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UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
Someone Make me a banner to put here I suck at this

Hello and welcome to a thread to talk about medical stories with everyone. There have been similar threads over the years mainly in GBS and the ongoing health care stories in The Goon Doctor. This will be a thread that is more geared for the layperson to discuss and share stories and have the ability to ask questions and better understand what may be going on.

What this thread is for:
-Sharing your medical experiences
-Sharing interesting medical stories you may have seen or heard elsewhere
-Asking questions about what you may have seen or have heard
-Sharing images of interesting things that are related to medical emergencies or conditions (ie cat scans, x-rays, images that don’t violate Hipaa

Please post anything that may be NWS or NMS in links with a description so that people can click on them at their own risk. This is a gentlemen's agreement but more than likely the mods will probate for this.

What this thread is not for:
-POSTING ABOUT COVID IN ANY WAY. This is not going to be for talking about the current pandemic in any way at this time. There are enough threads and all it will devolve into is rehashing the same things.
-Posting pure gore or death images. This is not going to be about applauding people dying or shock gore images. If an image is posted that is just dead bodies, more than likely you will get reported and probed. Have respect and don’t post images to be a massive dick to other posters.
-Violating Hipaa in any way
-Making fun of other posters for embarrassing stories. Everybodies dumb, laugh at the stories and let people share things, don’t be a dick.

I’m an Emergency Room Tech at a hospital system in Ohio and a state licensed EMT. I have experience dealing with psych patients, trauma, and things that I never wanted to see but have burned into my retinas. I’ve had my fair share of things stuck in rectums and trauma calls that I probably will remember for the rest of my life. We deal with suicides and peds to grandma who falls out of bed and the homeless guy that wants a room for the night.

I have a journal I started here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3920276
Where I will share my more uh not fun and more dark stories if you're interested.

Here's a freebie told to me as I came in one day by the doc. Patient came in complaining of pain when he sat down and was constipated. When brought back to the room the patient changed his story and told the nurse that he had been doing some crack and decided to pleasure himself. Not having the correct safe equipment he decided to improvise with the vegetable drawer. With an onion. Yes you read that right.


So he couldn't get it out, because it was a whole onion. The PA on duty actually tried to use one of the suction devices from OB to grab it and pull. Sadly it worked, but only to pull off chunks from the onion. So it worked great at getting him pieces for his dinner. Patient at this time (rear end out on stirrups) is basically screwed because it ain’t coming out on its own or with anything we have. So we have to call the surgeon on call, who loudly yells into his phone “I’m not coming in to take an onion out of a guy’s rear end urgently. I will come in after I finish my dinner”. I told the doctor at this point that he should have responded that it was urgent because “well doctor, we have the onions you need for the topping of your dinner here, you should come in asap for them”.

Moral of the story: use a flared base. This is going to come up a lot.

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Pastry of the Year
Apr 12, 2013

UCS Hellmaker posted:

Please post anything that may be NWS or NMS in links with a description so that people can click on them at their own risk. This is a gentlemen's agreement but more than likely the mods will probate for this.

What this thread is not for:
-POSTING ABOUT COVID IN ANY WAY. This is not going to be for talking about the current pandemic in any way at this time. There are enough threads and all it will devolve into is rehashing the same things.
-Posting pure gore or death images. This is not going to be about applauding people dying or shock gore images. If an image is posted that is just dead bodies, more than likely you will get reported and probed. Have respect and don’t post images to be a massive dick to other posters.
-Violating Hipaa in any way
-Making fun of other posters for embarrassing stories. Everybodies dumb, laugh at the stories and let people share things, don’t be a dick.

I endorse these provisions. This thread is for cool / weird / interesting medical tales (they can even be your own!) but not gore-gawking and I will be handing out Lovely Twelves to anyone that violates the spirit of this.

Look, obviously anyone in need of medical assistance is suffering at least in some way; that doesn't make this a schadenfreude thread. Remember how loving terribly those tend to go? We can discuss injuries, afflictions, and ailments without being (onion-stuffed) assholes about it.

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
So part of our job is psych patients (and being the drat drunk tank) which is a taxing and troubling job at times. One of the issues is everyone is taken seriously of they may be at risk for self harm. Even if it's obvious attention seeking or the homeless guy needing a place to stay for the night. We see some patients that do bother us and do have legit mental health crisis and need help. The biggest thing is that we always try to treat them with some respect even as we take everything including underwear and put them in paper scrubs and stand at the door staring at them for hours. Some of them can be memorable for good and bad reasons.

This is one of the funny ones.

Drug psychosis is a thing especially with meth. Especially if your a drug runner for the hell's angels. Carrying 5 pounds of meth that your using to stay awake while you travel from Texas back to the east coast.

Patient was found on the highway laying in the median, called in because a driver had seen him drive into a bridge embankment, get off at an overpass and then go back to hit the other side. He then got out and was making dew angels in the median while babbling at the sky. State boys brought him in after searching him, found the bag of meth and needed him cleared medically for jail. He literally walked in the door tweaked as poo poo, jittery and unable to talk. As soon as he hit the bed he was b52d with haldol and Ativan to knock him out because there was worry he would be violent and we can't keep the cuffs on. I had to sit on him and nothing big happened but anytime the Ativan wore off he got another shot. He was carried out by the state patrol right before the end of my shift and booked, which was hilarious because he was still wearing our paper scrubs and had charges that would put him away for a long time.

Blah funnier in hindsight but I'm phone posting right now and don't want to type out the bigger ones on mobile. The entertaining ones are the ones we end up hard restraints.

