around to try and find this glass…if it is inside the abdomen the chance of even seeing it on xray is minimal and this will dice up this patients bowels/bloodvessels and God knows what else. After approx 3-4 min (felt like 10) I feel an edge of something firm just inside the edge of the incision…pull up a bloodclot with the glass piece inside…didnt go into the cavity and all is well. Surgeon said she’d buy me a drink…never did get it :(
TLDNR: c-section, broken glass, I found it…yay
wasnt sure if you guys were messing with me or not… TL;DR appears to be the correct abbreviation (had to look it up) My cell phone in med school was a Palm Pilot with a B+W screen and had no texting capabilities…(but did have epocrates)…. And I graduated in this millennium so let that blow your mind for all you kids out there,.
Image source: real_doc_here
#57
My first day as a camp nurse for people with intellectual disabilities I gave 9 pills to the wrong guest. I didn’t know who I was looking for and asked my friend to send out the guest. His hypochondriac roommate walks out, tells me he is the person I’m looking for, I asked my friend for confirmation who THOUGHT the correct person had come to me and confirmed from afar that it was, and I administered the meds. He had a LOT of d**g allergies. Stomach dropped when the actual person I was looking for came out 12 seconds later.
Luckily, we called poison control and most of the pills were vitamins and the ones that weren’t were either similar to ones the guy was already taking, or in therapeutic low-dose form. He was fine and still continued to ask for everyone else’s pills at all times.
Worked there two summers and thankfully had no other disasters like this one.
TL;DR: Poisoned a guest on my first day of work.
Image source: ironmaven
#58
My brother is a surgeon, and during part of his residency, he had to work in the pediatric unit. He was working with two newborns. One was getting much better and fighting for life. He was going to make it just fine. The other baby was hours from death. He wasn’t going to make it. My brother was in charge of informing the families. My brother realized about 15 minutes later that he had mixed up the families. He told the family with the healthy baby that their baby wasn’t going to make it, and he told the family with the dying baby that their baby was going to be just fine. He then had to go back out to the families and explain the situation to them. How devastating. To be given a glimmer or hope and have it ripped away from you not even an hour later. That was most upset I’ve heard my brother. He felt destroyed.
Image source: AndromedaStain
#59
Someone else’s mistake directly affected me.
I was working in Yosemite as a camp counselor, so there was no internet access or anything. I started to get a red rash on my chest, and then on the same place on my back, and it started to expand and crawl up towards my armpit. And it hurt, really, really, really bad. As if you had the worst sunburn ever and someone slapped it really hard every time you moved.
I went to see the nurse (a new nurse gets cycled in every week) and she looked at it and goes “Ohhh that’s poison oak!”. I was like, really? I haven’t really gone hiking anywhere…, and she assured me that it was poison oak and that I must have accidentally gotten the oils in my clothes or something. She then proceeds to rub in hydrocortisone cream into my chest and back as hard as she can. I’m literally tearing up its so painful, and all she can say is, “I know dear, I’m sure it’s painful.” She gave me a bottle of the stuff and some anti-histamine pills and told me itd be gone in 2 days.
It wasn’t. I couldn’t move without being in terrible agonizing pain. I returned to the nurse and told her, “I don’t think its working..” She says to me, Oh, my brother who’s a doctor knows what it is and he doesn’t even need to see you. He says its something called “Herpes Zoster”. For those of you who don’t know, Herpes Zoster is Shingles. I had been living with undiagnosed shingles for like 5 days, and at this point the rash was the most disgusting collection of painful, puss-spewing pimples ever.
Ended up getting driven to the closest clinic which is 40 minutes away, and the doctor said it was one of the most severe cases of shingles she’d ever seen. Gave me some Vicodin to put me in “feel good” mode and told me everything would disappear in 3 weeks.
Since that time, I have a rare complication called Post-herpetic Neuralgia in the spot where my shingles was that causes me to feel basically the same pain because my nerve endings are too f****d up in those places. Turns out Hydrocortisone cream is the worst thing you could put on shingles.
tl;dr Got shingles, didn’t know it, nurse told me it was poison oak, it wasnt, learn I have shingles, and it was one of the most severe cases the doc has ever seen. Fun times.
