Doctors share stories of patients who came in for routine checkups but ended up needing major surgery, showing how unpredictable health can be.
Usually, when we visit a doctor, it’s for something simple, a routine checkup, a mild headache, or maybe a weird ache that’s been bothering us for a few days. Most of the time, you expect a quick diagnosis, a prescription, and to be on your way.
But what happens when what seems like a small inconvenience suddenly takes a serious turn? Imagine going in for what you thought was a minor issue, only to find yourself being prepped for surgery within hours.
Well, that’s exactly what happened to these patients. Doctors and patients online are sharing shocking stories of how a “quick appointment” turned into an unexpected trip to the operating room, and some of them sound straight out of a medical drama. Keep reading, you might think twice the next time you brush off a “minor” symptom.
#1
I remembered a second one. I teach an EMT class on the side and we were going through rare medical conditions that you can identify with little to no equipment.
Your aorta is the biggest artery in your body and if anything happens to it, it’s a big problem. It can develop an aneurysm (think a semi-failure of the wall, causing it to balloon out to the side, pending full rupture). I’m explaining the ways you can identify this in the field, one of which is to take both the radial pulses (wrist) simultaneously. They should beat together. If they are beating off-tempo, that can be a sign of an aortic aneurism.
I tell everyone to partner up and take both their partners pulses so you no what ‘normal’ feels like.
A hand is raised in the rear of the room.
“U/sam_neil! My partners pulses are wrong.”
I start by joking that students need to be more diligent in practicing taking vitals etc etc until I take the students pulses. Hers are indeed “wrong”. The head instructor and I go into work mode and do a barrage of other tests. She shows additional signs in a couple, but not all the tests.
We advise her to go to the hospital immediately. We explain that if you have an aortic aneurysm and it ruptures while you are on the operating table of the most skilled surgeon in the world your odds of survival are around 2%. She refuses and finishes class after we do CYA paperwork. She follows up with her doctor from childhood who, as she tells it, drags her by her ear into the ambulance he called.
It turned out to be a very minor aneurism, and she had a procedure to repair it and takes medication to keep her blood pressure low, but otherwise has a completely normal life.
Image source: sam_neil, Pixabay
#2
Not a doctor, but a paramedic of reddit.
When I was a brand new medic we got a call Sunday morning for a twenty something year old male vomiting, with a small amount of blood in the vomit. I speak two languages, my partner at the time was from a former soviet-bloc country and spoke about 5 fluently. Believe me when I say this guy got cursed out the entire ride to his house in 7 languages. A twenty something year old called because he was throwing up? On a Sunday morning? Dude. You have a hangover ffs.
We arrive and are met downstairs by his girlfriend who is panicking and confirms they went out drinking the night before. We roll our eyes, grab our gear and head upstairs.
As soon as we see the patient our tone changes. Guy is Asian, but is paler than printer paper, soaked with sweat, is cold when I touch him and is barely conscious. I look next to his bed and “a small amount of blood in the vomit” is in reality a medium sized garbage can, almost 1/4 full of straight blood.
His blood pressure is low, around 70/30, his heart rate is compensating by beating at about 160 times per minute. We get a big IV in him and replace about a liter of fluid. His vitals improve, he comes around enough to answer questions. He says he drank 2 beers last night and smoked some pot. He says he has never been able to have more than a few beers without getting sick for days.
I ask about his medical history and he says he has had general digestive issues his whole life but never anything like this- just has to have a low fat diet or else horrific diarrhea. Bad hemorrhoids, low grade abdominal pain constantly tbat has never been given a clear diagnosis. Nothing on paper to go from.
We get him to the hospital and drop him off in critical. In one of my only true Dr House moments, as I’m walking out I tell the triage nurse exactly what the issue is.
From the deepest depth of a half slept through lecture during paramedic school, I remember all these symptoms. He has an undiagnosed liver issue, which is causing bloodflow through his liver to get backed up. When the liver doesn’t work properly, you can’t digest alcohol or fat effectively. When blood starts backing up it causes portal hypertension which causes hemorrhoids and basically hemorrhoids in the esophagus, called esophageal varices. One of these varices has popped and he was bleeding out through his esophagus.
One of the only times I have correctly diagnosed a problem beyond “hey this drunk guy has been drinking alcohol!”.
#3
I’m the patient. I went to my doctor because I was tired. I asked to get my hormones checked, but my doctor is thorough and did a full exam and workup.
During the internal exam (I’m a lady) she said she felt something weird and referred me out for an ultrasound.
I had an external ultrasound and a transvaginal ultrasound that took nearly an hour with the tech snapping pictures the entire time (super fun /s).
Unfortunately the ultrasound didn’t show anything clearly. Whatever was wrong with me wasn’t an issue with my uterus.
My doctor referred me out for a CT. I went in, drank the gross goop, and they took a bunch of pictures of my pelvic region.