Also haldol can knock an lsd and pcp trip straight off it's feet. Literally stop a trip in it's tracks. It's hilarious and really amazing to see in person.

Pick
Jul 19, 2009
Nap Ghost
One time I was lying on my back and I kicked myself in the butt and as my heel hit my ischium it landed so hard I winded myself

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
That is legit funny to think about how you managed to do that. Winding yourself is the icing on the cake for it.

Teach
Mar 28, 2008


Pillbug
I hurt myself badly when I was 19 and I spent three weeks in hospital, laid up in bed. One of the more embarrassing side effects of the damage and the drugs was incontinence, including the inability to piss. After three days I was tight as a drum, and in "some discomfort".

I was catheterised - a little traveller's-toothpaste-sized tube of combination lubricant and anaesthetic was squeezed up my hog's eye, and then, five minutes later a lovely nurse produced a terrifying double-layered tube that she proceeded to push up the length of my urethra until the end of it went bonk against the top of my bladder. As it popped through the... what? The sphincter? at the bottom of the bladder, a glorious stream of piss, three days old, golden, left my body, and the sighs of relief could have woken the dead old man in the bed next to me.

The nurse then used a syringe to push water up one of the layers of the tube to inflate a little ball at the head of the tube so that it couldn't be pulled out, mainly by accident. All good. For a while, I trailed it around as I relearned to walk, like a little miniature IV stand, cock-height.

Some days later, it was time to remove the catheter. Not this time the pretty young nurse who'd inserted it. No, I got the brute with the hairy knuckles more used tor restraining the more energetic psych patients. All I remember (and I'm sure that my memory of the event has been exaggerated, it's grown with the telling) all I remember is that he deflated the little balloon at the head of the tube, then wrapped the trailing end of the rubber pipe around his knuckles. I'm sure he smiled at me, and placed his other hand on my groin, two fingers above my cock, two fingers below, then...

.. then he made an action like he was trying to start a recalcitrant outboard motor, or a petrol lawnmower, and he ripped it out of me.

The dead old man from the bed next to me had been cremated a week prior, but I'm sure he heard the scream. I've never felt anything like it. I am convinced that no one else ever has, either.

Phy
Jun 27, 2008



Fun Shoe

Pick posted:

One time I was lying on my back and I kicked myself in the butt and as my heel hit my ischium it landed so hard I winded myself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeafSiyJ_1A

content: when I was a kid I had a psychotic? episode from getting given too much Ventolin for an asthma attack while in hospital. I don't remember much of it, but I do remember crouching on the windowsill, terrified either of or for a horse that was under my hospital bed. (Either the horse was going to stand up and crush me against the ceiling, or the bed was crushing him.) Fun times! Haven't used Ventolin since then.

Clone Farmer
Aug 28, 2006
I'm an RN on an inpatient pysch unit, so I guess you can see I have seen some poo poo in the 8 years I've been working. These are my two most memorable past stories. They aren't bad stories, kinda funny and heartwarming really. I also have a patient right now that keeps telling me he loves me with all his heart and I keep almost saying "I love you too" back without thinking.

1. We had this one bipolar old lady who, when manic, was incredibly mean and nasty, verbally abusive to us. But when not manic she would just sit and knit stuff all day. So, during one manic phase, she was having a pretty good day, minimally berating us so life was good. At bedtime she went and got changed into her pyjamas and came to the nursing desk to tell us she was going to bed and sweetly smiled and wished us all a good night. Halfway to her room she whirled around scowling at us and screamed "YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!" then stomped the rest of her way to her room and slammed her door. I still like to wish people I know "goodnight, you motherfucker".

2. I had a very attention seeking patient for whatever reason decided she didn't want to sleep in her bed. I think it was because it was "too high" and she was afraid she would "fall out and no one would find" her on the floor beside the bed. She wanted to sleep on the couches in front of the nursing station (despite her bed having 4 side rails and being able to get much closer to the ground then the couch, she probably just wanted to spy on the night nurses and listen in on conversations). I told her no, she can't do that but she moved a pillow and blankets to the couch. I again told her show couldn't sleep on the couch and she'd have to move her stuff back to to her room. She got up off the couch, then slowly lowered herself to her knees, then got on her hands and knees, then laid herself on the ground, flipped on her back and started rolling around on her back yelling "OH I FELL, HELP ME! HELP ME I CAN'T GET UP!" I would direct her to sit up but she kept rolling around like a turtle on it's back, yelling and attracting a crowd. Other patients were getting mad that I wasn't hauling her up but man, I have a bad back for one thing, and that is exactly what she wanted for another thing and I wasn't about to give her that and she can get up perfectly on her own. Eventually the other patients got bored and left, except one guy who was eating a snack while watching from another couch. He was really tall but had a high pitched, nasally, slightly child like voice that sounded very off coming from him. He gets up, walks over to me and the other nurse with me, still chewing his sandwich then looks at the lady, holds out a piece of packaged cheddar cheese and says "hey lady! Wants some cheeeeese?" This seemed to totally break my patient's brain, because she stopped, sat up, looked at him with a confused expression on her face, then slowly and silently got up, grabbed her stuff and trudged back to her room and went to bed in her own bed. I had to stand there and try not to laugh, while my coworker immediately ran into the back too and laughed his rear end off. Whenever I was having a bad shift, my coworker would offer me some cheeeeeeese.

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
Is it kosher if I copy/paste my stories from the old EMT stories threads in here? Some are kind of gross, I’ll likely spoiler tag one of them.

