Not everyone is suited to be a doctor. Those who are an excellent fit for the job likely have ample knowledge, an unwavering purpose to help those in need, and enough immunity to withstand anything that may make any other person feel extremely squeamish and shaken to the core.
To better understand these disturbing occupational hazards, people with firsthand experience provided their insights in a recent Reddit thread. Most commenters are medical professionals, but a few were just unfortunate enough to see these scarring images.
If you’re easily nauseated, be forewarned. Many of these stories are pretty graphic.
#1
My father-in-law (FIL) was a Red Cross trauma surgeon during the Vietnam war. One day the locals brought in a villager with a live RPG round sticking out of his side. No one wanted to operate on him. FIL sent the OR staff out of the tent, so it was just him and the patient. Then he piled a wall of sandbags with a small opening around the villager, and used surgical tongs to extract the RPG round while sitting on the other side of the sandbags. Then he sewed the guy back up. He was fine.
FIL is about 5’2” and so mild mannered. You’d never guess it but he’s a secret bada*s.
Image credits: FNTM_309
#2
Doctor here. The best case that I have ever seen was that of an internship colleague. The patient was obviously psychiatric and managed to introduce a cylindrical cutlery basket full of spoons, forks and knives up his r****m. At the radiography, the cutlery was clustered in such a way that we didn't recognized the objects, but they were definitely metallic. The content was only revealed in the surgery.
Edit: just to be clear, the patient was not my colleague. He was my colleague's patient.
Image credits: sormatador
#3
Not a doctor, worked with doctors. The two weirdest things were a feather in a three month old and a scalpel that was left in after surgery, did nothing to the function of the body, was discovered by accident over an unrelated MRI. The feather in the baby, which sprouted out of her neck, was introduced from inside the mother. Nobody really knows for sure how.
Image credits: VeeAndro
#4
I think the top weirdest thing was a self harmer we had sutured, who picked the stitches and smuggled a plastic spoon in there for a few hours. We found it before they were admitted to psych.
Image credits: procrast1natrix
#5
Not a doctor but used to work with a guy who’s son was a doctor in the states. He told us a story of a lady that walked into the ER one day complaining of pain and irritation under her belly folds. The doctor rummaged around for a bit and started pulling out 1-2inch long splinters of wood from between the fat folds. When asked “excuse me ma’am, we’re finding some pieces of wood in here, do you know how they would have gotten there?” The lady replied “oh, that will be from my husband. Whenever he f***s me he sticks a piece of plywood in there so he can lift everything at once to make it easier”. Needless to say I did not each the rest of my lunch that day.
Image credits: kehnsnasty
#6
Just graduated medical school! I can answer this question!!!! I saw a CT scan of a dude who shoved a butternut squash up his rear. Said he fell on it.
Image credits: jzeitler121
#7
About a dozen barbie doll heads that caused an intestinal blockage. Guy swallows them all day long as a fe**sh. When he excretes them he washes them so he can reswallow them.
Image credits: WishIWasYounger
#8
Coiled up iv tubing in the bladder that was calcified in a big bladder stone. Cambodian patient who had been tortured by khmer rouge years earlier. The tube was used in the torture to fill his bladder to bursting.
After he was released they left the tube inside.
Image credits: tonvan345
#9
I had this patient who grew a giant tumor on his thigh in a matter of 3-4 weeks but he ignored it and kept going to work. The thing was about the size of a volleyball. I asked him how he got his pants over it to go to work. He just laughed and said, “why do people keep asking me that?”
The worst thing was an ignored breast cancer. Lady could have been completely cured but she ignored her doctor’s advice and would do only holistic medicine. By the time she came in a couple years later, it looked like somebody had dropped a grenade on her breast and it smelled like death with pus pouring out of it. She couldn’t put her arm down either because it spread to her lymph nodes and made her arm humongous.
Also, I saw a guy who ignored a testicular cancer. Testicular cancer is usually highly curable and almost never involves both testicles. But this guy wouldn’t go to the doctor. When he finally came in, one of his testicles had grown to the size of two soft balls and was as hard as a rock.
