We’ve all heard someone dramatically say, “If it had been one more minute, I’d be dead.” It sounds like something straight out of an action movie, but in the world of medicine, those words can be chillingly real.
Healthcare workers are now sharing the most jaw-dropping, “one more minute and it would’ve been too late” stories they’ve ever witnessed, and trust us, some of these will leave you absolutely stunned. From miraculous recoveries to terrifying close calls, these accounts show just how fragile and unpredictable life can be. So buckle up, because these are the kinds of stories that make you stop, stare, and think about how precious every single minute really is.
#1
IM doc here. I had a guy who came in after feeling “weird in the chest” all day. 40s, athletic, in the middle of a divorce, stressed. EKG looked ok. I see nonspecific chest pain all day long and it’s usually heartburn or stress or asthma or a strained rib muscle and I was SO CLOSE to sending him out with some Maalox but there was something about this guy that made me send him to the ED. I asked if he wanted a wheelchair escort and he said no, he’d walk. (It was about 200 feet).
Anyway, an hour later I logged back into his chart to see how things were going in the ED and the first thing I see is a code note. He’d made it to the ED, gotten some blood drawn and turned out to be having a mild heart attack and while the doc was delivering the news and explaining next steps he’d had a cardiac arrest. They got him back immediately since having your arrest in an ED in front of a emergency physician is kind of a best case scenario. When I saw him again a week later he was doing great but told me that he’d almost gone to get some food (it was lunchtime) before going to the ED but decided against it. If he’d waited he would have had his arrest in a Jimmy John’s and things probably would not have gone so well for him.
Anyway, almost 20 years of practice and that’s my closest call.
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#2
Emergency calltaker here. Most recent was a small child choking on some food. The ambulance my colleague sent was 10 minutes away the helicopter 15. While i was giving first aid instructions to the parents my colleague called the local family doctor, who in a stroke of luck took a last glance at his phone before he would have gone for a run where he would have left it at home. He was there within a minute and managed to dislodge the stuck food.
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#3
I recently had a patient carried in by her dad that was peri-arrest from anaphylaxis. Dad was uncomfortable using her epi-pen and thought he was close enough to the hospital to drive in instead of calling 911. She had weak central pulses, no peripheral pulses, and her BP was 50/30s on arrival. She was minutes? away from a bad outcome potentially. We did a lot of education and she ended up okay. If you have an epi-pen, know how to use it.
Edit: the dad was well-intentioned, appropriately worried when he arrived, and cared for her lovingly at her bedside as she recovered. This wasn’t meant to shame him. Emergencies look different for everyone, and allergies evolve quickly. She probably was not “that bad” when he decided to get in the car and it’s not always easy to know how bad something will get. But he got her to us just in time, which was what OP was asking about. To answer the prompt, there are very few of those cases, which is why this one came to mind. She was safe and dad learned a lot, so everyone won.
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#4
L&D nurse here. I had a patient who was 38+3, pregnant with twins. She was checking in for a routine induction. History of panic disorder and anxiety but nothing else.
Got her admitted over the next hour. She had some borderline hypertensive pressures (high 130s over 80s) and when I placed her IV her heart rate went up to 130. Concerning, but in no way emergent, and possibly related to the panic disorder.
With no obvious event or explanation, Baby A had a precipitous drop into the 50s. I went into the room and her sats were in the 70s, heart rate 178. We ran her to the operating room and delivered her emergently, then transferred her to the ICU.
Final diagnosis? Acute heart failure with an EF of 17%. It was sheer dumb luck that she was scheduled for an induction within an hour of her heart deciding to crump.
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#5
ER Nurse here, I am of the opinion that I would rather you come in and have us say “It’s nothing, go home”. Than not come in when you really should.
That being said, most of what walks through the front door could be treated at an urgent care during normal business hours. It’s cheaper, I guarantee it.
I’ve had two patients in my care that experienced those. One guy had a little upset stomach and generally feeling crummy. Nice guy. Really chatty. We put him through the CT, and I watched his abdominal aorta dissect as the images came up.
The serendipitous part was that the trauma team just got finished with one guy, so they were all two rooms down. Guy brought in baked goods for the ER staff.
