AskReaders: What are your best/worst stories from your job?

21. I am autopsy tech. It’s not uncommon for cats or small dogs to eat the hands and face off a dead or incapacitated owner. The worst I saw was an elderly woman who was paralyzed, but not killed, by a stroke and her little dog ate all her exposed skin before she was found. I did her autopsy after she died several hours after being admitted to the hospital.

22. I’m a criminal defense attorney. I once had a client charged with murder for essentially getting into a shoving match with a guy. No external bruising or scratching. No evidence of trauma anywhere. They opened his head and found a subarachnoid hemorrhage. It turned out he had a ton of booze and drugs in the tox report. Drugs had constricted the blood vessels and driven the blood pressure up and the booze had thinned the blood out. When he bumped his head slumping back that was all it took and he blew out and was dead in less than a minute. Really sad case.

23. A doctor friend told me an old boy came in with a large laceration on his arm. Suturing it up took over an hour, but can be quite fun as you can chat to the patients. My friend was engrossed talking to him about his experiences in the Second World War and really enjoyed treating him. The old chap was in good spirits throughout and told him lots of interesting stories about his time behind enemy lines or in trenches in Flanders.

After he put the last stitch in, my friend started clearing up and found the local anaesthetic bottle, unopened. He realized he’d not put any local in at all and yet the guy didn’t once flinch leave aside complain. When asked why he didn’t say anything, he just said “oh I thought that’s how it’s supposed to feel. I didn’t mind. Lovely chatting to you”, then walked out. They don’t make ‘em how they used to.

24. ER doctor here. My intern year in residency, I saw a 17 year old kid who, when while playing hockey, tried to stop a puck with a gloved hand. It struck his finger tip, injuring the base of his nail, causing a significant deformity. His nail bed needed repair, which requires first removing the nail. That is done by “bluntly dissecting” (read: separating) the nail from the tissue below it. If your stomach didn’t turn reading that and imagining it, congratulations, you have no soul.

Typically, we use a numbing agent to eliminate sensation to the entire finger using something called a “digital block.” I put it in. After ten minutes, he still felt me touching his finger tip. I tried putting some around the nail. He still felt everything. His mother said his father actually had a similar thing – lidocaine didn’t work on him. I offered him a different numbing medicine (we can inject benadryl in that case) or even knocking him out. He looked at me in the eyes and said “doc, just take it off.”
“Without anything?” “Yeah, it’s fine. They fix our cuts without numbing medicine”. “But it’s going to hurt a lot. I have to scrape…” “I know”

So I went at it. He grabbed a towel with his other hand and I went to work. 45 minutes later, the nail was off, he was repaired, and I replaced the nail in its rightful place. The kid didn’t even make a noise.

25. I’m an ER nurse. I cared for a patient that came in because she woke up with a severe headache and a knot on her head. She went to CT for a head scan and had 2 bullets in her head. One had gone in at the top of her head – just past her hairline and traveled under the skin, but on top of her skull to the back of her head. The other went straight in, but just fractured the skull behind her ear, didn’t go all the way through the skull. They were smaller caliber bullets. Apparently, she went to sleep the night before after taking an Ambien and there was a drive by shooting on her street. The bullets went through her window and she slept right through it.