When surgeons make mistakes
Doctors have seen some pretty gnarly things in hospitals and waiting rooms but surgeons are the medical professionals who see the most gore. By the very nature of their job, surgeons must endure patients with gruesome diseases, malodorous body scents, and rotting flesh. Additionally, they must brave it all with steady hands and clear heads. How do surgeons abide such things and return to their jobs day after day? First, they scrub their hands vigorously. Second, theirs is one of the highest paid professions in the world. Large sums of money can make almost anything palatable.
Surgeons also seem to enjoying sharing their tales with one another in order to make the horror less scarring. They’ve created a thread on Reddit detailing all of the moments when they went, “Huh, how in the world is this even possible?” And all of those WTF moments are below to make you wonder if any amount of wealth is worth such a queasy stomach, and whether you’ll ever trust yourself to go under a surgeon’s knife ever again.
These Surgeons Accidentally Gave A Patient A Sun tan
From Reddit user Traveledfartothewest:
“Way way back in the day, pre-op was done with alcohol-based cleaners. Naked, sedated guy with a light sheen of cleaning fluid on him + static electric spark = fully engulfed in flames. Everyone just stood there for a second til someone grabbed a sheet and put out the flames. Surgery went well, no complications, slight suntan.”
They Lost A Needle In A Patient’s Jugular
From Reddit user DrShlomo:
“We were putting up a central line for a drip with an 18G needle… in the patient’s external jugular, and all of a sudden the needle went right into the jugular. We all started panicking because usually with a drip the needle is meant to come out and only the plastic remains, but now we had lost the needle inside this guy’s jugular.
“Before we could even fish it out it was gone, I looked at the fellow surgeons and nurses and before we could do anything we rushed him right into theater. After a few minutes we fished the needle out near his subclavian vein – closer towards the shoulder – and we breathed a sigh of relief.”
One Surgeon Perforated An Eyeball But The Patient Didn’t Care
From Reddit user ugm9mjh:
“I was a junior doctor working in neurosurgery back in 2008 when one of the senior registrars (I suppose the equivalent is chief resident in the USA) told me his most unfortunate moment. In order to have a patient’s head stabilized for surgery he was using a frame that had a set of three spikes that held the head in place. Due to the angle he needed to approach from, this required the patient to be face down. As he was placing the head of the anesthetized patient on to the frame the head slipped and his eye landed on to the spike, perforating the eyeball.
“Panicking and thinking that his career was now over, he then (rather bizarrely) started poking at the eyeball trying to work out what was what until the anesthetist told him to stop. They then called the ophthalmologist who came to tidy up what was now a completely ruined eye. After the surgery, terrified, he went to explain to the patient what had happened. Understandably fearing the worst, anger, distress and tears, [he] received the response: ‘That’s OK I was blind in that eye anyway.'”
One Unconscious Patient’s Bowels Kept Falling Out
From a former Reddit user:
“We had a patient in the ICU who had some big abdomen trauma. He had gone to the OR and was too sick to be able to close his abdomen, so we left it open. We had a piece of plastic covering, like a bag, covering his intestines and then we placed a vacuumed sponge dressing on top of that…
“The patient’s nurse called me into the room to look at the abdomen because she thought she saw pieces of the bowel seeping out of the bag and getting sucked against the [wound dressing]. I agreed and thought the bowel looked pretty dusky as well, so we called the doc to come and look at it.
“The resident agreed and talked to his attending who told him to take the [dressing] off, tuck the bowel back into the bag it had escaped from, and put a new [dressing] on…
“So, resident comes in… and the bowels had become very swollen from the fluids, trauma, etc. So when he took the [dressing] off, [the bowels] all slipped out of the patient. The bag had dislodged significantly. We would tuck the bowels in one side, they’d spill out the other. Here we had this guy in his bed, disemboweling and we simply could not get everything back in him, in the bag, or anything.
“Luckily, the drugs we had the patient on kept him very nicely sedated and we had other drugs to control any problems with his blood pressure and the guy wasn’t overtly bleeding… It was MESSY. We really just had to step back and say, ‘Well, sh*t. How do we get this guy’s guts back inside him?’
“Ended up having to call in six other people to help tuck things here and there until he could get back to the OR for them to get everything back into its proper place…”
Just Another Day Of Broken Blades And Body Fires
From Reddit user Deadroachdancing:
“I was bisecting someone’s leg (deceased) and I did not know that said person had a metal rod through their femur. Proceed to cut through the bone with a metal saw. Sparks fly and my blade broke. Luckily I was standing off to the side, instead of directly behind the blade, as it flew backwards and hit the wall. The clothes the person had been wearing were lying underneath the body and caught a spark. I doused it with the water hose before a large flame could start, but still it was a [scary] moment.”