Image source: DocMcCall, Getty Images/unsplash
#6
One story that I’ll never forget is a family of 6 (2 parents, 2 kids, 2 grandparents staying over) who saved themselves from a collective carbon monoxyde poisoning by sheer luck :
Everybody was asleep, the mom got up to pee, and fainted (from the CO poisoning) on her way back to bed. The sound of her fall woke her husband up who checked on her and called an ambulance. The first responders’ CO detectors went off upon arrival and they evacuated everyone.
If she didn’t have to pee, they’d be all dead.
If she just made a few more steps and reached her bed without fainting, they’d be all dead.
If the husband had a heavier sleep and didn’t hear her fall, they’d all be dead.
If they thought the fainting was nothing and she’d see a doctor the next day, they’d be all dead.
Instead I had them all in the ER casually recovering from a moderate poisoning, chatting casually about this “unusual night” they were having, completely oblivious to how close they all got to make the local news the next day. It was eerie.
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#7
I was patient transport services in highschool. My favorite was a guy had gotten in a car accident and had his bone sticking out of his arm. He did the “I’d have been dead in a few more minutes!” And kept trying to have all services directed at himself. 1 hour later they brought in his passenger who had his arm torn off and was impaled through the chest with a peice of a sign after they freed him from the wreck. He demanded starbursts and water ice at our earliest convenience.
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#8
I used to work with a general surgeon who LOVED telling patients that their gallbladder, appendix, hernia, etc was:
1) The worst one he’d ever seen
2) He got there “just in time.”
Patients loved hearing it and repeating it. It wasn’t their fault; it was this old b*****d’s.
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#9
I have a story that happened to me. When I had my hysterectomy I was sent home to heal. There was a lot of endometriosis so the cut was huge and the doctor used staples to sew me back. I had an allergic reaction to the staples. My stomach was swelling up. I went back to the ER. But I had been swelling up so I had started to break open from where they had closed the wounds.
At the ER I was checking in and things went sideways fast. I started bleeding out in the ER waiting room. I woke up in the after surgery area and had to have a blood transfusion. (Several pints)
I have several autoimmune diseases so it’s not crazy for me to have weird reactions to things. My doctor told me I am the only person he ever had who was allergic to surgical staples.
Image source: No-Fishing5325
#10
PT here. I was a new grad at the time like two weeks off boards FRESH, working at a rural hospital. I had a eval in the last spot of my day on a Friday for “back pain.” Woman walks in and I can tell she’s in way more pain and discomfort than what she’s put on the intake form. We are going through the eval, dots for straight musculoskeletal pain were NOT connecting. Absolutely nothing I did reproduced her pain. And as I’m helping her roll to her side to sit up I feel her heartbeat in her abdomen. My mind is SCREAMING a triple A, abdominal Aortic Aneurysm. So I politely escort her to the ED below the clinic… mind you everyone in the clinic has gone home it’s just me and my newbie skills. The triage nurse heard me out (bless her) and had the woman immediately taken back.
The woman I evaluated ended up living. I was right, she did have a AAA, that if I had just sent her home, the surgeon told her she would have died because it was very close to bursting. She writes to me on every memorial of the day I met her, she says I was the only medical professional that finally took her pain seriously and that I am her guardian angel.
All I can say is thank goodness for Differential Diagnosis and clinical reasoning skills and maybe just maybe a REALLY scared new grad PT. 6 years later still a very proud moment of mine, but just doing my job.
Image source: iknowguacisextra23
#11
ER doctor here: It is exceedingly uncommon to see a patient who would have died had they not come to the ER a minute earlier.
I have heard numerous patients make claims like this and in the rare case that it’s both potentially relevant to their current care AND I have enough time to look … I’ve looked up the relevant records. In precisely zero of those cases would the person have died if they waited another hour. Another day? Sure.
I’ve had one personal case where the guy would have died if he had waited any longer to come in. He felt odd. Lightheaded. Nothing specific. 40 something generally healthy guy. Went into VFib right after he arrived. Shocked him out of it. He went back into a fatal arrhythmia a few more times but ultimately stabilized after more shocks and amio. If he hadn’t arrived in the ER when he did, there’s a high chance he either would have died, or not walked out neurologically intact like he did.
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#12
Couple year ago I had a 13 yo boy come in one time after a skateboarding accident who had a sizable epidural hematoma but was neurologically fine. Hospital I was at did not have a pediatric ICU and I’m not a pediatric neurosurgeon, so was arranging for helicopter transfer. As that was brewing he went comatose and blew a pupil, so I took him to the OR for a crani and evac, then straight to CT to confirm no recollection, then helicopter to hospital with peds ICU. He walked out the hospital two days later. Just the nature of epidural hematomas. If he had blown a pupil in the helo, not insignificant chance he would’ve had permanent injury or been dead on arrival.
