"Had a patient who had just had a major surgery throw himself out of bed because Freddy Krueger told him to do so."
If you're close friends with a doctor or a nurse, chances are, you've heard at least one wild story about a patient.
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One of my nurse friends has told me countless stories about patients grabbing and screaming at her, and it seems like that's not even the full extent of it. In one Reddit thread, medical professionals shared the scariest things they've seen patients say or do, and I'm honestly spooked.
Here are 19 of the wildest stories:
1. "Not a doctor, but a nurse. Once a psychotic schizophrenic patient got me. And it was because of how "normal" she said it."
"Screaming, threatening to kill me and then sitting on the commode......and then calmly looking at me and says in the most normal and monotone voice, 'I'm sorry, I know I'm not well and being mean to you. I'm in hell, and I don't know how to get out.' I will never forget that or how it made me feel. It's like she had a 10 second lapse of her manic episode to apologize and tell me how she felt. Made me super empathetic to my psych patients."
2. "During my med school trauma surgery rotation, our 16-year-old patient said 'my stomach hurts' right before he was intubated for an exploratory laparotomy. He had gotten shot in his abdomen."
"Intra-op, we noted that the bullet tore a hole in his aorta. He didn’t make it. Such innocent last words to hear a kid say. He fully didn’t grasp his fate at the time. And understandably so. I will never forget it."
3. "One of the most gut wrenching moments in my career was when I was treating a 9-year old boy who was the victim of significant blunt force trauma."
"He was unstable but awake and talking. With terror in his eyes he started thrashing around in his bed and screaming, 'Don’t let me die! I don’t want to die!' It made us all nervous and tense. He went to the OR and survived but that was 5 years ago and I can still see his face."
4. "As a resident, a patient was super angry and signing his papers to leave Against Medical Advice. He looked at me and said, 'I know what time you sign out, and I know where you all leave the hospital.' Looked over my shoulder the entire walk home."
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5. "A patient once looked at me with a completely calm face and said, ‘I know you’re trying to help me, but I’m going to die today. I’ve made peace with it, and you can’t stop it."
6. "As a resident working off-service, looked a woman dead in the eye before we were about to intubate her. She had the saddest look in her eyes and said 'don’t let me die.' She had awful esophageal and rectal varices that were never successfully treated and passed away that night in the OR. Still see it in my thoughts from time to time."
7. "Doctor here. First one that sticks to mind isn't so much what the patient said, but more her body language that clued into what was going wrong."
"Story: I was a medical student at the time and the city my school was in is a hub for human trafficking. I noticed a patient in the ER who had a pretty bad injury to her face was with a sketchy looking guy who was not related to her. She wasn't my patient, but I brought my gut feeling up to her doctor who then made up some excuse to talk to the patient alone and got her to help. Turns out she was a victim of human trafficking.I never talked to her myself, but I couldn't shake the vibe I got from looking at her and the man she was with."
8. "Had a patient who had just had a major surgery throw himself out of bed because Freddy Krueger told him to do so. He was on a ketamine drip for pain management at the time."
9. "'I can see death standing behind you.' Still haunts me and he passed away 2 days after."
10. "Nurse here. Had a patient going through opioid withdrawal. Asked if I could give him an injection of a certain blood thinner— he said yes."
"He didn’t like that the injection hurt. He leapt out of bed, backed me into a corner, and threatened to “smash in [my] skull.” He reiterated he once killed a police officer by beating him to death, and he wanted to do the same to me. He was 6’2”. I am 5’0”. I managed to deescalate the best I could (gave him his opioids, encouraged him to go for a walk off unit to let off some steam). It worked. But before he walked off unit he told our charge nurse he was going to kill me. Management, security, and the doctor did fuck all. Had to spent the next few shifts worried I was about to get my ass beat."
11. "One of the scariest things I’ve heard as a doctor came from a patient who calmly said, 'I see the man in the corner again.' There was no one there."
"The patient was fully alert and oriented, but their vitals were crashing fast. Moments later, they coded. Another eerie moment was a patient who came in after a traumatic accident. Right before surgery, they grabbed my wrist and said, 'Don’t let me die, doc.' Their vitals were stable, but despite our best efforts, they didn’t make it through the operation. The things patients say, especially in their final moments, can stick with you forever."
12. "I was a very new intern, working in the ED. I got asked to see a young woman patient and the diagnosis put beside her name by triage staff said 'SELF HARM.'”
"So I took her into a consult room and tried my best to ask her about what was happening. She said to me 'I think someone was in my room last night,' and I was like, hmm that’s a weird way to start to talk about self-harm, but I answered “oh…ok…why do you say that?” And she lifted up her shirt to show me the words 'HELP ME' carved into her abdomen. The cuts individually were very thin, made by a razor blade, but each letter had been gone over many times so they were deep and quite fresh, still bleeding. I looked up at her horrified, and she said “I don’t know who but someone must have done this to me while I was asleep because I don’t remember doing it to myself.” The psychiatrist she saw after me thought the patient might’ve had dissociative amnesia but I’m not sure what happened after that.That was like, 20 years ago, and I can still feel the unease of that encounter."
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13. "Plenty of times I have had patients with psychosis tell me they see a person in their room. This is never scary to me— I don’t attend to where their vision is (because it makes the hallucination more real to them), I just do a full assessment (figure out if they hear voices, if the voices are telling them to harm themselves or others), encourage them to engage in distractions, talk to them if that’s what they need at the moment, and give them whatever meds necessary. Freaks out other nurses tho."
"Have had many dying patients say they see family members or 'angels' in the room. The patients in those instances never seen scared— more like comforted. I actually encourage them to focus on those family members that they see if it brings them comfort. They usually pass shortly afterwards."
14. "I’m a physician assistant, not a doctor, but to me it’s always the scariest in the hospital or emergency room setting when someone says, 'I think I’m going to die.' Because often, they’re right. 😔"
15. "Nurse here, one time an old lady said to me at about 3 a.m., 'there’s something in my cooter!' Concerned, I checked. It was the pure wick device we use for urine absorption. Sundownings a hell of a drug."
16. "EM doc here. 'If you don’t bring me an iPad to watch YouTube on right now I’m going to come back with a rifle and go to the roof and pick you off one at a time' said approximately 3 min after arriving to triage."
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17. "Honestly it was probably a patient just casually telling me a story about how once a motorcyclist cut him off on a country road so he ran the motorcyclist off the road and left him for dead."
18. "I work as a ER Nurse. When I was starting off in a rural ER we had a Hmong lady come in and said she 'fell.' Her ear was missing and there was a clear human bite mark to her cheek."
"She refused to tell the actual story. She came in with some friends that seemed equally shocked and I pulled them aside and confronted them, ‘who bit this woman?’ He said ‘a cat’ and before I can stop myself I said ‘what like a fucking tiger?’, and he pretty much went into his shell.She did not open up to the cops, she was flown to a hospital with plastics and as luck would have it I knew the nurse that took care of her over there, the plastic surgeons also asked, and still no answer. I’ve always thought it was a scorned lover in an insular community and they covered for them.It really hit me on the drive home at 3 a.m., driving through this tiny town knowing this guy was out there."