I get a call from my doctor who says I need to meet with a surgeon right away. I get an appointment the next week. If you haven’t had a CT scan done before, it’s a series of images that are slices of your body shown as contrast in black and white. As the surgeon scrolled through the images, they showed the inside of my pelvic region slowly becoming full of white as he scrolled up and down my body.
I had a tumor the size of a football in my pelvic region.
And the only symptom that prompted me to go in was feeling so tired I couldn’t finish a normal gym workout.
Looking back I also realized that I still felt like I had to go to the bathroom sometimes even though I had just gone because it was putting pressure on my bladder.
They scheduled surgery for a few weeks later. Because it was my entire pelvic region, they weren’t sure what they would find when they went in…like, what was tumor, what wasn’t, and what it was attached to. There were at least 3 specialists in the room with my general surgeon.
It was actually much better than thought. Took about two hours to remove. No major organs involved other than a few internal lady bits, and only minimal side effects. The biopsy showed it was benign.
Image source: yakshack, freepik
#4
I went to my doctor thinking I had a bladder infection. I felt like I had to pee every 5 minutes. Doctor found nothing but sent me for an ultra sound.
Turns out I had a cyst the size of a grapefruit on one of my ovaries that was resting on my bladder. 5 days later I was in the hospital having my ovary removed.
Image source: Michigangirl866, RDNE Stock project
#5
Not a doctor, but I worked in an emergency room in nursing school. I was sitting out in triage late one night, my nurse had ran to the back for a minute and a guy comes in, only complaint was a sore throat. Nothing else at all. Just a sore throat. But something was off, he had a slight grayish tone.
As a tech, I figured why the hell not. Told him to follow me and took him to our EKG area. Few minutes later, my nurse comes back and is looking at me like I’m nuts because I’m doing an EKG on a sore throat. I handed her the printout and she had an ‘oh darn’ look, he was having a STEMI (massive heart attack.)
My charge nurse came out later after the dust had settled and asked me what made me check him, I told her I didn’t know he just didn’t look right. Intuition can be a funny thing. Poor guy, he was slightly confused about the whole thing, he just wanted something to fix his throat irritation.
Image source: ffs_not_now
#6
I’m the patient. Went in for a recurring pain in my throat. Quadruple bypass a week later.
Image source: Fatoldguy, hryshchyshen
#7
Actually a doctor — pediatrician — so many stories….
Teenager comes in for ear pain and turns out there is a hornet stuck in the ear biting his canal and ear drum — had to have it surgically repaired
Kid comes into ER for cough for a couple weeks, parents are very worried and the kid looks “off”, so I order a chest xray. His mediastinum (the white part between the lungs) takes up almost the entirety of his chest. Massive tumor.
Kid with belly pain and vomiting for 12 hours. Belly exam is hard — not like she is flexing but like rigid as a board. Ultrasound for appendicitis shows a massive kidney tumor that went from right lung to bottom of the right pelvis. Wilms tumors are crazy!
Most recently had a little one in for a regular check up that parents had kept postponing. Kid can’t sit up alone and parents still have to feed — not normal for a 9 month. Ultrasound of the head shows too much water in the brain and the kid gets surgery within 24 hours.
Image source: aliciapple, Sam Badmaeva
#8
I was the patient.
I got into a 60mph motorcycle accident a year ago. I slammed into a guardrail. It seemed like there were no serious injuries than some scrapes and a pain in my back.
I was transported to the ER anyway, they did an X-ray, told me I had bruised muscle, and attempted to send me on my way.
Except when I sat up I couldn’t lift my a*s up to put on my pants before stepping off the gurney because my back hurt so bad.
They run another X-ray, do an MRI, and a few minutes later the room is flooded with doctors and nurses.
I had a fracture-dislocation of vertebrae T2-T8. Basically my spine was in half and parallel to itself. On top of this, they missed the fact that my lung had collapsed and was filling with blood. Hemopneumothorax. They had never seen someone like this who could still walk. I had basically won the medical equivalent of the lottery that day. I was life-flighted to a level 1 hospital in my state and 5 hours later had 14 inches of titanium put in my back. I was only in the hospital for 9 days and required no rehab.
Image source: anon, André Mašek
#9
I’m not a doctor but I still have a story.
My dad had a bad stomach ache, didn’t know the cause. It was bad, but we thought it was just a bad case of food poisoning. He was in emergency and the doctors saw a burst appendix, so they took him in for surgery.
Opened him up and it was stage 4 cancer.
He had several tumors removed and had to go to chemo. On chemo, got better, then got worse, another surgery, deteriorating health. Just pure chaos.
This was 4 years ago. He died just last year..
Image source: anon, user25451090
#10
Not a doctor.
This one is completely on me because I did some questionable things as a kid.
I was 12. And growing up in Maine. I had a pellet gun that was advertised as shooting a .177 projectile at 1200 FPS. I had been shooting it for a few years so my parents would let me shoot it on my own out back as long as I wore safety glasses.
