Hospital Staff Share Their Most Astounding Horror Stories

Hospital shifts can be brutal, messy, and far stranger than most people ever realize. Behind the scrubs and steady hands, doctors and nurses are dealing with long hours, unpleasant surprises, and the kind of scenes that can turn a stomach fast.

In this story, hospital staff members are sharing the most astounding horror stories from the job, from disgusting smells to moments that made even seasoned workers pause. It is a reminder that saving lives sometimes comes with a very unglamorous side hustle.

Some of these stories are hard to believe, and a few are hard to forget. "A person thought that pouring Lysol on their diabetic foot ulcer would keep it from getting infected."

"An obese woman returned to the hospital after an abdominal operation because her staples had ripped off, and she didn’t notice (!?!). She now had a huge V-shaped gash at least 2 inches deep from her pubis to the diaphragm. We had to clean that gash a couple of times a day. The first student who went into the room fainted at the sight of it, so our teacher asked me to do it (I had the reputation of being tough). Imagine a small yellow and green river coming out of her each time she moved. The smell was so horrible that we had to open the window and close the door. Sadly, that poor woman died of the infection a couple of days later." "A patient’s extended family physically stopped us from resuscitating a completely limp and unresponsive newborn because helping it breathe, ‘isn’t natural. Labor is natural and requires no intervention.’ The baby eventually and slowly perked up about 15 minutes later. Needless to say, I don’t expect this baby to go to Harvard." "I had a homeless patient come into the dermatology clinic. He had a filthy bedsheet wrapped around his head, with only part of the left side of his face and left eye exposed. You could see the rancid stink coming off of his head. We got him into the exam room and unwrapped his noggin. It turns out he had a basal cell carcinoma (skin cancer) for which he had refused treatment for about 15 years. The cancer had eaten away all of the skin on most of his head. There were very large areas of muscle and bone exposed. The tumor had eaten into his skull, and you could see into his skull as well as his sinuses. His right ear was long gone. I could watch his muscles move and contract while he spoke. It was literally like watching something from The Walking Dead, except there was no sign of infection, maggots, or anything else horrible. It was literally a living, dissected skull talking to us as if it were totally normal. It was simultaneously horrifying and amazing to see."

Hospital work does not always come with a clean ending.

"I walked into the back room with two patients with cerebral palsy (CP). Another client was in the back with FEMA and was mentally disabled. The FEMA client was eating one of the CP client's faces off. Blood was everywhere, and the screaming is enough to stick in my mind forever. A quarter of her face was missing after that." "Bok choy in an adult male’s rectum. He insisted it just, ‘slipped in.’ I removed it, and it had a condom on it." "A story about a quadriplegic guy who had just had an operation. My teacher, another student, and I were taking care of him. The teacher took a washcloth and decided to clean his face, and that’s when it happened. The guy started to eat the washcloth. Yes, eat it. The more he ate it, the more he started to choke on it. The other student panicked. My teacher was pulling on the washcloth with both hands and her knee on the bed to get some grip. Nothing… The guy was still eating it and choking. So I had, probably, the best idea of my life, and I blocked his nostrils with my hand. He couldn’t breathe, so he let go of the washcloth. The three of us were shaking, sweating, and swearing to never put a washcloth near the mouth of someone who just came back from surgery. The funny thing is that I talked to the guy a couple of days later, and he didn’t remember a thing."

This reminds us of Billy Porter, who revealed he was “clinically dead for 3 days” after a sepsis battle.

"Probably the most disgusting time of your medical school career will be your obstetrics and gynecology rotation. You can expect to be splattered with blood/amniotic fluid mixtures on a daily basis, and on a slightly less frequent basis, to be covered in vomit, urine, and feces. For me, the worst was assisting with C-sections. Mostly, as the med student, it would be your job to hold the retractor, which means standing there and pulling on a big metal thing and staying perfectly still. Once they cut into the uterus, the amniotic fluid and blood spill out all over your hands and arms and drip onto your gown and down to your feet. It’s warm, there’s a lot of it, and you can feel it through your gloves, but you can’t move. That’s not really a special occurrence. It’s literally every day for the whole month (or more if you decide you like it, of course). "I walked in on a woman performing oral sex on her husband. She had just delivered a baby 2 hours prior, who was in the NICU. If my husband had asked me to do that even a week after having our baby, I would have punched him in his dick-hole." "The worst day on the job was being the nurse for a pregnant woman who was due the same week as me… I was in the room when the doctor told her that there wasn’t a heartbeat anymore. I sat with her while she cried. Her boyfriend didn’t answer her calls. She was hospitalized for an infection, and I visited her after my shift. I felt so awful that she had to go through that alone. I later found out that my baby had trisomy 13 and I had an abortion. I felt guilty for watching a woman cry over what she couldn’t control and then opting out of a wanted, albeit flawed, pregnancy." "My dad is an ER doctor. Early in his career, he had a big, burly truck driver come into the emergency room and flat out say, ‘Doc, I’ve got a dildo in my ass; you’ve got to get it out.’ So, my dad took him into a room with a nurse accompanying him, had the guy bend over and grab the exam table, and my dad told the nurse to duck when he said so. He grabbed hold of the end of the dildo with those gator clamp things and yanked it out as hard as he could. The nurse behind him never ducked, and a splurge of blood and feces hit her, full-frontal. My dad said the nurse ran out screaming, leaving behind a perfect silhouette against the wall while the dildo flopped around on the floor, still vibrating." "A lady pooped while pushing but didn’t know it. She boldly yelled out, ‘Okay, who farted?!’ That’s awkward." "One day, a lady came in complaining that she was having a lot of pain inside her vagina. So my friend’s aunt went to check what the pain was and ended up pulling out underwear from her vagina. Like, how the heck does someone get underwear stuck in their vagina and not know about it?" "I had a nursing student accidentally stand in the line of fire during a colonoscopy." "There was a guy at 4 a.m. who crashed his car through the gate at the parking lot across the street from the hospital. He shot his way through a door with a shotgun, made his way up to the cardiac floor, and threatened to shoot a nurse in front of a patient if she did not perform oral sex. He then proceeded to shoot himself in the head in the room."

"Here is a list of things I’ve removed from people’s rectums:

- A 750 mL wine bottle, empty.

- Jar of Pace Picante Sauce, half full.

- Grenade

- Nerf football

- Quick-drying concrete

- Hot wheels

- Dildos, dildos, dildos

- A smorgasbord of various vegetables and fruit.

- Tennis ball

- Hamster

- Barbie doll

- Cell phone

- Several pistols

- Pounds of cocaine and heroin

- And my personal favorite: a Nike Pegasus running shoe"

"My grandmother was a nurse: Before Roe v. Wade, women used to come in all the time butchered up and bleeding from coat hangers, too. A guy with diabetic gangrene on his legs started seizing. She held a leg, and it came off in her hands. She helped deliver a 15-month-old fetus – in pieces. A homeless woman with maggots coming out of her vagina." "A guy came into the ER and demanded to be seen but refused to tell anyone why. No one would take him in the back until he did. So, he doused himself with lighter fluid and lit himself on fire."

Want another “what did they actually serve?” nightmare? Read about the restaurant fined $28,000 for insect spray instead of cranberry juice.