Speaker A
Welcome back, everybody. Today we will be reading real things patients have said in the hospitals submitted by healthcare workers at my comedy shows.
Hilarious and shocking real patient stories from hospitals, showcasing bizarre behaviors and misunderstandings shared by healthcare workers.
Key Takeaways
- Patients frequently have misconceptions about their health and treatments.
- Healthcare workers encounter a wide range of bizarre and challenging patient behaviors.
- Addiction and mental health issues complicate patient care and safety.
- Humor helps healthcare workers cope with the stress and absurdity of some patient interactions.
- Clear communication and patience are essential in managing difficult patients.
Summary
- Patients often misunderstand medical instructions, such as cutting vitamins in half and thinking they get half the vitamins selectively.
- A diabetic patient believed standing would lower his blood sugar by making sugar rush to his feet.
- Patients experiencing withdrawal can exhibit paranoia and hallucinations, leading to unusual accusations against staff.
- Some patients express extreme hostility, including wishing harm on healthcare workers and throwing objects.
- Unusual items have been hidden in patients' bodies, such as a mini bottle of wine concealed vaginally.
- Addiction to pain medication leads some patients to desperate behaviors like locking themselves to IV poles to keep pumps.
- Patients with serious conditions like heart attacks sometimes deny or misunderstand their diagnosis and treatment restrictions.
- Rare and bizarre behaviors include using a stoma for sexual activity and hiding sandwiches under skin folds.
- Humorous interactions occur when patients question medical imaging or claim alien attacks on their eyes.
- Methamphetamine use can cause paranoia and dangerous situations, such as a patient refusing to come down from a roof.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Why haven't you gone yet?
Speaker A
Kids mom called pediatrics to find out what vitamins her kid got after cutting the vitamin in half and only giving half, thinking the child only got certain vitamins, not half of all of them.
Speaker A
How do some people go through life thinking about things like this?
Speaker A
If you cut any pill in half.
Speaker A
You get half of everything in the pill.
Speaker A
We should take her child away and submit this child to child protective services, poor kid has a mom with half a brain.
Speaker A
One of my patients was admitted to the ICU for DKA, diabetic ketoacidosis, that is when you do not produce enough insulin and you have too much blood sugar.
Speaker A
His blood sugar on ER admission was around 1,000.
Speaker A
That is very high.
Speaker A
Normal range is around 100, right?
Speaker A
Is that around 100?
Speaker A
60 to 140.
Speaker A
Ah, still got it, baby. He was transferred to my unit after the DKA protocol was done.
Speaker A
During my assessment, the patient just stood the whole time and refused to sit when asked why, the patient asked me back, "Will my blood sugar go down if I stand up like this?"
Speaker A
I wasn't sure what he meant so I asked him to rephrase. He said, "If I stand up, all the sugar in blood will rush down to my feet and when you check my sugar, it's gonna be at least normal to low."
Speaker A
I was speechless, he was 25, thought he should know better than this.
Speaker A
Technically he should, but honestly, I have stopped giving patients the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker A
You have to believe that these people genuinely think like this.
Speaker A
And no, sir, that is not how that works.
Speaker A
Although it would make sense as to why diabetics lose their feet first.
Speaker A
All the sugar goes down to their feet.
Speaker A
I was taking care of a patient going through withdrawals, he thought I was the "cocaine whore from across the street."
Speaker A
Cocaine whore from across the street.
Speaker A
I have been called many things in my lifetime wearing scrubs.
Speaker A
Cocaine whore was never one of them.
Speaker A
I went to give him IV Ativan and he thought I was stealing his wallet, he started yelling, "Help, police, help, police!"
Speaker A
My NCP came running in to see what was going on, she had a yellow star badge holder on that indicated she was a new employee.
Speaker A
The patient said, "Oh my God, I can't believe it, are you really a cop?"
Speaker A
Do cops still wear yellow star?
Speaker A
I don't know.
Speaker A
That's what happens, kids, that's what happens when you eat too much cocaine.
Speaker A
I had a patient tell me she hoped my future children got cancer and died because I was too young to be speaking to her.