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#13
I never really saw this in the ED to be honest. The human body is amazingly resilient, especially when it has some time to adjust. I had plenty of people walk in and I was like “holy s**t, how long have you just been walking around like this?”
In my last job I had a patient who had a VT arrest while visiting his mom (also our patient) on the tele floor of our hospital. It could have easily killed him if it had happened almost anywhere else. He came through it neurologically intact and in pretty good shape.(Other than needing a heart transplant).
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#14
Out of my ten years, I’ve had one patient. She drove herself to the ER and as I immediately wheel her inside triage to do an EKG, she went into cardiac arrest. I called a code, started cpr, and we shocked her back awake. Had it been just a few minutes earlier, she’d be dead in her car somewhere. Don’t drive yourself to the ER.
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#15
My one friend is an ER doc and the other is a surgeon and they’re both here watching TV while I’m playing on the computer and their answer is:
ER Doc: “It happens, it’s not the most common thing but the reason you here so many stories about it is because people who really will die without immediate intervention wait until the last second to come in for help.”
Surgeon: “Seconded. I can’t tell you how many people will know something is majorly wrong and wait until they’re on deaths doorstep to get it looked at.”
The conversation then proceeded about a lady who was s******g out of her v****a for three months and somehow survived and it was only known when she came in to the ER for her foot rotting off due to diabetes. They used a lot of big words I don’t know but that’s the gist of the story. Gross.
Image source: UndisclosedGhost
#16
I’m a respiratory therapist and work in the ER. It’s pretty common to have patients code in the ambulance on their way to the ER. But I think in these situations, they know right away that things are bad and they barely make it. One of the paramedics who taught my CPR class said that since we’re in a dense, but geographically small municipality with 2 hospitals, the chance of surviving cardiac arrest is much higher than average. They call once they’re in the rig and they’re outside the hospital by the time report is given.
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#17
My grandmother of at the time 80+ years old had her second heart attack on the bus. She got off the bus at the next stop which was the hospital, walked in and collapsed in the reception hall. Was resuscitated there with AED and back home within the week. The cardiologist was amazed. My grandmother had bruised ribs and a great story. She knew that it was a heart attack because she had her first when she was 65 and recognized the feeling. She had a couple more great years.
Image source: theekopje_
#18
Not a nurse…. I am a lifeguard…..
I was on vacation and it’s habit to scan the water and count kids…. I had a group of small children I counted and there was 7 of them…. I kept looking around just kinda hanging out on the beach…. Next time I looked there were only 6 of them….. I was pretty sure none had left the water (they were on a sand bar type thing and would have had to walk directly at me to leave by walking….
I got nervous and got up to look…. Started walking out on the sand bar and I could see neon green underneath the water….. I swam over (it was off the sandbar) as fast as I could and pulled a 7 or 8 year old boy out of the water…. Ran him to the beach and slammed his back, I could feel a pulse but he wasn’t breathing…. I gave one rescue breath and that kicked his system back on and he choked out water and started to breath….
If I hadn’t been watching, or if I didn’t get up to make sure one hadn’t gone under he would have definitely died… The parents were facing away from the water so they could face the sun…. Just assumed since the sand bar was there it would be okay…. Only 2 out of the kids could actually swim….
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#19
Me! Blue lips and short of breath but refused to go. Ambulance came. The ER nurses tried to explain and helped calm my husband before I put in an induced coma. I had heart and lung failure due to sepsis. Chest tubes were placed and surgeries followed. But sincerely it was the ER nurses and ICU nurses that saved me multiple times from drowning in my fluids and lack of O2. They believed me, it wasn’t anxiety. Thank You Nurses!! They held my hand and stayed with me when scared ♥️.
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#20
When I was 12, I spent a week throwing up strange colors and having cramps in my guts. At the end of the week I woke up one morning and it hurt so much I couldn’t even get out of bed.
My mom was very alarmed, called her friend who said I was probably faking and to see if I was better by Monday (this was Saturday morning). My mom fortunately decided to call an ambulance anyway, and I was rushed into emergency surgery as soon as I got to the hospital.