Image source: rirwin01
#60
In health care, we make mistakes. At every level from the top to the bottom, mistakes get made, and you just try to keep them as infrequent and minimal as possible.
When I was a student rotating through OB/Gyn, and I wrote an order for a woman’s post-partum continuation of magnesium sulfate, as she was pre-eclamptic ante-partum. I was super careful, because I knew what could happen with magnesium toxicity, and double-checked the order with the resident afterwards.
The nurse, instead of hanging one bag of mag-sulfate and another of I forget what, hung two bags of mag-sulfate, one of which she slammed into the patient over a minute, instead of slow-infusing over 12 hours.
The woman told the nurse she didn’t feel right, and the nurse p*o-pooed it. I happened to be walking by, and stopped in to see what was up. There they were, two bags hanging, both marked in a bright red warning label. We called for the fast response team.
They, and my team, got there in time and took over, but she still went into respiratory depression and ended up in the ICU.
We all make mistakes, some of which are dangerous. I’ve absolutely made my fair share. I’ve missed diagnoses, or tried to save patients from a trip to the ER and they’ve ended up in the ER anyway, just later. As long as you recognize your mistake and make an effort to improve afterwards, and it wasn’t too neglectful / egregious, I understand.
But I reamed the nurse when I overheard her laughing about the incident like she hadn’t just almost k****d someone. I don’t know what she thought, getting told off by a rotating student, but I was pissed at the time.
EDIT: ICU, not ER.
Image source: footprintx
#61
Pharmacy student here. Wait what? Yeah, I didn’t do it. I saved the lady.
I was on rotations, we had a lady who was taking VERY high doses of Oxycontin (roughly 240mg a DAY) for pain. I don’t remember what it was related to, she had a laundry list for her PMH. Let’s go with cancer, remission (to give life a good outlook). She is admitted to the general floor with altered mental status. She was out of it. Major side effect of opiates = altered mental status. Okay. No big deal, get the o****d out of there and the patient will probably come to.
Under my care (with my preceptor), the nurses on the floor had to use Naloxone on the patient. This hospital doesn’t f**k around with pain control. Naloxone (or Narcan) is an o****d reversal agent. It wakes you up when you have too much that it is negatively affecting your chances at living (such as respiratory depression). Patient is taken off her 200mg+ Oxy to see where her pain is. She’s on 20mg a DAY now. She isn’t complaining about pain. She’s still altered mental status. 24 hours pass, nurses Narcan her 6 times in 24 hours. SIX TIMES. Unheard of at a small hospital. She hadn’t had her Oxy in almost 16 hours when she got her last Narcan shot.
Due to her altered mental status, patient was put as a “fall risk”. As the nurses are putting the mats next to the patients bed, they turn around to get the pads that go over the sensors and the patient falls out of bed. Off the side? Nope. OFF THE END. They think she’s fine, put her back in bed. They find her home med of Oxy that she had been taking in her bed. That explains why she is altered mental status, she’s over-medicated. Problem solved? Nope. Patient is now 20 hours post dose (of hospital given medication).
I tell my pharmacist that we need to do a g*****n CT scan because she could have hit her head. ANYONE that falls should have a CT, especially if they are altered mental status. The nurse said she could have hit her head but the MD didn’t order a CT scan because they wanted to put in a pacemaker. The patient had a low heart rate too, so they thought that was the cause of the altered mental status. I beg my pharmacist to let me talk to the Doctor myself. I just had that feeling. That bad feeling of ‘oh s**t’. I’m good friends with an anesthesiologist that works at this site, so the pharmacist suggests we ask them first. I talk to them, they agree with me and go tell the MD to get a CT of the patients head. They do it.
2 hours later, patient is in ICU, crashing. Why? Cranial Hemorrhage per CT scan.
Next day, doctor comes to thank me. They were going to put the patient under for the pacemaker right when they did the CT scan.
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#62
I’m in the military, and as I’ve gotten closer to 40, it seems I’ve begun to develop high blood pressure. On-base doctor insisted I needed medication to control it, so he wrote a prescription. To be honest, I hadn’t seen this doc before and seemed a bit…. off. Not sure how to describe it, but he just seemed a bit less than completely there.