DemonDarkhorse
Nov 5, 2011

It's probably not tobacco. You just need to start wiping front-to-back from now on.
aw poo poo, perfect place to post my brain tumor.

beginning of 2018, i started getting headaches. i dont usually get them, but my doctor felt they were tension headaches, and gave me drugs. midway through the year, i was starting to experience other symptoms: more/worse headaches, extreme fatigue, muscle weakness, dizziness, and intermittent vision loss in my right eye. she scheduled an mri in september.



that's a tumor called a meningioma, about the size of a baseball. obviously it needed to come out; it took up too much space in my head and was causing cerebrospinal fluid to build up and was blocking it from traveling to my spinal cord.

before surgery, though, i needed this loving thing, an extra ventricular drain, to get rid of the excess CSF:


the doctor who did it gave me some cocktail of drugs and said i wouldn't remember the procedure. BULLSHIT, i absolutely remember this man drilling into my skull with an old-timey, little house on the prairie lookin' manual drill. (like this https://imgur.com/a/RqBAs)


surgery lasted 7.5 hours. when i was wheeled up to recovery, one of the doctors asked on a scale of 1-10 how much pain was i in and i flashed my hand at him 3 times. he said 15 wasn't an acceptable answer. gently caress that guy. i was up and walking the next day, though i had to call for assistance and had to tote the EVD everywhere. i spent 9 days in the neuro icu, waiting for the pressure in my head to normalize.


my christmas present from 2018. my brother knows my humor.

i like talking about it, so questions are ok.

Danaru
Jun 5, 2012

何 ??
I'm just a janitor so I usually show up after the interesting stuff happens, but one time working the ER I was cleaning a room with a bucket of what looked to have three litres of bright yellow piss inside of it, like when you drink a cheap energy drink and piss out all the b12 later. I asked the nurse "Hey what do you want me to do with the bucket of piss?" And her answer was "oh, that isnt urine. I'll dispose of it."

I was never brave enough to ask.

E: also another time a newbie doctor asked me to clean a room in minor surgery, sounding super apologetic. When I got to the room there was a bunch of blood smears and a few small chunks of flesh. My reaction was "haha gross" and that's when I realized I'd finally been jaded. Took long enough

Danaru has a new favorite as of 22:08 on Apr 17, 2020

elise the great
May 1, 2012

You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Ascites fluid, or weeping liver juice that was drained from the abdomen with a needle. It’s often stained orange because rifaximin, a common drug for liver failure, dyes all your body fluids (and administration equipment, if your nurse is crushing it and suspending it in applesauce or water for easy swallowing) a rich, vibrant vintage-appliance pumpkin.

I think my record volume for ascites fluid in one paracentesis is like 11 liters. It’s often foamy with albumin, and sometimes streaked with red.

HiroProtagonist
May 7, 2007
Unfortunately during my time as an EMT, all of my "cool" stories involve either mental health emergencies or picking up homeless patients, and either way it would be inappropriate to share those here. Unless extricating someone with their knee stuck in a dashboard glovebox would count? Also, a LOT of nursing home transports, many of which involved some form of poo poo (colostomy bags or otherwise). Not really remarkable outside of that.

Honestly, if people are being real anyway, much of the "cool" stories about EMS involve other practitioners, which the EMS thread already has a shitload of.

Either way, I'm following this thread now. :cheers:

fakeedit: I'm also here for Elise's stories, because they're poo poo all the way down

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal

Ugly In The Morning posted:

Is it kosher if I copy/paste my stories from the old EMT stories threads in here? Some are kind of gross, I’ll likely spoiler tag one of them.

Do it man, I'm off tonight so I'll be sharing more but I want to grab stuff off Reddit to explain pics and stuff. It's for sharing things and it doesn't have to be your own :)

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal

HiroProtagonist posted:

Unfortunately during my time as an EMT, all of my "cool" stories involve either mental health emergencies or picking up homeless patients, and either way it would be inappropriate to share those here. Unless extricating someone with their knee stuck in a dashboard glovebox would count? Also, a LOT of nursing home transports, many of which involved some form of poo poo (colostomy bags or otherwise). Not really remarkable outside of that.

Honestly, if people are being real anyway, much of the "cool" stories about EMS involve other practitioners, which the EMS thread already has a shitload of.

Either way, I'm following this thread now. :cheers:

fakeedit: I'm also here for Elise's stories, because they're poo poo all the way down

Some of my friends are private transport and by god do they see some poo poo from the nursing homes.

Firstly all nursing homes are evil places and most after dark literally are like hell, patients barely are checked on and the nurses are either brand new with no experience, been bounced around from job to job from incompetence, or are so burned out they don't care anymore. The truly good ones don't last because it's hard demeaning work, understaffed and filled with lazy coworkers. Literally get reports constantly about falls that occured hours prior that they just started worrying about after 8 hours. Or they check on patients once a shift at night and don't realize they fell until right before shift change. Or my favorite, the patients Foley bag is kinda bloody so we are sending him by private ambulance to get checked out.

The guy had almost blood red urine, was a Glasgow scale of 8, temperature was 102 and his blood pressure was poo poo. The guy was full blown sepsis from a kidney infection, in short he was drat near death's door and had been building to this for at least a few days. God that facility was notorious for some of the worst care.

So one story my buddies told me was a transport they did from a place that also handled schizophrenic dementia patients. Weird combination to think of I know. Patient was coming in because he was prone to small bowel blockages and constipation. He also was prone to screaming and yelling fits. So the lucky bastard got to be in the back with a demented schizophrenic who was having uh vomiting issues. He's back there keeping an eye on the patient during transport doing his thing. Patient starts going in a delusional tangent to him and working himself up. Patient then has an explosive vomiting event basically straight on the EMT in the back of the bus.