That week of leadup was my appendix telling me it was in distress, and Saturday morning it burst. According to what I was told later, another hour delay and I’d have been dead from the toxic c**p my guts were swimming in. As it was I spent almost 2 weeks in the hospital.
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#21
I exaggerated one once, on purpose, and it saved my father’s life.
He woke up one morning feeling “weird.” No pain, no dizziness, just a consistent feeling of strangeness in his chest and stomach. He said it almost felt like indigestion. After drinking some water and the feeling not going away, he asked me to drive him to an urgent care facility. About half way there, he says to me that he was starting to feel dizzy, and he was getting tunnel vision. I knew he had a history of heart disease, so I made the decision to go to the ER instead.
As I walk into the ER, the nurse at the desk tells me to take a seat and she’ll call me when she’s ready; there was already someone checking in at the desk, and a line of people behind them. I knew that explaining the situation would take too long, so I pushed the person out of the way and told the nurse that my dad couldn’t breathe. That got him rushed past the line and into an open room, where he was found to be having a heart attack. Two IVs, a crash cart, and a defib later, he was stable. He was moved to another facility, where he had open heart surgery, and has since made a full recovery.
The doctor told me that it was already a razor thin margin that he made it, and had I taken the time to wait in line or try to make the nurse understand the whole story, he wouldn’t have survived.
Image source: sharrancleric
#22
I’m not an ER nurse but I will share my own story: my son was in the NICU after giving birth to him at 32 weeks (complete placenta previa), and I was visiting him for the weekend. I got the worst headache of my entire life and nothing was helping. Next thing you know I began to feel really weird and couldn’t breathe and called the nurse in. I was having a stroke! If I had not been there and the nurse hadn’t come in that very minute I would have been a loooottttt worse off. They were able to get me on oxygen immediately and it was below 80%.
Image source: jandrvision
#23
I’m certainly no ER nurse and was obviously too young to remember it (or be able to validate) but I’m told that a few weeks or months (not sure) after I was born that:
1: I was sleeping WAY too much.
2: My mother had already had two kids, so she knew it was particularly unusual.
3. She took me to the family doctor who immediately called an ambulance and there was a team waiting when I got to ER.
4. I had scepticaemia and it was pretty touch and go. Story goes that my parents were warned they may need to start making arrangements.
According to the story, if mum hadn’t already had the experience of having a couple of bubs then she probably wouldn’t have clocked that I was way too sleepy for a new-born.
I was told this story a few times growing up, but now that mum is older she says she doesn’t even remember it, as with most of our early years.
No idea if it’s true or not TBH.
The other ‘near misses’ in emergency I remember were the almost monthly childhood asthma attacks that always had dad racing through red lights and occasionally being stopped by cops who then escorted us to ER, after which I’d spend a week in the oxygen tent. I DEFINITELY remember those, but can’t attest as to whether I was really minutes away from death.
Can’t really validate the first story but I always feel for my parents at how stressful it must have been for them with the almost monthly visits to ER for asthma. I’d be terrified if I had to go through that as a parent.
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#24
This is before Uber and 24 hour urgent care centers.
Got called out for an unknown medical around 3 in the morning.
Arrive on scene to find a lady in her late 40’s dressed, sitting in the lobby of a condominium building.
She was staying at a friend’s apartment for the week and didn’t have a car.
She was embarrassed that she called 911 but she was having such terrible indigestion since 11 pm and was afraid she had food poisoning.
No problem, we load her up, get a set of vitals, and then she mentions that it doesn’t get any better or worse when she lays down or sits up. That is a red flag in EMS, 99% of the time it means it’s cardiac related.
We hook her up to the EKG, and she’s throwing tombstones. My partner and I look at the monitor, look at each other, and both go “s**t”.
We started two IV’s, aspirin, morphine, and booked it to the nearest hospital with a cath lab.
When we came into the ED, the cardiologist is already there. He takes a look at the monitor (now running a full 12 lead), asks a few questions, we take her directly to the cath lab, and she codes.
We got her back after one shock, stabilized her, and they proceeded to perform the catheterization.
I heard she did fine in the cath and made a full recovery.
Image source: Grizzly_treats
#25
My dad had a food truck chicken sandwich years ago, in the 80s. He was a long haul truck driver driving home from Quebec to the Maritimes of Canada and he started to get crampy, pulled his fully loaded tractor trailer (lumber flat bed) off to the shoulder of the trans Canada highway and got out to urinate in front of the grill. Said blood was pouring out in his urine.
