A while back, Reddit user mhunter1323 asked hospital workers what the wildest thing they’ve witnessed on the job is, and the answers were a trip. From shocking injuries to escaped convicts to straight-up murders, here are the wildest stories they shared.
We also used anonymous comments from this post.
Note: There are mentions of suicide, murder, and lots of medical gore.
1. “I got a stat call to a locked dementia unit because staff had brought in a cake and two large kitchen knives and left them where a (surprisingly young) dementia patient (who was convinced the nurses were going to kill her to steal her organs) could find them. She proceeded to chase them around the unit, double-fisting knives, and even slashed one of them between the shoulder blades before I got there and managed to get her to put them down.”
—u/AL_PO_throwaway
2. “Literally a prison break. There was an inmate who was hospitalized for something minor and was getting discharged back to jail. He was literally about to leave, and the dude takes off running, off the unit, out the back door, and into the woods. They eventually caught him and took him back to jail, but that was wild.”
—u/soupywinter500
3. “I didn’t see it, but my aunt, who is a nurse, did. She had a patient one time that had dozens of botfly larvae embedded in his skull. He was bald, and dozens of flies laid eggs in his skin. He said he could feel all of the larvae moving around in his skin above his eyes, forehead, neck, and crown.”
—u/tseg04
Quick context for ya: botfly larvae can grow in your skin after the eggs become embedded via a mosquito bite in Central and South America. Usually, you’ll get a painful cyst (with a tiny hole in the middle for “breathing”), and underneath, you can literally feel them moving around beneath your skin. They can stay for months before exiting on their own, burrowing up to the surface. They typically require extractions, as it can be dangerous if they die inside of you. Sometimes, doctors will use vaseline or other treatments to get them to burrow out on their own.
4. “I was an RN in the OR (Operating Room) of a large midwestern University Hospital. It was not unusual for us to treat and do surgery on prisoners, as both a state and federal prison were less than 40 miles away. My coworker and I were returning to the OR from lunch when two guys got on the elevator with us. One was carrying a bouquet of flowers in a big, shallow ceramic vase. They asked if the elevator went to nursing unit 4B, and we said yes and gave directions. The minute they got off, we looked at each other and laughed, saying they looked out of place and not the type to bring such a big bouquet. I barely got in our locker room and changed into fresh scrubs when the intercom went off and my boss, an old army nurse, was yelling for me to get to OR #12, scrub in, and set up for Chest Trauma. She also requested that any and all available nurses get down there to help. ‘Patient is on the way,’ she screamed. Suddenly, a bloody gurney crashed through our door.”
“Three doctors in street clothes were bagging the unconscious patient, and a nurse was holding pressure on blood-soaked towels applied to the chest. The surgeon was suddenly right on top of me, demanding I gown and glove him. He hadn’t even scrubbed. What the hell? This was definitely not protocol. I gowned him and pulled up to the field with only an emergency scalpel and four clamps. The surgical instruments I desperately needed were still in the autoclave being sterilized. This set the surgeon off on a tirade of cussing and screaming about the cheap university that would not buy enough equipment for the OR. The more he cussed, the faster he worked, and he was able to make the incision and slow the bleeding with those four clamps, some suture, and my hands spreading the ribs like the mechanical retractor we needed. Once the instruments arrived, he was able to explore the chest, remove three bullets, and resect a lobe of the lung. Finally, we were able to take a breath. The medical student asked what the heck had happened to the patient. It was then that I learned our patient and another guy entered the room of a guarded federal prisoner, pulled a gun from a vase of flowers they were carrying, and shot.”
—Anonymous
5. “A patient walked into the waiting room with a knife wound to the neck. You could see inside; you could see his muscles flex as he swallowed and talked.”
—u/KMKPF
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6. “Hubby is a Respiratory Therapist. He was doing a terminal wean, and the wife requested that she be the only one in the room besides the medical staff. She spent ten minutes confessing all the times she cheated on him and stole from him. My hubby wanted her removed, but was told there was no legal reason to do so. He just sat and listened and hoped his patient was too doped up to understand.”
—u/RespectMyAuthority74
Fox
7. “A lady came to the emergency department after super-gluing her eyes shut. She apparently mistook the glue for lubricating eyedrops.”
—u/Affectionate-Focus98
8. “A guy tried to kill himself by walking into a samurai sword. He was wheeled into the OR with the sword still in and still alive. He survived.”