The Senior Doctor Got Food Poisoning And Left The Operating Room
From Reddit user Suckitz7:
“I was in my second or third heart procedure/catheterization when my senior doctor got sick, ripped off his surgical gown and ran out of the room. The doctor had just yelled, “Oh, no!” and left. I had just positioned these catheters with wires into the sleeping patient’s heart. They were just hanging out there pulsating to his heart beat. Apparently, the doctor had gotten food poisoning and made a run for the bathroom… never to return.
“So I’ve never made it to this point in the procedure before and am just wondering where to take it from here. I haven’t even been taught how to take them out safely. I’m looking at the vitals and monitors like, ‘What do I do now?’ Of course they page my senior cardiology fellow in training who is taking a nap and not returning any pages or calls. No other doctors around. Finally, thank GOD, my tech/assistant who has done these procedures since before I was born gives me a nudge to flush the catheters, which I do, to prevent blood clots and death essentially. And after a few minutes properly removes the catheters and wires. They get treated like sh*t but have saved ALL of the fellows in training and senior doctors many, many times in complicated situations with their knowledge.”
A Nice Case Of Maggots From The Road
From Reddit user profbobo 229:
“I was rounding a few months back and a guy gets wheeled into ICU smelling terrible. I walked over, and the dude had maybe the most macerated legs I have ever seen. There were things moving on the bed, and the suction container was full of maggots.
“Turns out dude had been weaving on the road, and when police pulled him over and opened the doors, maggots fell onto the road. He got taken to the ER, arrested, taken up to ICU and very rapidly debrided, then bilateral above-knee amputated. He actually made it out of the hospital, but I cannot imagine waking up one day and having no legs.
“I really wish I knew where he was driving, though…”
One Optometrist Only Spent Five Minutes On A Cataract Surgery
From Reddit user missandei_targaryen:
“In the OR, the worst I saw was some sh*t head optometrist who thought spending five minutes per patient was a good way to do cataract surgeries (most surgeons spend about 15-25 min per surgery). At one point he told me to keep the pre and post-op eye drops uncapped, because he didn’t want to have to wait the literal five seconds it took me to unscrew the caps after each surgery. The patient’s eyes looked all mangled and misshapen after the surgery, whereas every other cataract surgery I’ve ever seen, the patients looked fine right afterwards. Not really an ‘oh sh*t’ moment, but I told my boss after that day that I never wanted to work with that guy again. It was an accident waiting to happen. I heard one of his patients got an infection and lost their eye, but most of them were fine. Still, I wouldn’t have let him watch my goldfish for a week long vacation, let alone come at my eye with a knife. He was a douchenozzel.”
This Surgeon Had To Fire A Well-Liked Young Resident
From Reddit user is-not-a-doctor:
“I was called into a meeting with the program director, which is never a good thing, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. He makes some small talk, then start asking about one of the junior residents who had been on my service. Definitely one of the weaker residents, but hard working and likable. I start talking about her performance and her relationship with the other residents, her strengths and weaknesses, etc.
“After a minute I came to the horrible realization he wasn’t just asking about her, he was gathering ammunition to fire her and I was part of the firing squad. I jammed on the breaks and tried to talk her up, talking about her work ethic, and how well she got along with the nurses and the team. But we both knew it was a done deal before I sat down.
“I dunno why it bothered me so much, compared to kids who burned to death and the like. But that sudden realization while I was sitting there that someone I kinda liked personally, who had spent most of their adult life struggling in undergrad, medical school, and the lab, who had what I suspect was six figure debt, was about to get their career destroyed just stunned me.
“I don’t know if she was going to be an unsafe doctor. I think the fact we liked her allowed her to slide further than she should have, in retrospect. But of all the terrible things that happened in residency, that’s the one I think about most often.”
Blood Started Squirting Everywhere
From Reddit user rakeon:
“A patient had a bump on his leg. After imaging, it looked like it was an abscess collection that needed drainage.
“The patient was taken to the OR and the subcutaneous tissue dissected off. All of a sudden blood starts squirting. Turns out the abscess was really a femoral artery aneurysm.
“Overhead Stat called for the vascular surgeon to bail him out.”