That afternoon during the summer I found a small piece of piping along the road in the front yard and brought it out back to shoot.
I took the first shot and instantly felt something hit me in the head.
I have a younger brother so I thought it was a pebble or something, And put the gun down to investigate. I think the only reason i didn’t immediately think I got hit by ricochet was because it didn’t hurt at all. The only thing I felt was a bump, like a small rock hit me in the head.
I didn’t notice the blood till I wiped my face to clear what I thought was sweat. I was greeted with a completely red hand. At this point it didn’t click that I got hit by a ricochet and I didn’t feel anything when I touched the cut so I didn’t worry.
I couldn’t stop the blood with anything outside and I couldn’t find my brother so I assumed the bullet just hit me but didn’t stick, because the cut was so long. so I had to open the front door and yell for my mom.
As soon as she passed the corner she turned white, *And started freaking out.* At this point the blood was covering the whole front of my shirt and was starting to drip onto the ground. I told her a total lie because I didn’t want them to take my pellet gun away, so I told them I hit myself with a metal pipe while flipping it in the air. She looked at my cut and could immediately tell I needed stitches and they rushed me to the urgent care in the next city.
When I got there the towel my dad wrapped around the top of my head was showing a lot of blood. When the nurse made me take off my towel, her eyes opened wide. You could see my skull in the cut. They took me within like ten min.
The doctor took a look at the wound and made me tell the story again while stitching up the inch long gash which started at my hair line at about 11 o’clock on my face.
The doctor decided to take an X Ray. I waited for them to come back with the results with my dad and after like 15 min the doctor came back in. He asked me to tell the story again. His next question was what kind of pipe shoots metal four inches under your scalp. He made me tell the real story and showed my dad the x ray and my dad was visibly pissed.
The next thing I knew I was in an ambulance on my way to the OR. Those guys didn’t even put me to sleep while they cut into my scalp. And pulled out a perfectly circular saw shaped piece of mushroomed lead That was almost 5 inches from the entrance point. They couldn’t remove one of the fragments because of its location and it was small.
My pellet rifle still got taken away.
TLDR:
Got hit by a ricochet, lied to my parents because I thought I could get away with it, still got punished because doctors had to remove a piece of lead from my head.
Image source: Zachman97, Getty Images
#11
Doctor here.
I had one a few months ago sent into the hospital by his primary care doctor with ‘shoulder pain’. He said he felt absolutely fine, just a really uncomfortable right shoulder pain that hadn’t gone away for a couple of weeks. He maybe felt a bit more tired than usual and oh, come to think of it, had lost quite a bit of weight recently and none of his clothes fit him any more.
I went to examine him and had what we describe in the profession as a “heartsink” moment. He was jaundiced, and his abdomen was absolutely solid in the right upper zone from a huge, craggy liver.
Get him in the ct scanner and he is just fulllll of cancer. Everywhere. Couldn’t even work out which was the primary.
The shoulder pain is what we call “referred pain” and is commonly caused by diaphragmatic irritation, in this case from all the liver masses pushing against it.
Bless him. I think about him a lot.
Image source: cmwilson95, prostock-studio
#12
I was the patient, not the doctor.
September a few years back I was working 20 hour days in an office chair during “crunch time” for a big event. The day before the big event (in a remote desert location, similar to but not Burning Man), I did another all-nighter and took an hour nap before last push prior to travel. I woke up unable to lift my arms, the feeling of an elephant standing on my chest, and a headache when I never got headaches. My husband took me to Urgent Care, where I was diagnosed with acid reflux, given a painkiller shot in my booty, handed a dixie cup of something chalky and awful, and sent home.
I finished my work and went a day late to the big event. I spent 5 days walking around in 110 degree heat doing my job, still unable to lift my arms, but otherwise got through it.
A few months later, I went to a club with friends and danced all night. The next morning my calf hurt pretty badly. Thought maybe I had pulled my calf muscle. Over the next two days, the calf pain got worse and worse, until the day before Christmas I pulled out some old crutches. My husband wanted to hit up the climbing gym, so I went along and hung out with all our friends while they climbed. we stopped by Urgent Care right after. I was unable to put any weight on my leg at this point.
The doctor did a quick exam and put my leg in a compression boot. Told me it was a muscle tear or sprain, and to keep it iced and elevated for a few days.
The nurse waited for the doctor to leave, and pulled us aside. She said she had a strange feeling about it and asked if we’d be willing to go have an emergency ultrasound done at the nearby hospital. We figured it wouldn’t hurt “just in case.”
While in the ultrasound tech’s room, a lovely Russian-born tech started out cheery and making jokes with us. About 5 minutes in, she got quiet and excused herself. Moments later, a doctor came in, looked at the screen, and told me not to move. There was an 8cm blood clot in my leg.