—u/_C00TER
9. “My wife is a nurse and used to work in an ER close to a major city. They had a lot of psych patients come through all the time. Usually, these patients have someone who sits at their door and keeps an eye on them. The person fell asleep so the patient tried to escape….by climbing into the ceiling tiles. He made it further than you would think, and the security guard waited until the guy was right above him, punched his hand through a tile, grabbed the guy’s ankle, and pulled him down through the ceiling. I always thought that sounded like something in a movie.”
—u/HereForTheComments57
10. “I had a patient try to dig a bone tumor out of his dick. Not only did he have bone tumors, but the poor man had one right smack dab in the middle of his cock hole. He was also extremely manic and agitated, so when I heard him screaming for a while, I just thought he was doing his normal thing. But nope!”
—u/Beef_Wagon
11. “Many years ago, when I was in my residency, a man entered the ER with a hand on his forehead, walking by himself, asking for a doctor. You can imagine my surprise when I said, ‘Yes?’ and he removed his hand and showed his injury: a perforating hole from a bullet. He was quickly moved to surgery after that. Later, I found the bullet didn’t reach the brain; it was well buried in the skull bone.”
—u/QuickNPainful
12. “I was working in triage in central London in 1993. This guy pitched up, holding a full plastic bag tightly to his abdomen. His boyfriend had been fucking his colostomy opening, and it had become completely undone. There were meters of bowel in that bag. I’ve seen loads of shit working in Emergency, but I’ll never forget that.”
—u/Alarmed_Ask_3337
Some context: A colostomy is a surgery that basically creates a hole from the intestines to the abdomen so that you can “poop” via this hole instead, filling a bag that you frequently change. It can be used in cases where the colon has issues or in some cancers, and can be reversed; in many cases, it’s only temporary. Doctors do NOT recommend using this hole for penetrative sex, and if you do, you will probably end up in the hospital, as in the above example.
BSIP / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
13. “The sweetest cardiac interventionist had a scar across his neck. He said that he operated on a man who had a blockage, but was unable to save him. The next day, the man’s widow went up to the doctor for a comforting hug, but slit his throat instead.”
—u/CheesecakeCommon2406
14. “My wife’s grandfather was an ER doctor and then Chief of Medicine at our local hospital for many years, and at his funeral, one of the nurses told me a story. In the mid-1970s, there was a gang war going on in my hometown, basically two different biker gangs hammering each other. One night, two bikers brought a third into the ER who had been shot in the chest. The bikers put the wounded guy on a gurney and started grabbing nurses and threatening orderlies, screaming at them to help him. My wife’s grandfather was working in the ER that night. He heard the commotion, walked over, and just said, ‘If you don’t leave right this second, I’m going to let him bleed out.’ They left. The guy survived.”
“The nurse said it was the most cold-blooded thing she had ever seen. A lot of people came to his funeral.”
—u/tommytraddles
Related: Everything Seems Awful Right Now, So Here Are 20 Internet Posts From This Week That Might Actually Restore Your Faith In Humanity
15. “We had a guy come in with a metal pole in his leg. He had passed out on a hot day while on a riding lawnmower, ran into a chain link fence, and somehow, one of the fence posts came up through the floor of the mower and impaled his lower thigh. When he arrived at the hospital (with the pole still in his leg), the ambulance doors would not open. They eventually got him out of the side door, but very nearly had to cut the doors off the ambulance because the side door was only barely wide enough for the stretcher. He survived, and they did save his leg, but beyond that, I’m not sure what the outcome was.”
—u/mimicthefrench
16. “A few A&E patients who had put things that shouldn’t have been where the sun doesn’t shine. One guy with a whole butternut squash that needed to be surgically removed. The other, a guy with a Buzz Lightyear toy. He couldn’t remove it as the wings had extended.”
—u/Worldly_Let6134
YOSHIKAZU TSUNO / AFP via Getty Images
17. “A girl in her thirties with a locking blade knife stabbed through the left temple all the way to the hilt with the blade crossing through her sinuses to the other side of her face. She was completely fine, and we removed the knife with no significant problems resulting.”
—u/onacloverifalive
18. “My mom once worked in an emergency room. A guy walked up to the triage desk and said, ‘I have a problem.’ My mom looks down and sees that he is holding his intestines, which he had personally cut out. She replied something along the lines of ‘I see you do’ and whisked him into the ER from the waiting room for emergency surgery.”
—u/_CMDR_
19. “A patient came from a prison where he was serving the beginning part of a long sentence for SA to his daughter. He had ripped one eye out and most of the other because, ‘That’s where the evil lives.’ We had to restrain his arms to stop him from finishing the job on his other eye. It was disturbing. Twelve years later, and it sticks with me.”