Anyways, I walk down to the pharmacy area and wait my turn. I’m called forward and the pharmacy tech asks for my ID, looks up the order, and asks me some basic questions. “Name”, “Date of Birth”, and “Allergies”. I told her I was allergic to penicillin and sulfa.
The prescription was for Hyzaar. Any medical student can probably tell you moronic this order was. Hyzaar specifically has side effects for those with allergies to penicillin or sulfa. I’m allergic to **both**.
The tech actually said out loud “What in the actual f**k!”. She calls the doctor on the phone and starts chewing his a*s. Keep in mind she’s a civilian and he’s a commissioned officer. Neither of them “outrank” the other, so he’s arguing back with her, and then she says, “Your pill popping is f*****g over. You could have k****d this patient today because you’re always too high to know what’s going on around you. I’m going to the wing commander over this.”
To shorten the story a bit, it’s brought before an ethics board and a court-martial. Seems he was “trading scripts” with other doctors in the area for pain pills, was high nearly every waking moment, and could have actually k****d me. He received a sentence of over 1 year. I’m being a bit purposefully vague to prevent anyone from tracking me down personally (as I had to testify).
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#63
I was at a holiday party of relatives and friends. My older uncle is a radiologist.
He said (a story I’ve heard before) that he wrote left instead of right on one of his x-ray interpretations and because of that error the patient subsequently died (wrong lung with the tumor or something like that-but I really didn’t get the details).
Anyway, a doctor friend of his at the party said, “It happens to us all, it happens to us all” consolingly.
So people, it happens to them all-be really vigilant, don’t have a naive, child-like view of your doctors-they’re human.
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#64
Patient here. A doctor tried to put an Ilizarov fixator on me, for limb lengthening, without proper knowledge or experience. He damaged the growth cartilage, dislodged my fibula and destroyed my ankle.
I had to get 20+ more surgeries to fix his error. The initial procedure was something that another experienced doctor would’ve done in two minor surgeries over the course of 6 months. (I was 2 years old when he botched the surgery, 18 when I finally finished the reconstructions)
tl;dr overambitious doctor f****d up my entire childhood/adolescence, I will never be able to run.
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#65
This is a throwaway obviously. I’m a surgical resident and my focus is on pediatrics. I have done a fair amount of surgeries so far and death is not an uncommon thing for me. But the worst was a case with a then 8 year old kid. I was operating on his ulnar and accidentally caused damage on the nearby nerve. He lost about 20% of his sensory stimulus. He wanted to be a violinist.
My friend who did internal med missed diagnosed a woman a simple case of splenitis. Turned out she had an ectopic pregnancy. When he found out it was already too late, she bled to death internally.
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#66
When i was fresh out of training, not only a new nurse but a new ICU nurse, I f****d up. I admitted a crash-and-burn patient (aka one that deteriorated so quickly no one could have stopped it). They were young, but in seriously bad shape. Extreme hyperkalemia indicating kidney failure, just waiting to code. The nephrology doc was called in to place a dialysis catheter so they could start dialysis (basically kidney replacement by machine) because the elevated potassium level (hyperkalemia) would inevitably cause a heart arrhythmia (weird heart beats that require shocks and emergency meds). Their respiratory status declined precipitously and the blood gas I got (indicating how well they were breathing) was p**s poor, but I didn’t call it in fast enough to the attending. We tried Bipap (a machine that forces air into your lungs via face mask) but what we should have done was intubate (insert a tube into the lungs to force air via a machine in a more invasive but more effective manner). Granted, I was being supervised and constantly consulted both my charge, a seasoned ICU nurse, and the respiratory therapist, also experienced and trusted. That patient died. I now don’t hesitate as much to call the attending if I need to. The patient was pretty much on death’s door when they arrived, but the marginal chance of saving them was lost in moments of hesitation and indecision.
Another mistake I have made was not checking the IV medications that were going into a patient I had been taking care of for five months straight. I knew their medications and doses back-to-front, so I neglected to do the safety checks required at the beginning of the shift to ensure that the right medication was going at the right dose. Turns out that two of the medications were switched, so they were getting a higher dose of one and a lower dose of the other. The medications (dobutamine and nesiritide) are not forgiving, but fortunately the different rates were almost negligible. At that point, that patient had become a friend and I was their advocate. I f****d up, and told them straight up that I did. Even though I wasn’t the one that set those meds up incorrectly, I didn’t check because I thought I knew better. The patient forgave me, for which I am grateful, and my ICU director also appreciated the fact that I took full responsibility for my f**k-up, but I can tell you that I still feel bad and will forever check my drips upon assuming care of a patient.