Image credits: anon
#10
I saw this while I was volunteering as a premed in the Emergency room. Lady came in after having stuck a hairspray (without cap) can in her r****m. She acted like she didn’t know what was going on or how it got there (husband was an ecclesiastical leader I guess and she was embarrassed). What prompted her to come in was that she started to have this sensation that when she would lean or shift her weight a certain way, she could hear/feel a “shhhhhhhhh-ing” sound down low. She “thought it would be good to get checked out”. I wasn’t in the room when they asked her to demonstrate, but one of the nurses later confirmed the shhhhing (super clear with a stethoscope apparently).
Image credits: iclimbtreessofast14
#11
Not a dr, but a nurse...please do not stick anything in your cast to scratch an itch. A patient lost a pen cap between their cast and forearm. The patient didn't realize it until it was time to get the cast cut off....and her skin had grown over the cap. She needed to be cut open to remove the foreign object.
Image credits: cutiernjenn
#12
RN here. We had a guy go thru surgery because he shoved a glowstick up his urethra and it went up too far and he couldn't get it out. We all took bets on what color it was.
It was pink.
Image credits: marblefoot1987
#13
I’m not a doctor but my friend found fifteen magnets in someone’s body my friend does autopsy’s that was the official cause of death.
Image credits: Kyoto-unknown
#14
I had a patient who likes swallowing steak knives whole, to the point that the gastroenterologist told them that if they kept doing that, they would not remove it next time.
They swallowed a nail clipper last time I saw them.
Image credits: kitterup
#15
Not a doctor but i was in the medical bay when i was in Civil Air Patrol. We had a guy come in with his wife (both memebers of CAP). His wife says there has been blood in his underwear she noticed while washing his clothes. He insitis he was fine. After seperating the 2 and hearing the stories this is what the guy says. "Dont tell my wife. Ive been having an afair and i have an angel with an approximent 12 inch wingspan all the way in my b*m. We tried gettinf it out but we only snapped off one of the wings." Still to this day dont know how he fit a 12 inch plus shape up his a*s but it did end in a divorce and the guy had to wear a colostomy bag the rest of his life.
Image credits: Roach_335_
#16
Not a doctor but I remember a friend from my teenage years showing me an X-ray of his mother’s womb with a pair of sharp scissors in there. Apparently when he was born, the doctors had to do a c-section and the surgeon accidentally left some scissors in there and sewed her up. I don’t remember how long it took for them to realize it was still in there, but she obviously had to have surgery to get it out.
Image credits: anon
#17
In my emergency medicine rotation, I saw a little boy who had put the headlight from his Lego Iron Man’s motorbike up his nose and got it stuck up there. I removed it and we had a talk about how Iron Man says that heroes have to be sensible and not put things up their noses. All the while, I was contemplating the multitude of substances that Tony Stark has undoubtedly put up his nose.
Image credits: ifyouneedtotalkPM
#18
Not a doctor, but my older brother put a snail in his ear when he was a child. Had to go to the ER to get it removed. (Unfortunate for him, as the ER times were as likely as slow as said snail.).
Image credits: XxXMissShiroXxX
#19
Many years ago I was an x-ray tech. Had a lady come in with pain in her heel. When I took the xrays, I assumed it was a heel spur like I'd seen many times. I toss the films on the light box and there was a frickin' sewing needle deeply embedded. And it wasn't a small one either as it was 2-3 inches long. She claimed to have no recollection of ever stepping on it.
Image credits: billybrubaker
#20
ICU nurse here. We had an inmate come in to the unit and started complaining of not being able to hear. Come to find out, the jail was too loud, so he'd shoved his ENTIRE supper of chicken and noodles in his ears to muffle the sound.
I was stunned by how much he fit in there.
Image credits: mirror_image20
#21
Obligatory not me, but my sister in law always tells the story of a construction worker who swallowed several long nails. The remarkable part was that he ended up being totally fine, never had any symptoms, and ended up pooping them out.