—u/Balina44
20. “EMTs brought a guy in on a gurney, bloody bandages over both eyes. Psychotic break. He clawed his own eyes out because he couldn’t see God. It’s been years, and I still think about that one.”
—u/Angry0tter
21. “Working 3 -11 shift on the med-surgical unit in a hospital in the early 1980s, I found a patient climbing out the window around 9 P.M. who was recovering from a broken leg in a cast. He jumped as I got to the window, and all I managed to grab was his big toe of the casted leg. I screamed for help, and other staff on the floor came immediately, and we managed to safely pull him back inside. That is why hospital windows today are made to only open partially without a key.”
—Anonymous
Related: 22 People Who Embarrassed Themselves Much, Much, Much, Much, Much, Much, Much, Much Worse Than You Probably Ever Have
22. “I asked my doctor friends this before, and these were some of the answers: A 12-year-old kid walked in, and he had a 10-inch kitchen knife sticking straight up from the top of his head. The tip had embedded itself in his skull, but he was otherwise fine. Apparently, he was playing basketball, and an altercation about ownership of the ball came about. The other kid went home, grabbed the knife, came back, and stabbed this kid in the top of the head. Luckily, 12-year-olds aren’t very strong, but strong enough to have the knife stick into the skull.”
“While working in Tanzania as a mobile doctor, a young man walked in with a spear stuck through his body. He had leaned the spear against a tree and then climbed up the tree…and then slipped out of the tree and skewered himself.”
—u/ClownfishSoup
23. “Probably this woman who came in for numbness in her foot; I asked about history, and she said she broke her leg a week ago. I looked for X-rays, and there were none on the system. Turns out she had a displaced tibia fracture, and this fucking woman had PUSHED IT BACK IN AND STUCK A BAND-AID OVER THE BIT OF BONE POKING OUT! She needed surgery and now has constant leg issues. Don’t reset your own bones, I swear to god.”
—[deleted]
24. “Back when I was still in university, we had a 60-ish woman come in with a rotten leg. Like, actually rotten. It was necrotic from the knee down and infested with maggots, black chunks of what used to be flesh hanging from her bones. The stench made even the hardest of the staff throw up. She said it was like this for weeks, but she never bothered to see a doctor. She was genuinely surprised and started crying when we told her that it had to be amputated ASAP and that we were baffled she hadn’t died of sepsis yet.”
—u/GuerrillaRodeo
Fox
25. “One person I know who worked at a hospital said one time that a baby daddy knocked up two different women around the same time, and they both went into labor at the same time, and he was jumping back and forth between the two rooms.”
—u/YinzaJagoff
26. “Patient came in for a stress test as he developed chest pain evading the cops. He realized halfway through the test that the cops would find him at the hospital and tried to leave mid-test. The patient was a double amputee and was in a wheelchair. No idea how he was able to get away the first time, but they did indeed find him before he escaped the hospital.”
—u/smellycat001
27. “A man came into the ED wearing a cowboy outfit, arriving from a rodeo event over an hour away. He got bucked off his horse, and the horse stomped on his groin. His testicles exploded. It was just a mess of flesh inside his scrotum.”
—u/KarthusWins
28. “The trash room of our OR had a particularly awful smell for a little over a week. We throw away bloodied up materials and removed bodily tissue, so it never smelled good in there, but this was just…extremely potent. Finally, all the bags and bins were cleared out, and we found what had been stinking: It was a whole amputated foot that must have fallen out of a bag. Just rotting away on the floor for who knows how long.”
—u/mzladyperson
29. “A guy came into the hospital and was definitely septic and had a wound to his arm that looked very infected. Patient admitted he had accidentally dropped his meth in some water near a curb and reported there were roaches in the water. He didn’t want to waste the meth, so he kept drawing up the water with a syringe and shooting it up.”
—u/ammofortherank
30. “A group of men jumped out of a van and ran into the ED while actively burning from a meth lab explosion. The smell was like a caustic, corroded car battery mixed with burnt rubber and necrotic flesh. Easily the worst smell I’ve encountered.”
—u/KarthusWins
31. “We had an admission on the medical floor. A man had been found at his home, lying on the floor. Apparently, he had suffered from a CVA (a stroke) and had been on the floor for quite some time. The gentleman lived alone in a small house without neighbors nearby. He was eventually found (I am unsure by whom and how) and brought to the ED. Upon his ED visit, he was found to have developed decubiti (bedsores) on one of his hips and upper arm from where he had lain on the floor. There were maggots in the bedsores.”