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#67
This will probably get buried and although I am a doctor this was NOT me but this happened to a doctor I know.
A patient had gone in for surgery on their right knee. The surgeon did surgery and everything was fine except he did the surgery on the wrong knee. Fast forward a few days and the patient returned for surgery on the correct knee. The surgeon did surgery on the patients knee and forgot a sponge in the knee. The wrong knee, once again.
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#68
I worked in a digestive health clinic for a year or so to build up my med school application. I was a gastroenterology tech and obviously worked with many doctors, including my dads doctor (father has crohns). He preceded to tell me about an incident with one of the doctors that I worked with everyday. Apparently he was performing a colonoscopy on a rather fluffy woman and accidently went into the wrong orifice. These colonoscopes are hooked up to video screens and air/h20 supplies so the doctor can inflate the colon with air so he can have a better look at the lumen of the colon. Apparently this doctor mistook the cervix for cancer and preceded to take multiple biopsies of it. He also put so much air in her that both of her fallopian tubes ruptured and she had to have an exploratory laparotomy. Man his face must of been red.
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#69
Not a doctor, but in 2005 my father went to the doctor complaining of chest pain. The doctor assured him it was heart burn and sent him home with tums and no further testing. My father came home and died of a heart attack later that day.
So yeah, I’d say that guy messed up bad.
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#70
Intern (1st year resident) in Internal Medicine here. My 3rd week out of med school, and I was in the ICU on night-shift. ~30 extremely sick and complicated patients for me and my senior resident to handle, and a few more coming in from the ER. My senior told me to manage the current patients while he did the new admissions. I was “signed out,” meaning given information from the day team, about all the patients and what I needed to watch out for/follow-up on at night.
One patient in particular, Mr. X, was an elderly man in his 70s with altered mental status (he was acting loopy and nobody knew why) and nobody could get any information out of him. He was in arm restraints because he was pulling out his IV lines and acting aggressive towards the staff. He was also developing what appeared to be signs of sepsis. He needed a CT scan of his abdomen that night to look for a possible source of infection, and it was part of my job to follow-up on those results and start any necessary antibiotics/consult surgeons/etc if needed. No problem. About 30 minutes into my shift, I get paged that the patient is supposed to go down to radiology, but he’s too agitated to sit still for the scan.
So I decide to give him a medication called Ativan to calm him down enough for the CT to be done. It’s common practice to give a small dose of a benzodiazepine (a medication that works similarly to alcohol in its sedation-inducing effects) for agitation.
About 10 minutes after I gave the phone order, I hear the alarms go off and the overhead announcement of “Code Blue – CT scan. Code Blue- CT scan.” My heart skipped about 5 beats.
I run down to radiology and call my senior to meet me there. As I arrive, the patient is laying on the scanner, unresponsive and not breathing. His nurse said his breathing became shallow then abruptly stopped. His adult daughter was standing beside him glaring at us.
But we were capable and ready to revive him without a problem – he just needed some respiratory support (a little help breathing). I got the bag/mask and meds ready. That was until his daughter said “Don’t touch him!”…I had forgotten Mr. X was on file as DNR by his family’s wishes. I knew I could save him, but my hands were tied.
In those last minutes, I had to watch my patient die. I anguished over my decision to give him the sedative. Did I give him too much? Should I have not given him the sedative and just cancelled the CT scan outright? What would have happened if we never found the source of his infection? Mr. X’s daughter wasn’t surprised that her father died that night. She was upset, but not at me. She was a better person than I would have been in her shoes.
The next morning my attending physicians (supervising doctors) told me Mr. X was on the edge of death to begin with, that he probably would have died of his infection in the next few days, that I didn’t really make a mistake. I didn’t and don’t see it that way though; I knew they were just trying to be supportive. They all answered that if they had been in the situation they would have used an antipsychotic like Haldol instead of a benzo like Ativan. I still wonder how that night would have gone differently if I had known that medical fact just one day earlier.