I was moved to a gurney and rushed to the ER in the same hospital. The ER doc said I was incredibly lucky. He sent me for a CT scan of my chest “just to be sure,” saying it was just a precaution. Turned out I had 7 pulmonary emboli in my right lung, and 5 in my left lung. When he saw the results, he had “the talk” with us explaining the gravity of the situation. I spent 4 months in my bed on blood thinners not allowed to move while the clot resolved, with three additional ER visits due to cardiac incidents from blood clot bits breaking off and pushing through my heart.
My docs said it was most likely due to the number of emboli in my lungs and the size and placement of the clot that I’d likely had it back that September, and what was diagnosed as “acid reflux” was actually another piece of clot triggering a cardiac incident.
And that is the story of how my noodle arms and calf sprain turned out to be deep vein thrombosis with multiple pulmonary emboli.
I am very glad to still be here to type to total strangers about it. If that nurse hadn’t second-guessed the doctor on Christmas Eve, I would probably not be.
Image source: RiverJai, standret
#13
A couple years ago, my mom was experiencing crazy back pains. She went to this one doctor every so often to get some pain medication and that doctor, for the life of him, couldn’t find anything wrong with her, but could tell she was experiencing major pain, so gave it to her. One day, she’s going in again and her doctor is out so she has a different one. While being checked up, the doctor says “So you’re here for the broken back, then?” and my mom was really confused. Apparently, in 1999, she had been in a car accident where a tanker truck carrying gas rolled over her car and crushed her inside but nobody had apparently noticed that her back was broken for almost 16 years. She had surgery on the day of my birthday and she’s been a happier and more easy going person since.
Image source: DannTheDank
#14
Not a doctor but the Jon Dorenbos story is pretty incredible. Long story short, upon being traded to the Saints he had to undergo a physical (which he wouldn’t have needed to do if he had still been tenured with the Eagles) and it was discovered that he had a massive aortic aneurism and he immediately went in for open heart surgery.
Image source: palmeraspect, stefamerpik
#15
Obligatory not a doctor, this happened to an old co-worker of mine.
I was a supervisor at a truck terminal. One of our delivery drivers was moving a pallet in his truck when the wheel of the jack caught some debris on the floor of the trailer, and he pulled something in his abdomen.
He went to the doctor either that evening or the next day, and in the middle of the exam, the doctor basically just stopped and told him to go to the hospital like right away.
It turned out he had a baseball sized tumor in his abdomen, and it wound up being malignant. He died like half a year late.
RIP Jimmy.
Image source: BoonIsTooSpig, Drazen Zigic
#16
The reason there aren’t a lot of responses from doctors is probably because when we see our patients, the thought process is never “This person is here for a small problem”. We are constantly thinking “What is the worst possible thing this person could have right now? How do I make sure these things are not happening?”, so when we discover something serious it was already something we were worried about and trying to rule out. I try to think of every problem as a big problem until I’m absolutely sure it’s not.
Anywho my contribution to the thread: I saw an elderly lady for a ‘sore toe’, and when i asked her to take off her shoes both of her feet were cold, purple, and pulseless from a loss of blood supply. Cue urgent CT and vascular surgery consult. She saw me in a walk-in clinic so I’m not sure how she did but the surgeon I spoke to did think they would be able to save her feet.
Image source: mallardright
#17
Not a doctor, daughter of a patient. For years my dad complained of gut pain. He went from doctor to doctor and they all said “oh it’s just a stomach ache” or even “It’s all in your head.” Dad went to one doctor that took him seriously and did a scan. Turns out his gall bladder had died.
Image source: anon, hryshchyshen
#18
Oh boy.
As part of our medical course, we need cannulas ticked off. Another medical student and I went to the ED, where many patients need cannulas. We found a fantastic nurse willing to supervise us, who recommended a patient with easy veins e.g. young, no urgent problem. Young woman with vague, 3/10 abdominal pain was triaged low down on the list, so she was perfect.
It was the other medical student’s turn, so she begins rummaging through the drawers for equipment. It’s apparent she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, the nurse helps. Student sets out an enormous needle, 14G, the kind you’d use for a blood transfusion. Nurse gives her a weird look and replaces it with a smaller one.
It becomes apparent this is the student’s first cannula. After poking several random areas, she enters the vein. And then she….does nothing. Doesn’t release the tourniquet, doesn’t put a bung (cap) on it. Does nothing, while looking at the pathology tubes blankly.
The nurse is telling her to put the cap on it, but the student is still obviously trying to figure out whether to attach the pink or the yellow tube. Blood is gushing out. The nurse tries to hand her a cap, student doesn’t notice. Patient finally looks down. Blood everywhere. Over her arm, the bluey (towel placed under the arm), chair, reaching her pants.