—u/rva23221
32. Some more context: maggots can unfortunately end up in wounds when flies lay their eggs on an open injury, especially in the summer. They can be removed, and it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s rotting flesh. While some can be flushed out, similarly to larvae earlier on this list, others will need to be drawn from the wound and removed with tools. Fun fact: maggots can actually be used to help with wounds. They can disinfect and eat dead flesh; this treatment is literally cleared by the FDA. Please don’t try this at home, though. The larvae have to be sterile and “medical grade.”
Norbert Försterling/picture alliance via Getty Images
33. Relatedly…”Maggots in some guy’s bladder. He was quite honest about how they got there. Apparently, some people sometimes get bored with masturbating ‘normally.’ He inserted living maggots in his urethra because he enjoyed the feeling when they moved inside his penis. So he masturbated and shot them all out. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shoot all of them out, so they moved all the way up to his bladder, where they caused an infection. We had to remove them cystoscopically. Nice guy, though.”
—u/Limp-Marzipan9386
Related: People Are Confessing The “Horrifyingly Cringy” Experiences They Wish They Could Erase From Their Memories, And Whew, I’m Getting Secondhand Embarrassment Reading These
34. “Once when I was a CNA, I was a one-to-one sitter for a patient who wouldn’t stop trying to eat her own fingers. It was my job to constantly watch her and make her stop (she was restrained as well, but she could still reach her mouth if she twisted enough). Before being admitted, she had chewed away at every finger; some of them needed to be amputated because she was chewing bone. That was a horrifying shift.”
—u/mzladyperson
35. “A guy went into his neighbor’s garage and used a saw to cut his own leg off. He was with us for a couple of weeks. I asked him, ‘Why would you do that?’ soon after admission. He simply stated, ‘You can cut your hair or nails; why can’t I cut my leg off?’ Welp, you can’t argue with that logic. It wasn’t until (a few weeks later) he was working with therapy and trying to manage transfers and daily living tasks that he came to the realization, ‘Yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.'”
—u/Kajmnhc4
36. “I saw some terrible boat accidents where I carried a man’s leg, still in a wetsuit, into the OR behind him. Ended up with an amputation above the knee…”
—u/noelcherry_
ABC
37. “I had a patient whose buttcheek fell off while I was doing wound care.”
“It was a really bad bed sore that ended up turning into osteomyelitis in her hip and coccyx. When I took off the old dressing, her buttcheek just ‘sloughed’ off.”
—u/raininadesertt
38. “I work in hospital pharmacy. I was on the obstetrics floor delivering meds for a patient when a guy walked by with his very pregnant wife in a hospital gown. Suddenly, the guy started yelling, ‘It’s coming out!’ I turned around, and the baby had literally fallen out of her vagina. I turned toward the nurses’ station, yelling for help, when one of the nurses just came around the corner, told us to calm down, and just scooped up the baby and led the woman back into her room as if nothing had happened.”
“Apparently, the nurses thought it was hilarious that the large bearded guy from the pharmacy was pale as a ghost and yelling for help. They still tease me.”
—u/BreakfastCapital9088
39. “I saw a guy with his wedding band stuck on his manhood once. I only went in to draw blood to check for a clot, but that poor guy was in a lot of pain. I didn’t see the resolution, but I heard bolt cutters were involved.”
—u/martinsj82
40. “I volunteered at a hospital when I was a teenager. I saw a man with a hard hat nailed to his head.”
—u/Somerset76
At least he was wearing one; here’s what can happen if you don’t.
41. “As seen in an X-ray, a patient placed a pager in up this *** and kept calling it to repeatedly feel the sensation from the vibrations…he came to the ER cause it got ‘stuck’! 🤷🏻♀️”
—u/IamAliveeee
42. “A woman came in with an entire glass candle in her ass. She specifically asked for it back after having to have it surgically removed.”
—u/_C00TER
43. Finally, we’ll end on one with a happy ending. As an ED doc in a rural hospital, I received a patient who had shot himself under the chin with a shotgun. The blast went upwards and backwards through the middle of his brain. Though I didn’t expect him to survive, we were able to intubate and stabilize him, and he was flown by helicopter to a teaching trauma center 170 miles away. Two years later, in the same rural ED, I was seeing a patient for a complaint that I’ve now forgotten. He happened to be blind, and he had no natural or artificial eyes, just empty sockets. When I reviewed his chart, I was shocked to find it was the patient whose life our rural medical system had saved. The teaching trauma center had given him definitive care, and he was rehabilitated. He no longer suffered from depression. This is why we keep on trying.”
—Anonymous
If you’ve ever worked in a hospital (or even just stayed in one), what’s the most shocking thing you saw? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
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