Image credits: Fair_University
#22
My paramedic friend once had a geriatric woman whose toothbrush had become embedded in her cheek while brushing. I've seen the photos. It's not pretty.
Image credits: chalk_in_boots
#23
Not me but my dad is a surgeon. Once in the ER a guy came in and he had a tennis ball in his a*s so my dad had to get it out and after that he asked politely how it got there and the guy said he was playing tennis and my dad responded “well next time face the ball”.
#24
I am a urologist so I have pulled just about anything you can imagine out of male urethras.
The wierdiest one was when I was a resident on a female however.
We were doing a cystoscopy on this patient with lots of irritative voiding symptoms. She had a presumed diagnosis of intersitital cystitis. The staff for the case was a fairly elderly doc, in his 70s.
I put the scope in and immdiatly saw a NuvaRing floating in the patients bladder. My staff doc had no idea what it was and was flabergasted.
I then asked the patient if she was using NuvaRings for birth control. She said she hadnt used them for 2 or 3 years......I had to explain it to the staff doc what it was infront of the patient.
FYI nuvarings are fairly firm, hard plastic and pretty large...
So she had litterally put a NuvaRing up her urethra 2 or 3 years before and had no idea....
It was a sonofab**ch to get out too.....
Image credits: anon
#25
A glass jar Yankee candle in patient's r****m. Still have the X-ray pic of that. Still my favorite story.
Image credits: anon
#26
A friend of mine is a psych nurse and it is shocking to me how many stories she has about patients swallowing towels, sweaters, and other large things that I cannot even imagine being able to swallow ... 😭😰.
Image credits: -quiddity-
#27
Pulled a lego out of someone’s lung once.
Image credits: pro_nosepicker
#28
Urologist here.
Metal pull chain for a ceiling fan, pushed up the urethra and into the bladder.
Image credits: RuninRed10
#29
I'm not a doctor but I did train in medicine. One day I was tasked on going through old x-rays, ones that were so old they weren't needed any more, but we had to look through them for good clinical examples that could be used in lectures and teaching scenarios.
Well, we found a g*****n cyborg. A head, side view, with a g*****n computer in the middle! You could see the circuitry as plain as day. Must have been about 5cm square.
We showed this x-ray around to everyone in the department (well, the staff) but no one had any idea what could possibly be going on.
Bear in mind this was 25 years ago and the x-rays were all at least 10 years old or more. Pacemakers were only about 30 years old, brain implants were still a twinkle in some neurosurgeons eye, not even a possability back then.
Of course we got cyborg, and skynet/the terminator, and a time traveller, but no helpful answers.
Finally, about a week later, we got our answer. It's a hearing aid. The x-ray technation had obviously forgot to have the patient remove it before taking the image. I hope it didn't damage the poor patients hearing aid.
And yes, the image is still striking and was kept for teaching purposes, or more likely, humour purposes. (don't worry, all patient information was blacked out before being seen by students).
Image credits: _-Loki
#30
I’m an anesthesiologist. One time, I was in a laparoscopic cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal with scopes) on this guy from South America and when they put the cameras in, there was just this little, white Lima bean-shaped object hanging out in his abdominal cavity. Wasn’t attached to anything or in an organ. It was just...there. They sent it for pathology, but I never heard back on what it actually was. The rest of the surgery was pretty ordinary.
Image credits: littlepoot
#31
Peds RN, we have a psych patient who keeps eating foreign objects, her favorite being glass. When she gets admitted we have to take everything out of her room now because she’s eaten our lightbulbs, temperature probes, pens, tacks holding up signs and miscellaneous medical equipment. Anything she can get down her throat we have to strip the room of. She has had many surgeries and complications because of her “diet”.
Image credits: ronsinblush
#32
Mom here. Daughter was bleeding from the ear, but not distressed at all. Took her to urgent care clinic and they rushed her in.