He managed to get back in the truck and got it going again, and not very much longer, he got severe pain in his lower belly, so bad he couldn’t push the clutch in all the way. He used the CB radio to try to get some one but being Quebec, everyone was speaking French and he did not parlez. He finally got one guy to answer and dad told him that he wasn’t sure what was wrong but he don’t know where the hospital was or if he could get to it with the big rig.
Guy told him to make it exit whatever it was and he’d meet up with him and an ambulance. Guy was a truck running along side dad by this point having caught up to him. He’d radioed dispatch who called emergency services.
By this point, dad was getting weaker and weaker and wasn’t able to get the truck to come to a halt. The other trucker moved his box trailer in front of dad, who’d manage to gear down, having never truly gotten up to speed, and dad deliberately ran into the back of the other driver, coming to a halt.
Ambulance arrived and off he went to Campbellton, NB and into surgery for a perforated bowel and blood loss from a chicken bone in the sandwich. The surgeon told mum that dad was about 30 min from bleeding out, had he not made it to care.
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#26
I always like Boyles (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) response when he got shot in the a*s. “The doctor said an inch to the left and 3 feet higher and I would have died.”.
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#27
My stepdad showed up at the hospital for a scheduled colonoscopy with a heart rate of 23. He was admitted immediately and given a pacemaker. Not really a one minute situation, but if he hasn’t had the colonoscopy appointment he would have stayed home alone all day and probably been dead by the time my mother got home from work.
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#28
The only one I can think of was the dude that coded in the parking lot after driving himself to the ED feeling short of breath. If he wouldn’t have gotten into the parking lot when he did, things could have gotten real ugly real quick, especially if he’d coded while driving.
Image source: m_e_hRN
#29
I’m not an ER nurse. However, I am a recovering Acute Myloid Leukemia patient. I was told that my prognosis wasn’t ideal by very skilled and cagey communicators. I picked up on my care team’s careful wording very early on. They never made declarations like, you only have a certain time frame. Making promises and definite declarations opens them up to lawsuits so they do need to be careful about what they say.
The only time anyone came close to saying, “one more minute and you will be dead” is when I was preparing to have a bone marrow transplant. Unfortunately, the prebmt testing showed that my leukemia had come raging back. I remember the initial phone call I had with one of my oncologists after the new wave of cancer was discovered. He repeatedly apologized, told me that sometimes he needs to just sit in his car and scream in frustration (bless him. I can’t imagine the stress he works under. I would scream in my car too.) while we discussed next steps. Reading between the lines I definitely understood that no oncologist apologizes like that unless they feel like they have failed.
Years later he disclosed that he was shocked I made it to remission.
Maybe I didn’t and still don’t ask the right questions in the right manner to elicit a dramatic response, but this has just been my experience while living with a severe illness.
Image source: mariposa314
#30
Ooh! My favorite. I had a patient a few years back- went in for a routine OB appointment. Her office was connected to the hospital (important). She was getting over some respiratory bug that her daughter gave her, but was doing okay elsewise. Sat down in the chair for vitals and promptly passed out. BP low as hell. They called a code blue, whisked her to labor and delivery (very quick walk). Ended up doing a crash cesarean and her belly was just *full* of blood. Trauma surgery had to get called in to assist and they found she had ruptured her spleen RIGHT THEN AND THERE IN HER OB OFFICE.
Anywhere else, her and that baby would have been dead. They both had great outcomes.
Image source: Unbotheredgrapefruit
#31
My lung collapsed and I thought it was anxiety when I finally ended up in the ER I had to sign a paper and then into a room for an emergency chest tube. The urgency in which they worked around me definitely felt like one of those I could’ve died moments, but no one ever said it to me. I’m curious if it has ever actually been said to a patient out loud.
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#32
Not quite a minute or two but hours myself. I was so far into diabetic ketoacidosis before I was first diagnosed type 1. I was so weak I couldn’t even make it back down the stairs to get to the ER after a doctor visit. I was in DKA for months before my body started to fail.
My mother had left the state for the weekend so I was alone and couldn’t do anything. Thankfully she came back when she did because even the doctors and nurses said I wouldn’t have made it another day. Spent almost a week in the ICU before I was even stepped down to the ER.