Small bowel blockages block up your small intestines. So everything you eat backs up to your stomach. As in your stomach starts to collect what we call coffee ground emisis, code word for your stomach fills with actual poo poo. So image the EMT all of a sudden finding himself covered from the chest down with this coffee ground vomit that reeks. It's on the walls, on his and in his shoes, on his jacket. Patient felt a bit better though!

The way to fix something like this actually is kinda similar without the vomiting. In the ER we insert something called an NG tube into your stomach. This is a tube that goes through your nose and down your esophagus to your stomach, whereupon it's hooked up to a small vacuum that will suction up the contents of the stomach. This is kept in to help alleviate the pressure and stop some of the worst discomfort feelings that occur. And remove the poo poo in your stomach. Surgery tends to be required but I'm not super familiar with that stage. But I am familiar with how god awful it is to watch them stick a tube up someone's nose and down their throat. And it's a pretty decent sized tube.

HiroProtagonist
May 7, 2007
Ugh, yeah. I've never wanted to be intubated and I've assisted in plenty of intubations. There's a reason its contraindicated for conscious patients with a gag reflex, enough said.

Danaru
Jun 5, 2012

何 ??

elise the great posted:

Ascites fluid, or weeping liver juice that was drained from the abdomen with a needle. It’s often stained orange because rifaximin, a common drug for liver failure, dyes all your body fluids (and administration equipment, if your nurse is crushing it and suspending it in applesauce or water for easy swallowing) a rich, vibrant vintage-appliance pumpkin.

I think my record volume for ascites fluid in one paracentesis is like 11 liters. It’s often foamy with albumin, and sometimes streaked with red.

:gonk: I might be jaded but I'm not frontline-level jaded, I didnt even know that bodily fluid existed

elise the great
May 1, 2012

You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
I don’t even remember what all stories I’ve shared in the old thread anymore. Sharing them as two-bite tales of the grotesque was fun and cool, and it’s interesting to look back at them sometimes and watch my tiny baby nurse self first revel in the horrible, then become jaded, then learn compassion and empathy for through that jadedness. When I wrote them up as blog narratives, it felt too much like I was exploiting their suffering for my own creative gain; I still have really complicated feelings about having written the godawful tale of the guy that got eaten as if it were a ~cool edgy horror story~ with a punch line.

But the single-serving gross poo poo is my lifeblood. Hell yeah you can vomit poo poo if you get backed up enough; you can even drown in that shitvomit. If you have abdominal surgery for a shitjam that pops, you can end up with fistulae, scarred and skin-lined holes that dispense fecal slurry from your poorly healed belly wounds. (Ostomies tend to be neat and tidy and healthy and easy to care for; fistulae tend to be oozing portals to intestinal hell.) There is no end to the loving horror that intestines are capable of when they malfunction.

HiroProtagonist
May 7, 2007
if you think about it, a baby is just a big fistula, anyway

socalled
Sep 2, 2011

Yes, but you'll never get it.
On our first date my boyfriend, who is a paramedic, told me about the popular misconception that cooling down someone's body while they're experiencing a heroin overdose will save their life. This leads to people being found with whatever cold items (frozen peas, that kind of thing) were nearby on their bodies or in their clothing when emergency medical gets to them, which they or medical personnel later find. So one night my boyfriend is administering narcan to a man who overdosed and as the patient is coming around, he discovers that someone has put black cherry ice cream down his pants in a misguided attempt to save his life. The patient proceeds to start taking handfuls of ice cream and eating it, and my boyfriend has to address this.

I work in a family planning clinic. A teenage patient once called up to report she had a bump in her vagina, so I scheduled an appointment for her to see our PA. Turned out the patient's boyfriend had discovered the bump, and it was, in fact, her cervix. The PA told me this happens pretty often.

PopeCrunch
Feb 13, 2004

internets

Every time I see the word 'fistula' i think of fisting because I'm a fundamentally broken person. I bet there's fistula fisting fic on ao3.

Anyway, apparently I get a little weird when under anesthesia. I went in to get my barnhole remodeled a couple years back (hella hemorrhoids) and apparently I entertained the hell out of folks. The gasser gave me a shot of IV ativan, and asked if i felt anything. Nope, sorry doc. Hits me again and asks if there's any change. Apparently I turned to him with a completely stone-faced serious expression and said "I tell you what, doc, I'm not afraid of the loving police right now." He had to grab onto a chair to keep from falling over laughing.

After the procedure (they sawed the external one off, handled the smaller internal one like castrating a goat by wrapping it with a rubber band, and sewed up biggie like a football), I'm in the recovery suite, right. I'm coming to terms with my surroundings and noticing that my butt hurts on account of the half a mile of gauze pressed into service as a medical-grade butt plug, and the nurse (there's probably a more specific term that I don't know, the surgeon referred to her as a nurse so shrug) says 'Okay you're a little dehydrated, so it's going to be a little uncomfortable when we extubate you, are you ready?' My incoherent moan was interpreted as assent, so of course she rips the loving thing out like she's trying to start a lawnmower.

I cough a couple times and (apparently, i was told of this afterward) holler 'Jesus lady don't do that again, I'll tell you almost anything you want to know!' She smiles and says 'Almost?' I am told I looked her dead in the eye and said, coldly, 'I will never reveal the wu-tang secret'.