This Young Surgeon Encountered A Squirter
From Reddit user IdiopathicMD:
“I walk in and quickly realize what I’ve been assigned. This is a butt pus case… For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, a butt pus case is when you have an abscess filled with the most vile, malodorous, repugnant filth to ever grace the medical profession and you have to open up the glory of this pocket of putrescence so that the cavity in which it dwells can fill in with nice healthy non-sh*t. It was an easy workup and he was a nice guy but he did have a sense of humor. As I was getting him ready to go he says, ‘Just want to warn you, I’m a squirter. ‘ This stopped me in my tracks…
“As we get the guy positioned on the table it occurs to me how truly large this man is. He had to be around 450 pounds… We had to put his legs in stirrups so that we could get to his butt crack and do the procedure. I was positioned in the front row dead center, staring deeply into this guys brown eye while the chief resident and attending physician [stood behind].
“I numb up the skin, call for the knife, and stop for a moment. In that second I realize what he meant about being a squirter, there was no other reasonable explanation and I can’t imagine why I didn’t realize it before. But being the only one scrubbed in for the procedure and being seated right there in the… splash zone… I had no choice but to proceed…
“As I lean forward and place the blade into the pocket of pus the… patient gives a great heaving snore and then a cough. He shifts what must have been half an inch down right as I pierce the skin and the increased intra-abdominal pressure [creates a] shower of feculent horror [that] blasts forth, covering my surgical gown, cap, shoes and glasses.
“I’m speechless. my brain cannot simultaneously process the horror, hilarity, and smell of what just happened… I couldn’t see through my [dirty] goggles, I must have smelled like Pepe le Pew blasted with bear mace and dragged through a pool of goat vomit, and I was on call the rest of that night (this all happened around 9-10pm)…
“As I understand it the rest of the procedure was uneventful… The patient had the procedure before and had, apparently, oozed quite a bit previously which had grossed out other residents who had been there. That’s what he meant by ‘squirter.'”
One Surgeon Was Up To His Elbows In Poop
From Reddit user VivaLaPigeon:
“As a medical student I got to assist in the repair of a vaginal anal fistula, basically a connection between the two that meant the poor patient was leaking shit out of her vagina. Given the nature of the operation the operating room smelt so horrific the anesthetist actually had to leave because they were dry heaving so much. Towards the end of the operation we had to flush out the remains of the colon, and so I flushed saline through while the consultant surgeon stood at the end of the table with a bin bag. Once we were done the surgeon looked at me with a totally defeated look in his eyes, up to his elbows in shit and said, ‘I have a really f*cking glamorous job.'”
A Med Student Passed Out And Fell Into A Patient’s Open Wound
From Reddit user 911Hawk:
“Craziest: probably a medical student passing out face first into the wound, then falling backwards and cracking his skull on the floor. He starts bleeding from the head and isn’t moving. Just total silence for a few seconds. We didn’t know whether to laugh or yell at him or what. Heh. Luckily I didn’t have to have that talk with the family.”
One Patient Lost A Liter Of Blood In Only 60 Seconds
From Reddit user Loveplayingsorry:
“A while back I was doing a hysterectomy and staging for cancer (I don’t want to give too many specifics for privacy purposes). We had the uterus, cervix, tubes and ovaries out and we had her abdomen open from sternum to pelvis. We were WAY down in the corners of the pelvis digging out lymph nodes when we found one about the size of a tennis ball with several large (and abnormal) blood vessels running in and out of it. We had to get it out but the blood supply was coming right off of a major vessel and was really hard to access. We clipped as many vessels as we could reach and then started cutting it out. We lost a full liter of blood in the next 60 seconds before we got full control of the bleeding and lost a total of four liters in the case. At one point the pelvis was filling with blood faster than the suction could get it out. Scary is hell at the time but it turned out ok.”
Her Senior Surgeon Had To Plug A Bleed With His Finger
From Reddit user Taltyelemna:
“I was still a young intern when this happened. Young enough that the senior surgeon wouldn’t let me perform the whole surgery (under his supervision, of course), but old enough to be allowed to do parts of the procedure.
“So, I was doing (in my mind) a pretty decent job of dissecting a branch of the right pulmonary artery, freeing it from the cancerous nodes around it, when, suddenly, dark blood pulsing rose. That was like the tide coming up, only way quicker. My brain froze and I said, ‘Oh, sh*t.’ I had perforated the pulmonary artery, a very fragile organ with almost three liters of blood per minute in it.
“Well, my senior was the zen master he always is. He put his finger on the breach, which stopped the bleeding, and looked at me, winking, and said, ‘Well, Taltyelemna, you’re in deep sh*t now, aren’t you?’
“He stitched the pulmonary artery and finished the procedure. While that history isn’t as horrifying as others in the thread, it was my first ‘oh, holy shite’ moment.”