Turns out, it wasn't blood. It was strawberry juice. She'd shoved a chunk in there and when she tried to get it out, just shoved it in further.
We all laughed.
Image credits: JL_Adv
#33
ER Nurse:
Butt Stuff: Curtain rod
Not Butt Stuff: A psych pt who, over time, swallowed 9 steak knives. There were many other things swallowed (eye glasses, pens, spoons, etc.). The knives were intense though. Her abdomen was covered in huge scars from all of her surgeries.
Image credits: KSmegal
#34
Surgical tech, not MD. One time we found a little shard of glass in a lady's abdomen during an open hysterectomy. The doc is rooting around in her abdomen, doing his thing, when he hands me a big ol' clot to get rid of. I wipe the clot off my hands onto a sponge and something hard catches on and tears my glove. I exclaim something eloquent like "hey, what the f**k" and extract the hard thing from the clot. It was a little bit of glass, like maybe 0.5cm by 0.5cm.
Surgery pauses for a minute cos everybody is weirded out. All my instruments and countables are accounted for and there was absolutely zero glass of any sort on my table when we started -- we don't even use anything made of glass for this sort of surgery. Doctor speculates that maybe it's a bit of glass that somehow migrated into her abdomen after a car accident or something. Said he'd never seen anything like it. I get some new gloves and my nurse takes the glass off the field as a foreign body specimen. Patient has no history of any previous surgeries or procedures. The rest of the surgery was uneventful
But yeah that was weird.
Image credits: kinnoth
#35
I had a patient with a potato in his a*s
Also a guy who drank a glass of mercury. The Xray was amazing, looked like a weird poop galaxy.
Image credits: scromboid
#36
My wife is a doctor, and she has seen a fair amount. But there is one recurring patient that really stands out. He first came into the trauma bay with a light bulb that had shattered up there. It was a rough surgery to get everything out. He then showed up again about 3 months later with a slightly cracked light bulb. They were able to remove it without any breakage. Than about 6 moths later he showed up again with a snow globe, like a big one. Not sure he is learning his lesson.
Image credits: anderc4
#37
Nurse here but I had a patient who whilst in prison swallowed a full-size hair comb, a whiteboard marker, a toothbrush, a toothpaste tube and the toothpaste tube lid (separately). Reading the radiology report listing all this was interesting, they apparently had other unidentifiable objects in their stomach as well. The comb got lodged in their oesophagus and had to be surgically removed.
Image credits: SlaveNumber23
#38
I was the unofficial medic for my army unit so people would usually come and ask me medical questions so they don’t bother the doctors (I had the full support of the actual medics for this as I consistently demonstrated good judgment). One day while out in the field one of the guys in my platoon walked up to me rather shaky and a few shades paler than he usually was, he said in a matter of fact way “my neck hurts” I looked at the back of his neck and there was a small tree branch sticking out of him (please pardon the pun). We very quickly called in a helicopter casevac while two of us held his arms back so that he wouldn’t try to pull the branch out. After he recovered he told us that the doctors said that the branch was sitting on his carotid artery, it is kind of amazing that he survived.
Image credits: Askdrillsarge
#39
I have two interesting cases here.
1. 14 year old girl. Her mother brought her into the ER claiming that she had swallowed some sort of sharp object 3 hours prior. Upon getting a quick physical and examination (objectively she was depressed, borderline catatonic), sent her off to get a chest and abdominal X ray. Saw what looked like 3 different surgical blades (a blade 11 for the surgeons out here) around her epigastric area. Promptly re-examined her and her clothes to make sure that she wasn't holding the blades on her person (the arrangement on Xray didn't make sense, the blades were clearly arranged in a way where they couldn't have been within her clothes). She wouldn't admit to what she ingested, had the general surgeons and gastroenterologists on scene pronto. Have a video of the blades being removed via OGD.