I wish I was that funny when I could remember it :(

Malachite_Dragon
Mar 31, 2010

Weaving Merry Christmas magic
I dunno, Pope, you're doing a drat good job right now as far as I'm concerned :lol::lol:

The only real medical stories I have are from when I lost my hearing to meningococcal meningitis at age 5, and since I turn 30 in June these are pretty dimly remembered. I do recall that the doctors were annoyed with me because one of the myriad gifts to me from my paternal grandmother's side of the family was a minor resistance to gaseous anesthesia. I kept moving in my sleep in the MRI machine or full-on waking up and just would not stay conked out for the duration.

IV anesthetic worked just fine though! Watch them push the needle in the IV line, "Count down from 10 for me, okay?" (this was before the infection actually took my hearing)
"Mmkay. Ten... Nine... Eiy..." -thump-

My dad was somewhat concerned. I've never gone to sleep that quickly before or since.

elise the great
May 1, 2012

You do not have to be good. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Oh yeah propofol isn’t called “milk of amnesia” for nothin. Counting down from ten is a joke, nobody ever makes it to five.

buglord
Jul 31, 2010

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Buglord

DemonDarkhorse posted:

aw poo poo, perfect place to post my brain tumor.

So it appears you came out of that remarkably well for someone who had a baseball sized brain tumor (and grats on being here with us!). How terrifying was it when you saw the scan/got the news? Tumor anything is scary, but learning that it’s in your brain sounds nightmarish.


Also, the cheeeese story made me genuinely lol. I have a lot of respect for patient-facing medical staff. The amount of emotional energy it appears to take is astounding. My EMT friend told me a lot of stories in this vein. It sounds like retail, but with cysts, diarrhea and leather restraints.

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal
Psych patients can be both hilarious and just down right sad, some of them legit I feel bad for and those ones I always hope don't come back because they feel better and get help.

Here's one oddball one we had. Patient came in for DKA or hyperglycemia. Has a history of type 1 diabetes and oh he's a chronic heroin user. Patient came in breathing heavy and lethargic, has been in DKA for more then a few hours. He had basically nothing for veins and took multiple attempts with an ultrasound to even find anything, they were just ready to start an IO to get access for an insulin drip.

Side note, an IO is short for Intraosseous infusion or better known as we take a literal drill and drill a needle into your bone marrow on your tibia or your humerus. Its going to hurt and its a last resort. Needles tend to be 16 gauge to `18 gauge.
:nms: link to an IO being put into a septic patient its not something to be done lightly and usually done on people that are actively dying.

So patient gets an IV finally and gets admitted to ICU. Patient was short of breath but that is typical of DKA patients to some extent. Patient goes upstairs, and about an hour later things blow up. Charge nurse and doctor are back and forth on the phone arguing with management about something, hospitalist is back and forth talking with the ER doc. About 2 hours after going upstairs the patient is returned to one of our trauma rooms and we find out why. Patient needs a chest tube put in, has decreased level of consciousness since going upstairs and his breathing has gotten worse. We get the OK to assist our ER doctor with the procedure and ICU team leaves the room, there was a worry about something management wise due to him being a patient in the ICU and I don't understand it to this day. Doc starts to intubate and tells us loudly that there is gastric fluid in the back of the throat and to prep for immediate chest decompression. Tubes in, breathing and O2 sats stabilize (patient is in a propofol stoop at this time) and I assist the doc with the chest tube. For my first time seeing one it was interesting to see how its performed, doctor basically found a spot between the ribs, cut with a scalpel between the ribs focusing on staying away from the area where nerves and blood vessels travel on the bottom of the rib. Cutting through the layers until he hit the membrane around the lung cavity he then took a tube and had me hold the patient and pushed it square into the thoracic cavity.

Where upon the tube started gushing out brownish acidic fluid, from the patients stomach. Turns out that the patient had torn his esophagus alongside the DKA just above the diaphragm leaking stomach fluid into his lung cavity. This basically caused everything in the cavity to start getting acid burns and swell causing his breathing to worsen has his lungs became more and more damaged. The pericardium protected his heart to some extent but it became a patient we were not equipped to handle that needed immediate trauma surgery downtown. The tube was sutured into place and sealed with a one way valve to prevent back-flow, and the patient was stabilized while we contacted lifeflight transport for immediate response. Later we looked up the prognosis after the patient left, its literally a coinflip if you will survive or not due to the trauma that can results in your lung cavity, before adding on comorbidity like long term heroin use and diabetes. It was another one I never learned the results of, mainly due to it being at the sister hospital I float to when they are short and to cover shifts.

Edit: I have more dreary stories I will keep in my journal thread since they aren't really funny in any way. I will try and write there every few days but they will tend to be more emotional impact stuff. Elise can agree with me that one thing you learn as you go in the field is how clinical you look at everything. How much you disassociate yourself from everything you see. People dying become just another day after awhile, with the only thing that truly effects you is the kids.
God I hate it when anything peds come in that isnt simple
Like the neighbor girl shot me with her crossbow and hit me in the head! Which ended up with us making jokes with the 8 year old girl because she had a funny story now about getting shot by an arrow! She had a bump on her head from one of the blunt practice arrows and mom was just generally worried, She got a bandaid and a quick xray and an all clear to go home.