The patient’s face goes ghost white. Even her lips turn white. Her eyes roll back into her head. Before I know it, she’s passed out. The cannula *still isn’t capped.*
The nurse is desperately trying to hurdle over the student and the trolley to cap the cannula or take it out. Student is still standing there, not moving out of the way. Flummoxed, I grab another nurse and we find a bed to transfer the patient onto and elevate her legs. The patient is rolled into resus, where there are bigger bays. There’s so much blood on the floor that the wheels of the bed left a long, red trail across the emergency department.
In handover later, I heard she was hypovolaemic and they were keeping her for awhile until her red blood cell count was returned, to confirm she wasn’t anaemic from all the blood loss.
TL;DR – woman came in with vague abdominal pain, ended up admitted for violent blood loss.
Afterwards, I heard the student asking the nurse if she would tick her off for the cannula.
Image source: manlikerealities
#19
Went in to check why I had such bad period pain, ended up getting my kidney removed.
Image source: mcalindenc
#20
I was/am the patient. I work construction for a living and was working a job removing some very heavy laminated glass. Strenuous lifting all day long. During the course of the gig, my left testicle began to swell and hurt, and wasn’t getting any better. I told my supervisor I suspected I had given myself a hernia, not unheard of in my field, and went to the occupational healthcare clinic in town. The sweetest grandmotherly physician did the whole turn-your-head-and-cough deal. Awkward, necessary, but yielded nothing. She recommends I check myself into the emergency room and get an ultrasound. Well, when the ultrasound tech finished the session by saying “good luck to you, buddy” I suspected something amiss. Well, one removed testicle, a round of chemotherapy, and an abdominal lymph node removal later, testicular cancer hasn’t beaten me down. I’m awaiting my four-month post-surgery CAT scan now. Fellas, check ya nuts.
Image source: GreenLeavesDryHeaves
#21
Not a doctor, mom was the patient. She went in to get a regular check up, renew her prescriptions, etc. Mentioned that she had been having pain in one of her fingers. She had put off getting it checked cause she was thinking it was just arthritis. Doctor refers her to a hand doctor, turns out it’s a tumor that’s wrapped around her bone and tendon. She gets surgery to remove it tomorrow.
Image source: LandShark93
#22
Not a doctor, but my dad has a pain in his back for a week or two, so he went to the doctor’s to make sure it wasn’t more than a pulled muscle from catching for me when I practiced pitching in middle school. They did some scans, and he ended up being diagnosed with lymphoma.
I like to say my wild pitching saved his life. He’s been in remission for a few years!
Never figured out what the back pain was.
Image source: ImSoReadyToWakeUpNow
#23
Not me, not a doctor.
A “friend” who is the definition of anti-establishment anti-vax anti- anything-science-backed always had a little bump on her nose. She put her oils on it, smuged with sage “to remove the toxins”, and regarded it as her “beautiful bump”.
The bump gets bigger. Darker. Her grandmother supposedly tricks her into going to the doc about it. I think she was supposed to be helping grandma to her own appointment, but sneaky grandma had other plans.
Anyway, miss olis-cure-everything is currently in hospital having the entire left side of her nostril and part of her cheek removed due to skin cancer.
Image source: oneofeach1016
#24
I went to the doctor trying to get a sick note so i could cal out of work because my stomach hurt and i threw up a few times. i ended up in the hospital for 24 hours needing emergency surgery. i was pissed off. all i wanted todo was go home and play video games but i was stuck watching hospital tv.
Image source: tralif99
#25
14 year old cancer survivor comes in for his routine post-chemo screening echocardjogram. His heart was barely moving. I don’t remember the EF, probably in the low teens. We sat him and mom told for some bad news, put EMLA on his arm for a PICC and walked him to the cardiac ICU. A few months later he has a heart transplant.
Kids, man. They can look great on the outside when compensated. Then you look at the images and just get nauseous for them. Scariest thing about pediatrics and #1 reason why kids need kid doctors.
Image source: msbossypants
#26
Not a doctor – but my dad’s skin was itching a lot and creams or allergy meds weren’t giving relief. Went to the doctor and found out it was stage 4 liver cancer. He died 2 weeks later.
We were all nuts for a while after that one.
Image source: krisspy10
#27
Not a doctor, but my dad had a bit of pain that wouldn’t go away 3 years ago, sat through all of Christmas morning, then as soon as my family and my sister’s family left, he took himself to the emergency room I grant, but only because it was Christmas so there weren’t any walk in clinics open, ER was only choice.
He had pancreatic cancer, and in the end he got the Whipple procedure done, then chemo after and latest news from his doctors is that its 100% gone, which is phenomenal for pancreatic.
Edit: He was super lucky there were any symptoms at all early enough for it to matter.
Image source: Siniroth
#28
When I was two I had a really bad ear infection and fever so my parents took me to the doctor’s office. Turns out I had an infection in both ears, my sinuses, something going on with my tonsils (remember that for later), and a fever of 104F and climbing. My parents ended up getting some antibiotics, and everything cleared up for a while. But then for the next few months all of that would come back and then go away again.