Image source: FriedSmegma, Curated Lifestyle/unsplash
#33
Not quite the same, but many many years ago I had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl. Haven’t touched anything in 9 years but yeah..
By the time they got me awake they used two bottles of narcan, my lips were blue and my breathing was so laboured that they told me if they were a minute or two longer I’d be dead.
Image source: Maple-Sizzurp
#34
My mom was told that if she was thirty minutes later bringing me in to the ER, I would’ve died. To be fair, I was 5 months old and had a severe case of rotavirus and I was so dehydrated that my eye sockets were sunken. They also had a lot of trouble getting an IV in me because my veins were collapsed, so they had to put in a port.
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#35
ER nurse of two decades. TBH a lot. That being said, we often tell people these things to underscore the importance of them coming in. You have no idea **how many** people take two Tylenol for their chest pain and take a nap vs coming to the ER. Or think the “worst headache of their life” will go away.
I’ve had a few patients where it was literally “if they hadn’t been in front of us they would have died”. A few. But in the end I want people to know if s**t seems weird, just come in.
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#36
Not an ER nurse, just a witness. Rush hour morning traffic into the sun. Guy ahead of me on a motorcycle. Truck in front of motorcycle guy. Truck had huge wooden box of some sort vaguely strapped down in the truck bed. Motorcycle sees an opening, passed truck and he’s outta there. Seconds later box falls out of truck bed splintering into a million pieces causing a lot of chaos for those of us behind it. Motorcycle guy dodged death by seconds—and will never ever know. I still think about you motorcycle guy.
Image source: Roseliberry
#37
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we had a middle aged female come in breathing relatively fast, appear slightly pale – bp was soft but within normal limits ekg was fine- she had a triple A in the room of the ER and that was it. I can’t recall if she went to surgery or if was futile.
We also had a Thai boxer come in get hit in the chest at the exact wrong time, could not get him out of his not conducive to life rhythm. Young like 22. .
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#38
Bought a CO detector for the first time in my life because of Reddit. That one story about the guy that thought his house was haunted was enough for me.
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#39
I’m a psychiatrist, so we don’t have a ton of these types of stories, but there is one that sticks out in my mind from residency.
I was on-call one night when I got a call from an outpatient of one of the attendings in the clinic. The pt’s wife said that he had recently started a new medication, and wasn’t feeling well, and just wanted to make sure it was nothing serious, apologizing for bothering me. I looked in the pt’s chart and noticed that he had a history of liver issues and was currently being monitored and treated for cirrhosis. The medication he had recently started was known to be hepatotoxic, or potentially damaging to the liver. The pt’s doc should not have started the medication given the pt’s history.
I discussed the situation with his wife, who reported that her husband had been feeling ill, vomiting, felt weak, had abdominal pain, and when I asked, reported that his skin and whites of his eyes were yellow. She also noted that he had been displaying progressive confusion and seeming “out of it.” I told her not to give the pt the new medication anymore, and to either bring the pt to the nearest emergency room or call 911. She asked me if that was really necessary, as she and her husband were already in their pajamas and were going to go to bed soon. She asked if they could just go to urgent care in the morning. I basically said, “Ma’am, if that were my father, I would either be on the phone with 911 right now or getting in the car to come over and bring him to the emergency room myself.” She seemed to take that seriously, and said that they would get dressed and go in.
I checked in about 1-2 hours later on the pt’s chart and saw that the wife did bring her husband in, thankfully, and that he was immediately admitted to the ICU with acute liver failure. His exam findings and labs were pretty terrible. Had he and his wife gone to bed with the plan of going to urgent care in the morning, he would likely have died.
Otherwise, I have definitely heard my fair share of pt stories about being on the brink of death when they weren’t, having experiences within healthcare that would never happen or are impossible, or presenting labs/exam findings/med doses that are meant to show the severity of something that do the opposite. Most of the stories I’ve read on Reddit about people reporting they woke up during surgery seem incredibly exaggerated if not completely made up based on the way that ORs are set up and how surgeries are done. Just about any story you see including things like “so the nurse saw my leg and just started screaming,” or “all the doctors and nurses were shocked and had no idea what to do” are likely exaggerations as well. There is very little that actually shocks medical staff, and nurses have seen s**t and can handle a lot. I’ve had numerous patients sit down in front of me and say that they are likely the worst/most f****d up person I’ll ever meet, that they’ve gone through the worst trauma I’ve probably ever heard of, or made comments like “yeah, you’re probably wondering how I’m even still alive right now.” In all cases, they have been wrong. The worst/most f****d up patients I’ve ever met don’t consider themselves so. The worst trauma I’ve ever heard of has come from patients who don’t put a lot of thought into comparisons. There are definitely pts that amaze me by still being alive, but none of them boast about how bad they have it like there’s an award for the most suffering a human being can experience.