UCS Hellmaker has a new favorite as of 11:22 on Apr 18, 2020

Mister Kingdom
Dec 14, 2005

And the tears that fall
On the city wall
Will fade away
With the rays of morning light
About four years ago, I was going to the laundry room at my apartment complex. The building where the laundry room was has two entrances. For whatever reason, my key to the back entrance would not accept my key and the front entrance had a locked gate since it was where the pool is and it was kept locked until about 10am. I figured I'd climb over the wall and hop down and open the back entrance from the inside. When I landed on the other side, I went down like sack of potatoes. I tried to stand and went down again. I could feel my right foot swelling, but there was no real pain. I had to hop into the building. Luckily, there was another person there who got me a chair to sit on. By this time my right ankle was the size of a grapefruit. I figured I ad sprained it.

But noooooooo....

She took me to the ER and I found out that I had fractured my right heel. Had I not been a fat bastard at the time, I would have probably been okay. Fast foward a week or so and I was in surgery to have screws and plates put in.




Five weeks out of work (thankfully I had plenty of PTO), then another six weeks of having to be driven around (a huge shout out to my neighbor) and I was able to drive myself again. It would take another two years for it to fully heal. Although I can no longer bend the big toe on that foot fully anymore.

That's my biggest injury to date.

DemonDarkhorse
Nov 5, 2011

It's probably not tobacco. You just need to start wiping front-to-back from now on.

buglord posted:

So it appears you came out of that remarkably well for someone who had a baseball sized brain tumor (and grats on being here with us!). How terrifying was it when you saw the scan/got the news? Tumor anything is scary, but learning that it’s in your brain sounds nightmarish.

i went home to take a nap after the mri, and woke up to like 7 missed messages from my doctor, my parents, my loving pharmacy, all trying to get a hold of me. when i called my doctor back, she said "i don't want you to be alarmed, but they found something on the scan and you need to go to the ER for an emergency neurologic consult." way past being alarmed, thanks. i had my parents pick me up and 4 hours in the ER later, finally saw the scan when the neurologist showed up. pretty sure i yelled "HOLY poo poo."

i was/am pretty healthy, never broken a bone, no hospital stays, no major illnesses. the closest i'd gotten before this was pneumonia/swine flu back in 2009. just had to go balls out with a brain tumor.

cock hero flux
Apr 17, 2011



DemonDarkhorse posted:

i went home to take a nap after the mri, and woke up to like 7 missed messages from my doctor, my parents, my loving pharmacy, all trying to get a hold of me. when i called my doctor back, she said "i don't want you to be alarmed, but they found something on the scan and you need to go to the ER for an emergency neurologic consult." way past being alarmed, thanks. i had my parents pick me up and 4 hours in the ER later, finally saw the scan when the neurologist showed up. pretty sure i yelled "HOLY poo poo."

i was/am pretty healthy, never broken a bone, no hospital stays, no major illnesses. the closest i'd gotten before this was pneumonia/swine flu back in 2009. just had to go balls out with a brain tumor.

if the revelation that your brain is currently 30% tumour isn't supposed to warrant alarm I can hardly imagine what would

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
This is the story of my first code copy and pasted from an EMS story thread a while back. It was 4 years ago basically to the day! It’s :nms: so I’ll spoiler tag it. It’s gross.

quote:



So, last night the other crew got called to a nursing home for a adult female with a low pulse ox reading. That's an annoying one at nursing homes, because usually it means a CNA saw a low number and called 911 without doing anything. If you readjust the pulse ox, or sit the person with CHF up so they aren't drowining in their own fluids anymore, usually the number goes right back up and they don't want to go to the hospital.

Well, this was not one of those times. 2 minutes later, right around when the crew was making the turn into the parking lot, the tones went off in the building again. Only this time, it was "a second crew to back up the first crew on a possible cardiac arrest". I don't know what it is about nursing homes, but the most hosed calls always have the easiest sounding dispatches.

We got there, and the other crew- 2 EMTs, a paramedic, and an EMT student observer- are doing CPR. I see pads on the patient, but the staff is loving nowhere to be found. Later, I found out that the CNA's had put the AED on the patient, and then proceeded to do nothing. No CPR, no ventilations (they didn't even know what a BVM was when the first medic asked for one), nothing. At this point, the first medic has them on the monitor, which is showing as asystole. Flatline. Not shockable. The observer went to get the backboard so we could do CPR on the stretcher during transport, I start in on bagging the patient while another EMT does compressions. Medic #1 gets lines in- the first one was usable but dependant on position, and the second was perfect. The observer gets back with the board, we get moving, and medic #1 does the first shot o' epinepherine. So far, it's a little chaotic but nothing out there.

In the ambulance, it's basically Medic #1 down towards the feet doing meds, Medic #2 up top trying to intubate, and the other EMT and I are on the left and right of the patient switching between who's bagging and who's doing pushy-pushy every two minutes. The observer is taking times and letting medic #1 know when three minutes have elapsed so he can do another epi dose. Where the story really starts to get, uh, interesting, is on the first tube attempt.

See, this lady was almost seventy, had parkinsons, and was senile. She wasn't exactly flossing religiously. Not a "brush thrice a day" type. Her dental health loving sucked, is what I'm getting at. The laryngascope blade that was being used to try to see her vocal chords straight up pushed three of her teeth to a 90 degree angle. They were loose, and an airway threat, so they had to go.

So I had to reach into a dead woman's mouth and do some amateur dentistry. Feeling those teeth come out was, if it wasn't the grossest thing I've ever felt, at least a solid top 3. At least I knew the compressions the other EMT was doing were pretty decent, being as that she was perfusing well enough to bleed!