That was in July. It scared the hell out of me, and haunted me for months afterwards. But it made me a more vigilant doctor.
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#71
My parents are nurses. They knew a doc who’d been on a 36 hour shift. Patient came in with a punctured lung (I think) and the doc had to collapse the lung to fix whatever was wrong with it.
Through tiredness he collapsed the wrong lung, and the patient died. Doc ended up k*****g himself after being fired.
Don’t burn yourself out.
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#72
When I was an intern in surgery department, I remember this guy in the late 50s came to the ER at 2 AM complaining about some vague abdominal pain. His medical history was free of any events except for absolute constipation for almost a week. Me and my senior was thinking of intestinal obstruction and proceeded to do lab investigations for the patient and x-ray. The x-ray showed massive abdominal distention so we decided to prepare him for abdominal exploration … After blood samples was withdrawn and while we are waiting for the results, the patient asked if he could sleep a little on one of the beds in the ER. He was calm and there was nothing that require attention so we thought why not? One hour later the lab technician called us … I remember the conversation we had
– Hey you have a patient named ________ ?
– Yes, he’s in the ER
– What is he doing at the surgery ER? His blood glucose is 600 g/mol!!!
*CLICK*
I closed the phone and ran toward the patient … He was having a DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis) and we don’t know. When I reached his bed he wasn’t asleep … He was dead. We tried to resuscitate him, called for help but it was too late. He didn’t mention anything about his blood sugar when we asked him. We failed to see that a patient with DKA could be presented by abdominal pain. I will never forget the look of his sons. He came to the hospital looking so good, walking on his feet and died within an hour because we failed to do a basic test that wouldn’t take more than 30 seconds … I couldn’t sleep for weeks …
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#73
Well this probably isn’t quite what you’re expecting, but my father is doctor: general internist, and his mistake isn’t necessarily one of physical issues.
Doctors, the way I understand it, are trained such that they are somewhat psychiatrists as well. He seems a lot of people from every walk of life, and I know he enjoys that about his job. People can often form very strong bonds with their doctors, because they are in a setting where there is not very much judgement on a personal scale. I see my parents get very symbolic gifts sometimes: cards, homemade food (my mom and her staff of nurses got about 50-70 tamales just last week), and hand-knit blankets or cushions.
He had this one lady who’s life was going down the drain. Her kids hated her, her husband left her, her health was deteriorating, she was depressed.
I don’t remember what the situation exactly was, but he came in and started screaming at him. My father screamed back at her, and she left angry as all get out. My father thought good riddance.
The next day, he found out she k****d herself, and he was questioned by authorities because his name was in her s*****e note.
He says he had never felt so guilty. He won’t live it down to this day. She took their relationship really seriously, and when she saw it went down the drain, just ended it.
On a separate note, my mom was on call this past thanksgiving, and she had to go in and see a guy who had kidney failure because a surgeon who was doing a minor surgery for back pain ended up f*****g up big time. The surgeon accidentally cut off circulation to basically the lower half of the body, and s**t went mad wrong. I can’t remember what, but it was so bad my mom was called in. I can’t remember what happened but part of the reason the kidneys failed was because the guy smoked a lot too. I can’t remember the details.
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#74
Someone else tragically lost their life years ago but the incident saved my sister’s life about 10 years later.
Several years ago, my sister and I were in a car accident. I had visible injuries, she did not and was walking around without any problems, so we thought. Nine days later, she was preparing dinner, began to feel ill, vomited and then passed out. She was taken by ambulance to the hospital emergency and after talking to my brother-in-law for only a couple of minutes, he rushed my sister into surgery and removed her spleen immediately, it had ruptured in the accident but was a slow bleed.
My sister was in ICU for a couple of weeks but survived and is in good health today. Later, the admitting trauma surgeon said he recognized what was happening because of a mistake his college professor told the class she made as a surgeon years earlier.
A teenage boy had fallen from a cliff and hit rocks below, other than being bruised he was fine so did not seek medical help. Seven days later he was brought unconscious into ER, where the college professor was working as a surgeon at the time. She and her team were not able to quickly identify his symptoms of a ruptured spleen that had happened 7 days ago. The teenage boy died about an hour later.
She was always sure to share this particular incident with her students, thus saving my sister’s life when one of her former students (my sister’s doctor) showed up to class that day!