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#40
I have worked as an ER nurse for 5 years now. I can’t think of a single patient that was not a trauma patient that would have died had they come just one minute later.
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#41
I don’t know if mine really counts, but when my son was 11 months old he started having respiratory issues. We called the on-call pediatrician, and he tried to explain the whole “sucking” on the abdomen and if it got to that then to bring him in. This was at like 9pm on a Saturday night. I stayed up all night with him, while he coughed and didn’t sleep and didn’t drink any milk. At 8am the next morning I took him to my nearest urgent care, they sent me to a different urgent care. I went to that and the PA gave him a breathing treatment. At this point his oxygen level was at 82%. I knew absolutely nothing about what this meant at the time. The PA said it was up to us if we wanted to take him to the hospital or not. He was completely casual about the whole situation and didn’t express any sort of concern, so we didn’t think to be concerned either. We decided that we would take him to the hospital, just to be safe, and opted to call an ambulance because the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. Thank god we did. When the EMTs arrived they were shocked at the lack of concern, and immediately insisted that we rush to the nearest children’s hospital with lights and sirens. As we were driving my son started to lose consciousness. It’s been 4 years, and even as I’m typing this story I have chills. I don’t know what would have happened if any different decisions were made that day, and I will never forgive myself for not taking it seriously sooner. We visited the hospital several more times with him, and he was diagnosed with asthma. I will say we learned to take it seriously, and the following hospital visits caught it very early.
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#42
One of my CNA coworkers was in the cafeteria getting lunch. A 30-something visitor suddenly collapsed, no vitals. Coworker immediately started chest compressions while someone else alerted the code blue. Person lived and made a full recovery. I don’t know about “one minute more”, but I know if she hadn’t collapsed in the hospital around an entire cafeteria of people with vast experience in CPR, she’d most likely have died.
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#43
Not exactly another minute. But I did find out that delayed anaphylaxis is real. I was prescribed a medication that was of a penicillin variety (I’m very allergic and always tell doctors, nurses, anyone who needs to know). The doctor who prescribed it said that reactions are very rare.
About 40 minutes after taking my first dose, i felt weird, then I started getting a rash on my chest, then my breathing became a little strained. By the time I got to the ER (a 5 minute drive), I was in worse shape.
I remember the doctor saying “it’s a good thing you came in when you did”.
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#44
4th of July weekend 4 years ago I was coughing and hacking, feeling lethargic and heavy in the chest. I’d been to Urgent care the week before and they said it was likely bronchitis and gave me steroids etc. I just couldn’t get over the feeling and so had the wife take me to the ER. I was admitted to the cardiac care ward with congestive heart failure. Walked out a week later with a defib vest and an EF of 25-30 which was supposedly twice what I had when I went in. If I had gone to sleep instead its likely my wife would have woken up next to my corpse in the morning. I felt sick but not dire by any means.
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#45
ER nurse.
All the time. I hear them in the ER because it’s often the first thing people mention and they’ll go on to use terms that they heard from the doctor that they don’t understand but shows that they were fine. Then I’ll look in their records and I’ll find it to be BS.
But it happens, for sure. Maybe not “one more minute” but one or two more days. I’ll see that a few times a week. Which, yeah, it’s an emergency department. That’s what we do.
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#46
To answer your question, not THAT often.
But recently we had a patient who was coming by EMS as a STEMI, then coded in the ambulance bay. Got him to the Cath lab immediately and he survived fully neuro intact and went back to work a month later.
If he had driven himself to the hospital or if EMS had chosen a hospital slightly farther away, he probably would not have had the same outcome.
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#47
I imagine (as a non ER person) that these types of events are regarding trauma events. Like Jeremy Renner if he had not had the resources to get medevacced to the hospital right away. I know someone who had a widow maker but they were very close to the hospital and were able to survive.
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#48
I ended up in the hospital after a s*****e attempt years ago. Multiple doctors told me things like “you should be dead” and “any longer and you’d be dead.” I was really out of it and even replied “that’s the whole point” to one doctor lol. They talked about airlifting me to a different hospital at one point. I spent a month in the hospital. I made a full recovery and have no lasting health issues.