Speaker A
I thought being called a cocaine whore was the worst thing that could have said.
Speaker A
No.
Speaker A
Future children get cancer, that is spicy. She then tried to throw her bed pan at me while screaming at me that she pays my salary because she works at Amazon.
Speaker A
There's so much to unpack here.
Speaker A
First of all, was the bed pan full?
Speaker A
Or was it empty?
Speaker A
Second of all, ma'am.
Speaker A
You could barely pay your own salary.
Speaker A
Working at Amazon.
Speaker A
Okay.
Speaker A
Let's be real.
Speaker A
She thinks because she works at Amazon, she has Jeff Bezos's salary.
Speaker A
It's not true, lady.
Speaker A
I love you, Amazon.
Speaker A
Please deliver my packages.
Speaker A
I had a patient in the ED for detox and SI, suicidal ideations, after taking her belongings 10 minutes later she said, "Do y'all want this too?"
Speaker A
And pulled a mini bottle of wine out of her vagina.
Speaker A
I hear to age the wine, you need a dark enclosed place.
Speaker A
And she found the perfect one.
Speaker A
I'm sensing notes of cherry, meth and come.
Speaker A
Straight from the source.
Speaker A
See, ladies, you complain about pants not having pockets.
Speaker A
Make your own pockets.
Speaker A
I once had a patient that wanted to keep her pain pump so badly that she locked herself in the bathroom and wrapped herself onto her IV pole.
Speaker A
Wow.
Speaker A
If you don't know what a pain pump is.
Speaker A
It's essentially a pump that we hook up to an IV pole.
Speaker A
All you have to do is press a button and the pain medication goes directly into your IV and into your body.
Speaker A
It's usually given to patients who are in severe pain who need it every few hours.
Speaker A
Or only when you're allowed to have it again.
Speaker A
So, you can't just keep pressing it.
Speaker A
But yeah, she really wanted to keep her pain pump.
Speaker A
Patients are addicted to pain medication.
Speaker A
I was admitting a patient from the ER with an NSTEMI, heart attack.
Speaker A
He only wanted a cheeseburger and was mad I wouldn't let him eat.
Speaker A
He told me emphatically, "But my specialist said it's okay to have a cheeseburger and Mountain Dew sometimes and that's what I want."
Speaker A
I finally said, "Sir, some days that may be fine, but not while you're actively having a heart attack." Dumbfounded, he asked, "Who's having a heart attack?"
Speaker A
To which I responded, "You are, right now, that's why we're not letting you eat.
Speaker A
We're trying to save your heart.
Speaker A
And why you're attached to all these IVs.
Speaker A
How does he not know he's having a heart attack?
Speaker A
There was a long pause, "So if I unhook these and go to the cafeteria to get a cheeseburger, can you just admit me after that?"
Speaker A
"No, cardiology is coming to see you right now.
Speaker A
Do not go to the cafeteria."
Speaker A
Guess what happened?
Speaker A
People are so crazy.
Speaker A
Why do we try to keep these people alive?
Speaker A
He was like, just one more bite.
Speaker A
Mississippi sidecar, legit true story, patient was admitted to med surge for perforated stoma, the patient told the GI surgeon, "Times are hard, you have to do what you have to do."
Speaker A
As her nurse, I responded, "Sister, times aren't that hard."
Speaker A
A stoma is when they cut a hole in your stomach and they take a piece of your abdomen.
Speaker A
So that poop and piss and digestive stuff can come out of there.
Speaker A
Sometimes because if your digestive system is all fucked up.
Speaker A
They'll poke a hole and stuff will come out.
Speaker A
A Mississippi sidecar is when someone uses that hole to have sex with.
Speaker A
So this patient has a hole in her abdomen and was using it for sex.
Speaker A
I know, it's gross.
Speaker A
When my dad was an ER trauma nurse out of college in the 90s, he found a sandwich in the fat folds of a patient.
Speaker A
And they said, "Oh, that's where my sandwich went."
Speaker A
Let's hope to God this guy never loses his dog.