First tube went into the esophagous, so air went into her stomach. That's not that uncommon for intubation attempts, and this lady's anatomy was pretty bad. She had seized earlier in the day, so her tongue was all swollen, so the medic couldn't visualize what he was doing at all. The second attempt had the same thing happen, and at this point, we were suctioning a vomit/blood mix from her mouth. It was pretty nasty, but about to get worse.

See, I can do CPR pretty well in a moving ambulance, but it's still a moving ambulance. You hit bumps and need to go around turns. One or the other happened while I was compressing, and my hands moved. The force from my compressions went onto her stomach. Her full-of-air stomach.

I had a corpse puke its last meal mixed with the blood from when I tore some teeth out of its face, directly into my eyes and nose. I was very happy I had my mouth closed. . Medic #2 ended up dumping hand sanitizer into a towel, and just yelled "SHUT YOUR EYES AND MOUTH!" before scrubbing my face with it, while I still did compressions.

The ER doc ended up having the exact same thing happen in the ER while he made his own attempt to intubate, so both of us had to sit around for three hours while the hospital tried to convince the family to do a blood draw so they could test for Hep C and HIV. The family refused, even though two people trying to, you know, bring mom back from the dead, could really use that information. It was for religious reasons, just like the lack of DNR. I don't get the whole "only god decides when it's time for you to go, so please go through extreme measures to bring them back from the dead" thing. This came out a bit longer than I originally intended, but oh well.
—- later post
I forgot to mention that the new girl was cleaning the ambulance after and handed me a few white things and asked what they were supposed to go to. I was like “Oh, the patient’s mouth! Those are her teeth!”



E: I spent four weeks on post exposure prophylaxis for HIV after and holy poo poo, I have never barfed so much in my life.

Ugly In The Morning has a new favorite as of 18:22 on Apr 18, 2020

Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug
Fun car wreck one! This was in 201...5, I think?

quote:


When I volunteered in Rockland county, we used to get some ridiculous wrecks on the Palisades parkway. One winter, someone was driving in a snowstorm, skidded out, and hit a snowbank. They were doing a good 60 or so, which meant they got enough air to clear the wooden barricades closing an exit for the winter. The entire front of their car got ripped off entirely. I walked up to the wreck, and saw no one in the car. Instant pants-crapping moment, since ejection has about a 75 percent mortality rate (don’t get me started on the whole “being thrown clear” myth). I’m looking around for anything that would tell me where the occupant was launched to and I realize the windows and front and rear windshields are intact.

I walked back to a car that’s idling by the exit. There’s a shivering teenager in the passenger seat. I asked her if she was driving, sure ‘nuff, she was. Not a scratch on her, straight up refused to go to the hospital with us. Modern safety features in cars are fantastic. The only fatality I’ve ever had in a car accident was when a 70’s beetle hit a 70’s pick up truck.

Gross one! :nms: for poop and vomit.

quote:



It’s the summer of 2014, I’ve just started, and I’m doing a shift with a volunteer place I’ve since left. This place put out an ambulance with a driver (in this case, a big ol’ fat dude in jorts), and an EMT (me, actually wearing a loving uniform like we’re supposed to, Jim). There’s also a countywide ALS service that dispatches paramedics to all 911 calls. We got a call for a 90 year old male feeling weak. Turns out he can’t get up off the toilet. Seems easy enough! We get there, and his wife tells us he’s been having diarrhea since he got out of the nursing home for rehab for some bacterial thing.

That and the smell tell us he probably has C. Diff, an opportunistic infection you see in nursing homes and people on hardcore antibiotics. It has a pretty distinctive odor. The smell wafting past the closed bathroom door is like moldy chicken soup a fifty year old alcoholic took a poo poo in, which screams C. Diff. Great, this is gonna be fun.

There’s another complication- the bathroom door opens inwards, and the toilet is right by the door. This guy can’t move, so he’s blocking us from opening the door. The cop on scene says he’ll open the window, climb in, and carry the patient out. We all ask if he’s loving high. The dude is 90 and sick and probably covered in poop, that’s the worst idea. The medic and I notice the hinges are on our side of the door, so we get some screwdrivers and pop the pins out and take down the door. Then we retch and try to get the vent fan on as the smell really hits us.

The medic and I go into the bathroom (since my driver was too fat to fit) to try to stand the guy up so we can move him to the stretcher. I brought in a yak sack because the guy says he’s nauseous, but I set it down since I needed both hands to lift the guy. I have my hands on one of his hands and under his armpit, and the medic has the same on the other side. Oh, and by the way, this guy managed to poo poo ALL OVER the floor. Our boots are sliding around in the stankiest lake of diarrhea I have ever seen, before or since.

Count to three, then we’ll pull you up!

One...

Two...

Three!

He comes to his feet and as soon as he’s upright, launches a torrent of vomit all over my arms. Did I mention I had a short-sleeved uniform on? Yeeeah. So I have C. Diff poo poo on my boots and I’m covered in vomit. I try to clean off in the ambulance on the way in but sometimes the taint just never leaves.



Another edit: one of my friends (and a goon, Cakeequals get your rear end in here!) had to transport someone for urine retention and when they got cath’dthey drained over 2.5L of urine. I think that’s a high score.

Ugly In The Morning has a new favorite as of 19:02 on Apr 18, 2020

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

A few years back I took way too much Excedrin trying to force my way through a crunch time project at a job. It opened up a bunch of lesions in my stomach and I nearly shat blood to death.

