Surgeons shared scary stories from their practice (19 photos)

A surgeon is not just a profession, it is a calling to save lives. It's no secret that difficult situations are not uncommon in their practice. On the Reddit page, surgeons talk about the scariest moments they have experienced with their patients and the times they made mistakes during operations.







"I'm a medical student. I was observing a knee operation when the surgeon suddenly stopped, looked at the staff dumbfounded and asked, 'Is this the wrong knee?'" Basically, he was told to operate on the wrong knee and halfway through he realized it. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage, the team stitched up and took care of the other knee.”





“When I was in residency, my first independent operation was a spinal operation on a 16-year-old girl. At the end, after 13 hours, I was putting stitches and accidentally tore the dural sac - I tore the thin membrane where all the nerves meet. And then it ruptured , and the nerves just spilled out of him, the cerebrospinal fluid flowed out. I was overcome with wild horror. I knew that I had to cope with this. I counted to five and returned to work."



"While still in residency, I did kyphoplasty. During this procedure, bone cement is injected into a broken vertebra using a needle. So, one time I incorrectly determined the length of the needles and installed one of them so that it could rupture the aorta or vein. As soon as I "I realized my mistake, immediately took the needle out, and then spent the longest five minutes of my life with the anesthesiologist checking that my blood pressure remained stable."



“When we opened the abdominal cavity of a woman about 20 years old, the operating room smelled of rotting flesh. The indications for surgery were severe pain and a feeling of hardness in the abdomen. It turned out that the patient had developed multiple organ failure, and the tissues began to rot. For 20 seconds, the surgeon looked at stomach, and then said: “I think that the pressure in the abdominal cavity is the only thing that provides her with blood pressure.” The girl died on the operating table. She used methamphetamine in large doses. and it spread through her body like wildfire."



“My father was admitted to the hospital with chest pain, they decided to do an angiography. Contrast was introduced, my father was lying under the machine, and the surgeon suddenly asked: “Are you okay...feeling good?” Have there been any loss of consciousness?" He replies: "No, only pain." Several more doctors come in and look at the screen. They take the father to another machine and again look in bewilderment, without explaining anything. "You have a blood clot the size of with a golf ball. It hits the valves, we thought they couldn’t live with that.”

My father was given a super-strong drug to remove blood clots, and many specialists came. Everything went well and a few months later he had a triple bypass. That was 30 years ago, now my father is 87 years old and can climb steep slopes with ease."



"I have a lot of stories. There was an 80-year-old man who shot himself in the chest. The surgeons and I fought to stabilize him, but could not understand why blood continued to ooze from him. Then we found out that before he shot himself intentionally overdosed on blood thinners."



“A 45-year-old man was admitted in a private car (he was brought by relatives, not an ambulance) with a head injury. We realized how bad it was when we noticed a plastic bag on the patient’s stomach. It contained brains, which relatives managed to collect in the hope that we can implant them."



"He was a 30-year-old methamphetamine addict with a catheter in his chest through which he was injecting drugs for pulmonary hypertension. He was admitted to the emergency room with a crisis. It turned out that he was injecting methamphetamine into the catheter."



"It was my first day of work in the surgical department. A middle-aged woman was admitted, unconscious, pale, possibly with internal bleeding (she had been stabbed several times in the abdomen). We opened the abdominal cavity, trying to find the source of the bleeding. A few minutes later we We were able to stabilize her condition and check each segment of her intestines for bleeding. We found several, cauterized them and stitched them up. When we were stacking the intestines, my senior resident decided to look under them again, and accidentally hit a large artery (most likely, it was there in the first place). slightly damaged), bleeding began.

We had to call the chief surgeon, although he was on vacation. He calmly explained to us what to do. I was very scared. I thought the patient was going to die. We were able to control the bleeding with aggressive cauterization and suturing. I definitely won't forget this."



"My father was referred for surgery with an umbilical hernia. What appeared to be a hernia was actually stage 4 cancer starting in the appendix. For several years, my father lived with the belief that he had a hernia, but waited for it to start hurting, before you do anything."



"I'm a veterinarian and we do quite a lot of surgeries. Mistakes happen all the time. From cut blood vessels to ruptured skin/organs. Most of them are minor. Of course, I've heard stories of males being mistakenly spayed and having an incision made through the peritoneum. And Amputations of the wrong limbs also happen. Sometimes patients “forget” surgical instruments.

My biggest mistake was breaking a small bone while setting another fracture. Anything can happen. We are addressing these issues and learning lessons."



"A healthy 23-year-old man presented to the emergency department with chest pain. Normal vital signs, never smoked, normal chest x-ray. The pain began after he ate something spicy. We told him it was most likely In total, GERD. Five minutes later he drops dead. We begin artificial respiration and check his pulse, they do a CT scan, they find an aortic dissection, and then he dies.

The guy just burst a large blood vessel. This happens to men in their 70s with a long history of smoking and high blood pressure. This healthy 23-year-old guy had absolutely no risk factors."



"I am a medical student. I had to observe the procedure for replacing the pacemaker wires on a 60-year-old woman. When the patient was under anesthesia, she told everyone that she had smoked crack the day before. The procedure had to be rescheduled to allow the cocaine to leave her system."



"About 20 years ago, when I was working as a veterinary technician, a small dog was brought in for surgery because he hadn't peed in a few days but was otherwise healthy. So they put him to sleep and prepared him for surgery. The dog is lying on the table, and he the bladder is filled like a water balloon with only old urine. And, of course, like a good water balloon, with the slightest pressure it burst on me and the doctor. So, I am in shock, dripping from my face and covering my clothes. protection. We sewed up the bladder and set it back."



“I was a medical student doing an anesthesiology internship. In the morning I went to see a patient who was about to undergo surgery. On my way back to briefing, I meet a nurse who tells me that the patient was given a full dose of anticoagulants the night before because the surgeons forgot to stop it. If I hadn't recognized this and administered an epidural, the woman could have started bleeding in her spine and become paralyzed."



"I'm a surgeon, and I also do litigation. Now, most mistakes in surgery aren't due to someone slipping and accidentally cutting the wrong thing, although that can happen when anatomy, such as the bile ducts, is misidentified when removing a gallbladder (a surprisingly common mistake) These are usually errors in decision making, such as timing surgery. even if this is the case, can it be treated non-operatively since the patient is weak and may not survive surgery.”



“The guy was wounded in the chest and was dying before our eyes. We opened his chest and stopped the pulmonary hemorrhage. A day later the patient was talking to me, and two weeks later he returned home to his newborn baby.”



"I am a surgeon. A young guy, 21 years old, was admitted at 3 a.m. with a stab wound. He waited several hours before he decided to seek help, laughed, joked, brought his whole family: mom, dad, brothers, friends. It was a serious injury, and we immediately took him to the operating room, where he lost consciousness. We began to resuscitate him, but he did not come to his senses. A final attempt was made - manual cardiac massage: they open the chest and manually pump the heart to start it up. hit the abdominal aorta, and it burst - liters of blood spilled onto the floor.

Friends were eating pizza, laughing and having fun in the waiting room when we had to tell them about the guy's death. All hell broke loose; they forced their way into the department. I had to call security and the police. The brother saw the deceased and shouted: “You killed him! He came here, whistled as if nothing had happened, and you killed him for his organs!”