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#49
All the d**n time.
Heck the other week I had a guy come in and tell me his heart isn’t beating. I assured him it was. He then argued with me, and I smiled while saying ” you’d not be able to tell at me it your heart had stopped beating as you claimed sir”.
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#50
As most have said, maybe not “one minute”, but we see patients every day that if they didn’t come in when they did, it would have ended much differently.
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#51
What I hear more frequently is, “then this hit me in the and the doctors said if it had been one millimeter to the left, I would have been dead”.
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#52
I’m a doctor, not an ER doctor, but I can tell you that things get misinterpreted a lot. I’ve given patients explicit instructions in writing and verbalized and had them repeat it back to me and they come back having done completely the opposite thing because they think thats what I said.
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#53
Not an ER doc, but the story of my birth kinda touches on this. Without too much detail around 9am December 2nd my mom went in for a pregnancy check up and was told she needed to be admitted right away and induced or she and i will die within the hour. “You will have a stroke and die [at any moment]” She didnt listen, because she had two other kids and a husband who couldnt leave work. She went home and basically laid on the couch trying to stay calm and not raise her blood pressure anymore (it was triple over triple at the docs). She went to the ER the next morning where her OB was waiting. She was injected with the medication to get things started and i came out in three light pushes the doc had to catch me with one hand as a result. Sans a few days in the nicu bc i was a preme and my mom needing a lil observation we were fine. Shes an unreliable story teller but she tells it like she was on the verge of death and was actively fighting the reaper himself. Ovbs she was in trouble but not like that.
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#54
Paramedic here. I hold them in the same regard as patients that have a two page “allergy” list.
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#55
My gallbladder went septic. I had been getting gallstone attacks the previous 2 years. They were so painful that I started to keep a log of each incident. I had no idea what was causing it. I just felt like I was dying for about 45 minutes and then the pain would vanish as quickly as it came. After having a fever over 101 for a few days, I finally went to the doctor and he did an ultrasound. I was about 6 hours away from home when I got the call saying that my gallbladder had gone septic and it needed to come out immediately. I drove back 4 hours to another town and checked into a hospital where we knew one of the surgeons which happened to be the one who took the gallbladder out. He said he was very close to opening me up completely to get all of the infection out. A 30 minute surgery turned into a 2 1/2 hour surgery because he chose to do it laparoscopically.
I still don’t realize how close I was to sepsis.
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#56
A minute? No.
However you realistically have about 5 minutes in cardiac arrest as an adult (with no intervention) before you’d be significantly braindead.
Anything where you’re not breathing ie choking, cardiac arrest. O****d OD the minutes absolutely matter. Probably not anything outside of that is so time specific.
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#57
I’m not in the medical field, but I have a cousin who had a stroke while in the hospital for a routine appointment that was unrelated. She made it out completely fine, but she’d have had some real damage if she wasn’t literally already where they could help her.
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#58
I’m in the UK and will say to patients I’m glad you came in or you left this to the last minute but I don’t mean to the literal last minute on the whole.
If it’s that touch and go people usually do lose their pulse – plenty of people go into cardiac arrest on the ambulance or while being wheeled in. I’ve never had someone come in peri arrest and got them IMMEDIATE treatment where I’m like phew that’s saved them from the brink. But some people who have had fantastic responses – known aneurysm payment collapses and ambulance on scene within 3 mins. They tell A&E they’re coming in and we let the vascular team know and they start letting theatre staff know. Patient spends 7mins in our department getting blood tests including transfusion match samples, cannula, consent for surgery and handshake from surgeons before being whipped upstairs and surviving. In stuff like this every minute counts but I’m never like one minute later would have been the last minute.
But I guess “I don’t think you had anther 15mins/hour to spare” had the same ring. .
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#59
I’d rather have patients who exaggerate and turn out to be stable than risk the one who dies. patient came in GCS 15, blunt force trauma to the head. GCS went from 15 to
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#60
Honestly, most of those stories are exaggerated. It’s not that people are lying, but the average person doesn’t have a good grasp on just how sick they really were. Without medical knowledge or anything to compare it to, they assume they were seconds away from death when in reality they probably had more time than they think. From our side, we see genuinely critical cases every day, so the perspective is very different.
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