So anyway after all the emergency room disasters (some patient interrupted my intake to complain about the waiting room TV channel, while the nurse was mollifying him I uncontrollably shat blood again) and what have you I wake up in an MCU facility, surrounded by mostly stroke victims and drug overdoses. I am the only patient in the room who can coherently talk. So I spend some time playing cards with a night nurse, that sort of stuff. One morning I wake up early because there's a bunch of people in the room, talking loudly. I open my eyes and there's the chief of medicine walking around a gaggle of scrubs on some learning rounds. I don't want them to stop because it's the only interesting thing that's happened in the past two days. So I close my eyes and wait to hear their take on my board.

Eventually they make their way around to me. At this stage in my stay I was just between a bunch of different -oscopies and I don't think they had any clue what was wrong yet. So the chief gets my chart and says "with this patient..." And pauses to read the chart, which I assume just said "this guy only shits fresh blood, we don't know why" on it. So he starts again. "With this patient... Well he looks a lot like Seth Rogen" and everyone laughs and then they leave.

Aggro
Apr 24, 2003

STRONG as an OX and TWICE as SMART




DemonDarkhorse
Nov 5, 2011

It's probably not tobacco. You just need to start wiping front-to-back from now on.

theironjef posted:



Eventually they make their way around to me. At this stage in my stay I was just between a bunch of different -oscopies and I don't think they had any clue what was wrong yet. So the chief gets my chart and says "with this patient..." And pauses to read the chart, which I assume just said "this guy only shits fresh blood, we don't know why" on it. So he starts again. "With this patient... Well he looks a lot like Seth Rogen" and everyone laughs and then they leave.

i was in the neuro icu, so i was also one of the few coherent people on the floor. i tried to mess with the rounders at every opportunity. waved, made goofy faces, yelled greetings. they were always too far away for me to hear what they were saying though, and i think i only got one of them to smile once.

HiroProtagonist
May 7, 2007

Lmao. I love the stories that are just two pictures and zero commentary, because none is necessary. :allears:

gamingCaffeinator
Sep 6, 2010

I shall sing you the song of my people.
A few years ago, I started vomiting often and basically out of the blue. I'd had a duodenal ulcer as a kid, and had similar symptoms, so I ended up seeing a gastroenterologist for an endoscopy to get a look.

They put me under twilight sedation, went through the procedure, and brought me out to my SO in the recovery room. The doctor went over a few things with him, then asked me some question. I don't have any memory of this, but my SO swears that I replied with "No, I know the secret of the universe. It's love" and turned toward him with a sappy grin.

Also got to keep the pictures the gastroenterologist took of my insides. He said I had "very pretty guts".

Cowslips Warren
Oct 29, 2005

What use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price?

Grimey Drawer
Not me, but my almost stepdad.

My mom had been dating Mike for a few years and he had moved in and things were okay. He was kind of an idiot but handy around the house. I wasn't living at home at the time this happened, but Mike had a poo poo diet. Lots of fried things, so he got constipated a lot. But being a good ole redneck, he was handy with tools. So he's constipated bad, straining in the bathroom, and decides to help pull some of the poo poo out. Not use an enema, because That Would Be Gay.

He grabs up a shower scrubber wand. The kind with the hook on the end so you can hang them. Up his rear end, wiggle around like he's playing Pong and the joystick is sticky, and then he realizes he can't get it out. Because the hook caught on an intestine.

So here is this 50-some year old man, screaming for my mom, because he is stuck at a 90* angle. She has to call the ambulance because she won't help him pull it out. Ambulance comes, they made sure no one saw him in that position as they haul him out and to the hospital, where he had to get a colostomy bag for weeks.

Bonus points: he told the people at the hospital he had fallen on the item and it just....went up there.

Second round bonus: he hated the colostomy bag. Didn't like it at all. So my mom would regularly find the filled/dirty bags in the kitchen garbage.

Final bonus round: they decided the story to tell their friends would be that he strained himself when making GBS threads and pushed so hard he actually broke his intestines. He started to believe the lie, to the point they had screaming matches where he denies he ever used the scrub brush.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Ugly In The Morning posted:

This is the story of my first code copy and pasted from an EMS story thread a while back. It was 4 years ago basically to the day! It’s :nms: so I’ll spoiler tag it. It’s gross.

I'm surprised y'all even transported this one. My service would have done the rounds of epi at the nursing home and then called it without even putting them on the stretcher.

HiroProtagonist
May 7, 2007

Khizan posted:

I'm surprised y'all even transported this one. My service would have done the rounds of epi at the nursing home and then called it without even putting them on the stretcher.

It's really dumb especially for unwitnessed arrests but standing orders in a lot of places are to work asystolic patients and field pronouncements are not permitted. So if you're in a rural area or someplace without online medical direction available, you're workin that corpse, baby.

UCS Hellmaker
Mar 29, 2008
Toilet Rascal

HiroProtagonist posted:

It's really dumb especially for unwitnessed arrests but standing orders in a lot of places are to work asystolic patients and field pronouncements are not permitted. So if you're in a rural area or someplace without online medical direction available, you're workin that corpse, baby.

Yeah we get more then a few obvious deaths that even at the scene they knew were dead, but because the protocals are that it needs to be obvious signs of death they work it. IE they need to be cool to the touch, lividity, rigor, or uh, missing body parts. They hate it as much as we do most times when a 95 year old codes in the nursing home and is flatlined on the monitor and obviously gone but family wants it a full code. Mainly its avoiding lawsuits.

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Ugly In The Morning
Jul 1, 2010
Pillbug

Khizan posted:

I'm surprised y'all even transported this one. My service would have done the rounds of epi at the nursing home and then called it without even putting them on the stretcher.

This actually happened about two weeks before we stopped transporting unwitnessed arrests.

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