Remember my tonsils? Those were why I was getting so sick. I can’t remember exactly how, but they were causing all of these infections. So my parents took me to the hospital and I had surgery to have them removed.
Then the doctor almost ended me by giving me too much anesthesia. So there’s that too. :/
TLDR: I almost died from a bunch of different infections and then the doctor nearly ended me during surgery.
Image source: anon
#29
Not a doctor and not me, but my dad.
I took him to the hospital for a check-up prior to a planned knee surgery. The knee had been playing up for years, so he needed to get a new one. It was just a routine check and pretty boring so I was in the waiting area outside, while my dad got his knee looked at. The doctor also noticed a red, bloody moskito bite on his right forearm and asked my dad about it. Dad told him, that it’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a moskito bite, that he scratched until it bleed. The doctor has a short look at it and calls me into the office.
Doctor: I am afraid, but we need to do surgery on that bite. It needs to be opened and cleaned
Dad: No worries, I’ll schedule an appointment for that on my way out.
Doctor: No, you don’t understand. We are preparing the surgery for you now. When did last have something to eat?
Turns out, the arm was severly infected. They cut his arm open and he had to stay in the hospital for almost two weeks, while the drained loads of nasty fluids out of the arm. If the check-up would have been a couple of days later, he might have died from blood poisoning.
Image source: chili_666
#30
Not a doctor but I’ve got two stories where I thought I was fine/being ridiculous over the whole thing.
First one I thought I had really bad period cramps which kept getting worse to the point I couldn’t walk. Turns out I had an ovarian cyst burst on me, and I spent six hours in the waiting room hunched over in a wheelchair because the nurses thought I was just trying to get out of school.
Second time I just thought I had a sore throat, did the strep test and everything which came back negative at the walk-in clinic. It proceeded to get so bad that I couldn’t swallow and I was vomiting up whatever I ate but I was determined that I was just being a wimp over the whole thing. My sister came home, felt my forehead and immediately called our grandparents to take me to the hospital. I sat in the ER for four hours because she made me take an all-in-one sorta thing for sore throats which also included reducing fevers so the nurses probably thought I was being ridiculous. Turns out I had cellulitis in my uvula and it had swollen to three times its usual size. Don’t know how I got it, but work sure was thrilled about me calling in sick for a whole week during busy season. There’s a difference between your soft palette and your throat, and that definitely makes a difference when doctors are trying to diagnose you!
Image source: iompar
#31
Not a doctor yet but a student. I haven’t seen the worst kind of stuff yet but this was a “fun” one.
I’m shadowing a GP at her office and a guy comes in for a routine check-up a few weeks after surgery on his toe for an ingrown nail. Doctor asks how he’s doing, guy is like “fine I guess, a little tender.” She says ok, how does it look when he cleans it? Guy says he doesn’t know.
Turns out he was still in the same dressing they gave him at the hospital after the surgery, never even opened it. Had just been walking around in the filthy thing for weeks. Even the experienced Dr was struggling to keep a neutral face when she opened that dressing and the Smell came. It was bad.
Image source: malted_barley_flour
#32
Not a doctor, however I feel I have a good example to contribute.
Couple years ago my grandfather was complaining about minor chest pain. He said it was only when it was cold outside and he found it a little hard to breathe. This is the first time in his life this happened so he didn’t know what it was. We ended up taking him to the doctor, expecting it to do with the cold weather taking a toll on his 81 year old body. After a couple appointments, he found out he needed a triple bypass. (In very brief terms for those who don’t know, a triple bypass is clearing any obstruction from 3 of the 4 sections of your heart)
Had we not taken him for this small doctors appointment, who knows how much longer he had before the lack of blood stopped his heart. He got the surgery ASAP and he’s still alive and well today.
Image source: S1rsnipesalot
#33
A friend of my mom’s went backpacking once with a very heavy backpack, and ended up somehow breaking his neck with it in a crowded bus. He didn’t notice right away, but later he collapsed on the road in the middle of a city and someone called an ambulance for him.
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#34
Not a doctor, but a patient.
I had taken martial arts for much of my youth, with a plan of taking it professionally after college. During college, I visited my grandfather for a family reunion, who was an MD (General Practice, to give you an idea of how long ago it was). He noted a lump on the side of my jaw, and I just shrugged and figured it was part of doing martial arts. Occasionally, you dodge poorly, and get tagged harder than you’d prefer. He asked me, as a favor, to see an associate of his. Deciding to humor him, I went.
So, he subjected me to an FNA (Fine Needle Aspiration… also known as a ‘needle biopsy’, or in common language ‘jab this huge needle in your jaw until it scrapes bone and see what comes out’), then an MRI and a CAT scan. Well, results were concerning but inconclusive because the swelling from the FNA obscured the results of the MRI and CAT. Do it again.