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#75
My brother had a mic-key put in stomach so that he can be fed through a g-tube due to aspiration risks secondary to cerebral palsy. During the surgery, the surgeon accidentally perforated his bowel and it went unnoticed. This is probably due to my brother’s unusual anatomy as he has severe scoliosis and kyphosis. My mom started to notice my brother appeared to be in pain. He, however, had no way of telling her what was wrong (non-verbal and no control of muscle movements). She then noticed the smell of feces coming out of his incision site. His medical team assured her he was alright and she was overreacting. It was soon discovered that he was going septic as his digested food was going back into his stomach and poisoning him. By this time he was in life-threatening condition and had to be air lifted to a city a four hour drive away. The perforated bowel was repaired and my brother made a full recovery. His surgeon now does that procedure differently to prevent the same complication and I’ve been told it’s been effective. I believe he does and endoscopy before closing up and that adds 5-10 minutes to the surgery. My parents had no interest in suing and are glad my brother is healthy and his situation helped advance medicine/possibly save others.
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#76
I’m no doctor, but I remember when I was 10, I got appendicitis. No biggie, right? So after some time, they performed the surgery and about a week later, I left the hospital. 3 months later, I was getting stomach pains again. ‘I shouldn’t be getting pain over there’ I thought. So I assumed that I had a bad stomach ache and continued my day. Later that day, I had started eating lunch, and the pains got really bad. So my parents and I went back to the hospital. Turns out the doctor messed up and only took out a portion of the appendix and still left a chance of it bursting. The worst part about it was the first time that I got it, I got a “really good” doctor, but he goofed. Second time around, they got some new guy, and he did it perfectly.
Tl;dr- “Experienced” doctor f***s up, and I get appendicitis twice.
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#77
Well, I fully expect this to get lost in the 1435 comments already here, but who knows?
So far as I know, I haven’t k****d anyone yet in my career, but there was a patient one of my attendings worked on during my residency who nearly died due to the tiniest thing going wrong.
We were doing a lower extremity bypass graft. Basically, there’s a section of the artery in the patient’s leg that’s too small to get enough blood past (usually due to cholesterol and smoking), so you strip a vein from the leg (the other veins can compensate well enough), turn it around so the valves in it are pointing in the right direction, and hook it up to the artery before the blockage and after it, effectively bypassing the blockage.
Well, veins get their blood from little tributary vessels, and all of these have to be tied off.
One of the ties slipped off after the operation.
So the guy had arterial-pressure blood spurting out of his vessel into his leg, which then caused massive blood loss and nearly caused compartment syndrome (compression of the tissues, vessels, and nerves in the leg, and extremely dangerous even when you’re not actively bleeding out). Twelve units of blood and two hours in the operating room at 3 AM later and we saved the patient’s life and his leg, but that was a pretty major mistake.
Very rare, and it’s almost a privilege in a morbid way to have seen it, because it shows you just how unbelievably important even the tiniest detail is in the surgeries we perform. The guy did very well after that and was discharged on post-op day 4.
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#78
Saw a med student suck up a skin graft with the suction device. The skin graft is a very thin piece of tissue that was being carefully laid onto the wound where it was then to be sewed on, carefully, like a patch. The med student was using the suction to clean up the wound, and accidentally sucked up the carefully-prepared graft. Poof, gone instantaneously.
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#79
Patient presented for a swelling in the abdomen which had a fluid wave but the fluid could not be aspirated in any position. Patient was taken to surgery for exploratory and upon opening the abdomen, I was greeted with thousands of clear fluid-filled cystic structures roughly the size of marbles attached to every organ in the abdomen. At that moment, I realized that this patient had metastatic ovarian adenocarcinoma, and it was physically impossible to resect all of the metastatic lesions since that would be total evisceration of the abdomen. Patient was euthanized on the table at the request of her mother.
At this point, I will point out that the patient was a chicken.