2. 43 year old lady, clearly histrionic personality. Presented to the ER with a note from her dentist claiming that there was a mishap with the patient where a part of his equipment (the drill attachment, to be precise) dislodged and ended up falling down the patient's throat. The dentist was probably distracted with all of the mammaries that this patient had on show (she had a bit too much on show for a simple dentist appointment). The drill piece was clearly visible on xrays. Brought in the general surgery team, she had no signs of perforation/peritonism and the attachment had passed the ligament of treitz. Recommended that she wait it out and pass it out the other end. That patient ended up hounding me for 3 weeks (she knew my work schedule) asking when it would pass. My answer was always the same, each body has it's own rate of passing waste. She wasn't lying, the drill attachment was there every time we checked via abdominal xrays.
#40
Not a doc (ex-medic) but saw a lightbulb that had been heavily duct-taped before insertion, and a wood rasp that had its handle removed (which was very stupid when you stop and think about it.) Saw many, many xrays of various things in the "a*s box" which, sadly, most ERs no longer have as I understand it. Probably a HIPAA rule or something.
Image credits: dramboxf
#41
Ain't a doctor, but one time me and some other kids were at a junkyard, and this one kid was barefoot, and a nail was through his d**n foot.
#42
One of my friends father is a chief surgeon. I remember hearing a story of a guy who came in with a ball up his a**s... he couldn’t get it out... they ended having to put him under and figured that they could pop the ball with something sharp and pull it out. They did just that!
#43
Omphalith. People, especially older people, get a build-up of gunk in their belly button that looks like a black rock. Every time I see it, I have to resist the temptation to pull it out. One time I tried, but it’s kind of stuck in there.
#44
A whole f*****g screw. He said he wanted to be optimus prime.
#45
Not a doctor by far, but I am a medical coder. I mostly code gastroenterology so colonoscopies and egd’s. The charts for those will have pictures that they captured during the procedures, and one day I saw a couple of batteries in a stomach, and later that day somebody had swallowed a handful of earrings. One time somebody inserted a couple of bullets into their r****m.
#46
I once had a piece of chalk stuck up my nose. I was about 6 and it was before church on a Sunday morning and I was writing on my chalkboard. I ran out of green chalk so had the bright idea of shoving a piece of white up the schnoz and letting the snot do the work for me. Ended up at the hospital and they finally dug it out with a pair of really long forceps. Been shy about putting things in my orifices ever since.
#47
Shovel handle in the r****m. On an xray. Like an episode of scrubs.
#48
This is barely applicable; but I’m a hospital transporter and I once watched a 36W pregnant woman get an MRI for suspected appendicitis. Yes, it was amazing seeing her nearly-term baby inside her!
#49
Not a doctor, but when I was 10~12-ish I sneezed out a piece of Lego cone I shoved up my nose a few years earlier.
#50
A small lava lamp.
#51
High school student with a sizable piece of driftwood, maybe 4x2x1”, jammed deeply into the top surface of her foot - she had been walking barefoot on the beach, wasn’t watching where she was going, impaled herself. wood was maybe 1.5” into the foot. she was extremely calm, didn’t appear to be too upset by what was essentially a wood stake to the foot. I suggested she go into medicine as she was apparently unflappable.
Image credits: anon
#52
Paediatric registrar here! My stories are less shocking, more cute 💕
Saw a 4 yo girl in ED who’d put something in her ear (she wouldn’t say what). Finally fished it out, and it was a tiny toy chair from a Polly Pocket play set.
Also once fished a pea out of a little boys nostril!
#53
My mother-in-law was an ER surgeon at one point, and always tells the story of a guy who came in with a budgie stuck up his a*s - acted surprised when they identified it, but then cried something terrible when they informed him it was dead and no, they could not bring it back to life.
Image credits: Billbapierogi
#54
Psych patient swallowed Dominoes that had to be removed from abdomen in OR, game played by interns and nurses while being removed.
#55
I saw a dog with an 8" spay hook left in a dachshund.
It was a stray from Alabama and the vet left the spay hook in the subcutaneous space lateral to the skin incision somehow. I noticed it on normal abdominal radiographs a month later.