Did it again in the right order this time. After some ominous ‘hmmm”s, he referred me to someone he knew out at M.D. Anderson. Turns out, it was Periosteoscarcoma, or ‘cancerous tumor growing out of the jaw bone’ for those of us who did not take Latin.
So yea, prognosis went from ‘bone bruise’ to ‘bone cancer’. That… was not the most pleasant discovery of my life. Fortunate, of course, but not particularly pleasant.
Image source: ShneekeyTheLost
#35
Not a doctor, but a patient.
I was in school and caught a cold. It wasn’t going away for a while, but I didn’t really notice it because I was so focused on school work. Eventually, I went to the doctor because I developed a little bit of a cough, and since I have asthma, colds that affect my respiratory system are horrible.
I go to the school’s medical center, and get triaged by a nurse. She takes my temperature while asking a few questions and looks puzzled. Takes it again, and asks me if I’m in uncomfortable. I tell her something like “No, I got this cough”. She tells me “Your temperature is 104.6° F (40.33 ° C). You don’t feel hot?”. I didn’t.
After triage, I was first priority to see the doctor. She tells me that my tonsils are huge and that I most likely have strep throat (even though my strep test came back negative). So she prescribes me antibiotics and an electrolyte solution and sends me on my way.
That night, I’m drinking that Gatorade electrolyte stuff, but my friend is holding the cup. My body is shaking violently, and even though I took a prescribed fever reducer, my temperature kept going up. I thought I’d just sweat it out, and the antibiotics would take effect soon. I began hallucinating shadowy figures, and the room became hazy, my friend’s walking looked like stop motion.
I went to the hospital with my friend after I told them what I was seeing, and after he noticed my fever was still rising regardless of the medication. We went to the ER, and they did bloodwork, cultures, X-ray and a physical exam. They gave me IV fluids to bring my fever down from 105.4 ° to 100 °ish. The doctor diagnosed me with some unknown virus, and said good thing I went to the ER. If I hadn’t, the fever could have caused me to seize and give me brain damage.
Long story short: It was not a cough, just a crazy virus that could’ve ended a part of my brain.
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#36
Not following the rules of the thread, but a girl from my high school was on vacation with her family somewhere in the Caribbean and went to the hospital for what they figured was a mildly serious jellyfish sting that was bothering her. I guess after some evaluation the doctor came out and said ‘good news, I think we can save the leg’.
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#37
My mother was the patient. She and my grandmother had been in a car accident with a drunk driver, and were being checked out for whiplash and such. As they’re signing discharge papers, a surgeon comes running into the room and says my mother can’t leave.
Apparently she was missing her top 3 vertebrae. Her neck was being held in place purely by muscle. She was one of a handful of people ever found with this problem past the age of 2, and most are only found on autopsy.
So they ended up taking a chunk of her hip bone, sculpting it, then fusing it all together with enough wires to set off metal detectors for years.
Image source: Fufu-le-fu
#38
I am the patient.
Went to my doctor complaining about leg pain in September, to the point where I couldn’t continue working out. Got an X-ray that showed pelvic tilt. I did what they asked.
Pain continued. Went back in October, got an ultrasound that showed bursitis and tendonitis. I did physio, it didn’t help.
Pain continued. In January I went to a new doctor. She diagnosed me with a SECOND tendonitis and gave me an MRI. Tendonitis treatment didn’t help.
Had an MRI a few days ago. It revealed a 3cm Tarlov cyst at the bottom of my spine. Will need surgery to remove it.
Image source: anon
#39
MEDIUM, TLDR at the end.
Me, a patient: I was about 14 and I kinda felt like “something´s loose inside me”. Whenever I leaned forward I could feel something inside moving (eww). It was in lower chest/abdomen but since it felt only uncomfortable, I didn´t pay attention to it. But then I was supposed to participate in skittles tournament (something like bowling but balls are smaller and without holes and there is 9 pins) and I could not carry on after like 20 rolls. Next day we went to doctor´s to get RTG pix and as soon as we arrived home (we weren´t supposed to wait for results) my parents got a call from doctor that indicated a week in hospital. What they found you ask? I had punctured lung and I spent like a month using only one (which does not really put your life in danger but breathing would be harder) and as it deflated it pushed on diaphragm. Since I did not recall any falling or hitting myself, the doctor deducted from my medical sheet that the reason is that my height increased by 16cm in one year. My body (I´m pretty slim so that was also one of the reasons why it happened) could not keep up with my body growing up and the lung popped and deflated.
But the hospital staff, surgeons and lung-specialist were reassuring me that everything will be fine, that it is not as uncommon as I thought. But man, how I was scared at first!
TLDR: Felt something “loose inside”, found out it´s punctured lung because I grew up too fast and I needed a surgery.