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#80
Gastroenterologist here. Was removing a large polyp during a colonoscopy. I put the snare around then polyp (kinda of like a cowboy throwing a lasso) – it took an unusually long time to severe the base of the polyp – until, all of a sudden, blood started squirting from where the polyp was removed. The screen quickly turned red with blood. I couldn’t see s**t. The patients blood pressure started to drop. The patient, who was a dark skinned middle eastern man, turned pale white on the stretcher in front of me. Thats when I felt like i was gonna faint and empty my own bowels… the only thing i could think was “Oh S**t”
*** (people asking what happened): I gave myself a moment to breath and control my emotions. Once I cleared my head, I let my instincts kick in. We gave him a bolus of fluids to bring up his blood pressure and put him a trendelenbug position (head down, feet up) to maintain blood flow of his brain, lungs and heart (and try to reduce blood flow to his gut, where the bleeding was). I turned on the water jet and diluted the blood with as much water as I could – hoping to establish some kind of visualization and eventually clip or cauterize the blood vessel. As It turned out, the patient’s blood pressure dropped just enough to stop the bleeding automatically – that gave me a short window to aspirate the mix of blood, bile and water – giving me just enough visualization to identify the vessel and clip it. The man lost 1/3 of his blood volume in less than 60 seconds. He was admitted, transfused and discharged the next day. The polyp turned out to be cancerous, however the margins were clear, so we saved him from a hemicolectomy. These days, if I anticipate a similar situation, I just refer them for surgery. I am not interested in being a hero.
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#81
Not a surgery but I did get surgery on the injury. I dislocated my shoulder but it was an “inferior dislocation” so the normal pull it back into place is the wrong way to pop it back in. It dislocated once before like 6 months prior. The nurse kept insisting that she knew how to put it back in place. So she proceeded to pull on it for 15 minutes all while I’m screaming in pain. I started vomiting and almost fell off the gurney profusely vomiting and demanded a doctor. The doctor popped it in no problem, taught me how to do it myself, shot me with god knows how much morphine and has me sign papers that I don’t realize release them of the liability of f*****g up my arm even more. My shoulder was so loose I dislocated it reaching for my wallet in my back pocket. I had reconstructive surgery about 3 years after and now have a little less then 90% mobility in my arm and cramps and pain if I sleep on it wrong or reach to far or move it to quickly. This all happened when I was 17.
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#82
My dad’s not on reddit, but he’s told some stories…
One of my dad’s colleagues was doing a hip replacement, way back in the day (we’re talking 60s-70s here)
Hip replacements aren’t fun, they have to pretty much butterfly you like a boneless roast to get the top of the thigh bone clear of the ball-and-socket joint of the hip.
They then saw off the ball end, and attach the new stainless steel one – which is on a long stem they insert down the middle of the bone to keep it in place.
So he’s got to that stage, tapping the stem down the femur, when it jams halfway.
Won’t go down any further.
Won’t come out again.
Can’t saw it off, bonesaws won’t touch hardened steel.
Can’t close up the patient and come back to it; there’s a foot-long spear stuck out the top end of his leg.
And the anesthetist is saying they can’t keep him under much longer.
Uhh.
F**k.
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#83
I was the patient and I’m pretty sure it was an “oh s**t” moment for my obgyn.
I was at the end of my labor and my daughter was stuck. I had had 2 epidurals, both of which wore off. My ob used forceps to try and get her out. I don’t think she knew my epidural was as ineffective as it was, otherwise I don’t think she would have shoved the forceps in like she did. I obviously felt the forceps and started thrashing in pain. The doc got scared and tried to take them out but they got stuck. Had to wait for the next contraction to push them out. Then blood went everywhere. She was on the phone with her lawyer while wheeling me in for my emergency csection. I assume that means she had an “oh s**t” moment?
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#84
I work in cardiovascular and I can think of a couple.
On my 8 years career I’ve had 3 patients start moving their arms in the middle open heart surgery, one of them even try to sit up (the surgeon was literally pushing the patients’ shoulders down and yelling to anesthesia to “give the patient something”).
Another time a simple pericardial window. For different reasons sometimes patients can have extra fluid build up in the pericardial sack that surrounds the heart. The surgeon made a small hole and stuck the sucker in to suction the fluid out and make room for the heart. He stuck the sucker in too far and stuck it through the ventricle. Blood shot out of the small hole just below the sternum. He had to quick open up the patient more under the ribs so he could stick his hand in to plug the hole with his finger. We had to call another surgeon in to help quick crash onto the heart lung machine.
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