Speaker A
Sir, there's a reason they're called cold cuts.
Speaker A
You do not need to keep them warm.
Speaker A
This happens all the time, by the way.
Speaker A
We hear stories about this all the time.
Speaker A
Really large patients will lose things under the folds of their skin.
Speaker A
We once found a dead cat.
Speaker A
The cat wasn't very nice, is what I've been told.
Speaker A
I rate patient upset that he paid good money and we gave him his CT and X-ray images, and they were black and white.
Speaker A
What are you expecting, sir?
Speaker A
I replied, "Excuse me, sir, are your bones colored?"
Speaker A
He looked confused, thought about it, and said, "I guess not."
Speaker A
And immediately walked away content.
Speaker A
I was the department hero that day.
Speaker A
Wow.
Speaker A
That is all it took to convince him.
Speaker A
Maybe he secretly knew.
Speaker A
He just needed a reassurance.
Speaker A
I remember this one guy came in and his eyes were so painfully red, apparently, he claimed that aliens kept shooting lasers into his eyes.
Speaker A
And he had been washing his eyes out for hours.
Speaker A
What type of aliens?
Speaker A
Aliens from outer space?
Speaker A
Or aliens from outside of this country?
Speaker A
Build the wall.
Speaker A
Build the wall.
Speaker A
Worked as a paramedic in a level one ED, female patient comes in coding, we take the handover from EMS and start removing the patient's pants.
Speaker A
As the edge of her pubic hair, we see a tattoo of Jimmy Cricket pushing a lawn mower into her bush.
Speaker A
All professional standards were lost while we continued to code the patient.
Speaker A
Now that is a creative tattoo.
Speaker A
Why Jimmy Cricket, first of all?
Speaker A
Patient came into the ER with chief complaint of "Ninjas." Methamphetamine played a key role in him being on the roof of his home and paranoid that the vague images he saw darting between the shadows must be after him.
Speaker A
Quote, "The only thing I could think of was it was ninjas." He called 911 but refused to come down from his roof when police arrived on the scene.
Speaker A
He had to be tased and handcuffed.
Speaker A
What?
Speaker A
If a man calls 911 and is on his own roof.
Speaker A
Are you allowed to tase and handcuff?
Speaker A
He started with, "I know I'm not crazy, I saw what I saw."
Speaker A
While recounting his experience, it changed to, "I don't know, maybe I am crazy."
Speaker A
By the time he finished, he was at, "Fuck it, I am crazy."
Speaker A
Well, you know, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Speaker A
So, good for him.
Speaker A
A patient arrived to the ER concerned that she swallowed an ice cube and hadn't pooped it out yet.
Speaker A
Why would you even think that an ice cube would come out your butt hole like that?
Speaker A
To her credit.
Speaker A
She could see the corn.
Speaker A
Why not see the cube?
Speaker A
The real concern, how often does she poop out ice cubes to notice this?
Speaker A
When I worked in the emergency room, I had a patient check in because a fly flew out her butt hole with her poop.
Speaker A
What is it with people's butt holes?
Speaker A
She was later told by the doctor that isn't physically possible for a live fly to come out with her bowel movement.
Speaker A
Dead fly, maybe.
Speaker A
Live fly?
Speaker A
I don't think so.
Speaker A
It was probably in the toilet bowl when she went to the bathroom.
Speaker A
The patient got so upset that she left to go to another emergency room.
Speaker A
And said she would sue if they found flies in her butt hole.
Speaker A
Well, that is a chance we are willing to take, aren't we?
Speaker A
I feel bad for the fly.
Speaker A
Talk about having a shitty day, huh?
Speaker A
Nothing should come out of your butt hole.
Speaker A
Except for poop.
Speaker A
And possibly corn.
Speaker A
Thank you, everybody, I am currently on tour right now, ticket link and cities are in my bio.
Speaker A
I hope to see you soon, motherfucker.
Speaker A
Bye.
Topics:hospital storiespatient behaviorhealthcare workersmedical misunderstandingsaddictionwithdrawalfunny patient storiesemergency roommental healthmedical humor