Image source: Wertical93
#40
I went to the after hours A&E centre quack about a cough i had from a bad flu. As part of the visit she went to put the stethoscope on my back to listen to my heart and she said “oh whats this?” and I said ah thats just a small fungal rash ive had for a year and havent bothered getting looked at.
Turns out she was the local skin cancer doctor and I had a basal cell carcinoma. Had to get surgery to cut it out of my back and two layers of 12 stitches to seal it back up. Its been about 2 months and I still cant reach forward to my keyboard very well.
But I can say I have been stabbed in the back and have the scar to prove it.
Image source: anon
#41
Lady came into the ED with substernal exertional chest pain that she’d had for a day or so, but she had never had it before prior to this episode. She was active, shoveled snow regularly over the winter, etc; it just came on out of nowhere. In the ED, had a mild trop elevation of 0.06, I thought ok, indeterminate trop but whatever, we’ll throw her on a heparin drip, ASA, etc, and we’ll see if she is cath in the morning vs stress test. Her chest pain stopped, and I figured it would be non-cardiac since she had been tolerating serious exertion without pain up until yesterday…but her trops didn’t stop going up. They went up and up, peaking later that night in the low hundreds, and her EKG clearly showed NSTEMI. She went for cath, and had horrible multi-vessel disease with tons of collaterals; stenting would be insufficient, but there weren’t any good targets for CABG either. She ended up getting listed for heart transplant.
tl;dr previously very active lady came in for a twinge of chest pain with exertion and ended up having to get listed for heart transplant due to the widespread and inoperable nature of her failing coronaries.
Image source: Bazirker
#42
Not a doctor, but the patient in question. Last December, a week before Christmas, I made a doctors appointment because my hemroids flared up and I noticed a decent amount of blood in my stool. Right before I left to go to the doctor I threw up. I drove the the clinic clutching my abdomen in agony. It took me a few minutes to get myself out of the car, but I did and I also managed to get my kids (2 month old daughter and 17 month old son) out of the car but as we were crossing the street I suddenly felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my abdomen and I doubled over in pain. A lady, who had stopped for me while I crossed the street with my kids, got out of her vehicle and helped me get my kids into the clinic. Since I was doubled over in pain the nurses rushed me into a room and helped keep my kids, mostly my son, occupied. They ended up sending me up to the hospital, luckily my step mom worked 2 blocks away and was able to walk over to drive me up. My boyfriend was working out of town at the time and rushed home to help me and the kids. We discovered that my crippling pain was from a gallbladder attack. Since it was a week before Christmas I had to wait until the new year to get the problem taken cars of. In fact, I just had my gallbladder out last week.
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#43
The patient here, went to the doctors for minor tonsillitis. However I had been getting it quite frequently and he recommended getting my tonsils removed.
So I arrive at hospital to get my tonsils out, surgery happens and I wake up in my bed struggling to breath. They insisted that I was just tired. I tried to get out of my bed and instantly collapsed. A nurse rushed in and started doing her vital signs, turns out I was breathing quite frequently and heavily. The doctor comes in and checks me and over again, and finds out that during the surgery I had pneumonia and as a result my lung had collapsed. Leading me to stay in hospital for another 2 weeks.
Image source: ChrissaInBed
#44
My wife in her third trimester. Her blood pressure had been going up, so she was assigned bed rest over the weekend.
On Sunday, I flew across country to a training class for my new job.
On Monday, wifey goes to the OB. They measure her BP and it’s astronomical – like 160/120 or something. She’s in full on preeclampsia. “You need to go to the ER right now.”
She went to the ER, did five rounds of, uh, lithium? (Can’t remember which element they give you) None of it worked, so they did an emergency caesarian. Our kiddo was 9 weeks premature, and spent the next month in the NICU.
Meanwhile, I was frantically trying to get home. I was sitting in the airport in Minneapolis while all of that was happening.
Image source: Opheltes
#45
Not me but a kid from my high-school broke his collar bone during a football game, had an xray where the doctors actually found a tumor. Had the tumor removed (plus the bottom half of his scapula and 2 rotary cuff muscles) and was on chemotherapy for 9 months. Guy made a full recovery.
Image source: Slay_the_chickens
#46
It happened to us. We took our daughter for scheduled well baby check. She had a strange little bruise on her head that we wanted to ask about, plus it was time for vaccines, etc.
Left 2 hours later by ambulance to peds ICU. She had a brain tumor the size of my fist. The bruise was caused by pressure inside her skull. A few more days and she likely would have had major symptoms (seizures, etc.) We were totally dumbstruck, had not idea there was a problem.
12 surgeries, 2 years of chemo and years of therapy have her doing pretty well. She has permanent disabilities but she’s happy and relatively healthy.
Image source: bwatching
#47
Not a doctor, but it happened to my FIL. Went in to have his stent replaced, as he has done a few times already, but this time doc says there is too much blockage and schedules an emergency bypass asap. Went from a check up to open heart surgery in two days time.
Image source: KismetTrue
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