Gobsmacked Doctors Share Stories About the Stupidest Patients Ever

The whole time we were there, she kept saying she was dying and why wouldn’t we help her. OB telling her she was in labor and to push each time she felt pain.

She kept yelling ‘It’s just gas! I’ve had gas for a while, but it won’t come out because I’m dying!’ Fast-forward to baby coming out.

The nurse places the baby on her chest and says, ‘Well, here’s your gas.

This patient starts insisting to meet the doctor when it seemed like the consult was wrapped up.

So we get him back in there, thinking maybe she’s got another question. The patient says, ‘I still want to meet the doctor.’

And the doctor points at himself and says, ‘I’m the doctor.’

Doctor: ‘You’ve already met the resident.

I’m the doctor doing your procedure.’

Patient: ‘No, not you! I want to meet the robot that’s going to do my surgery!

I feel like we should at least shake hands first!’

Apparently, the patient was expecting some metal man to walk through the door.

Awesome.

A year later she shows up for her doctor’s appointment, and she’s obese. She must have put 100 pounds on an already obese frame.

She’s developed many health problems related to her weight. She tells us she’s never been more active after having a kid; her diet hasn’t changed, her work life hasn’t changed, nothing has changed, the weight gain just happened due to hormones.

It worked, so she’s still doing it.

We figure this is how she gained so much weight (she’s probably eating two large bowls of oatmeal on top of her meals, with milk, sugar, butter, etc.), but the woman insists she’s eating one to two packets of plain oatmeal a day.

We send the doctor in to see her afteår briefing him on the whole story about the oatmeal.

He’s in the room with her a long time — much longer than normal. When she comes out of the room, she keeps her head down and walks off, looking angry and embarrassed.

The doctor walks up to the nursing table and fills out the chart.

It turns out she didn’t know plain rolled oats were a thing. She thought the feeding clinic meant plain oatmeal cookies.

She was eating an entire package of oatmeal cookies every single day for a year (basically a ‘bowl or two’ filled with cookies), and could not understand how that was different from oatmeal.”

The infection wasn’t going away so she took antibiotics for a long amount of time. She somehow got her hands on a blood glucose machine and must have had a reading that was slightly low one day because all of a sudden she started buying bags and bags of jelly beans because ‘the infection is making my blood sugar go dangerously low,’ (we tested it, it wasn’t).

She is testing her blood glucose on average 20 times a day and taking about 250gm of pure glucose, at least, plus supplementing with lollies from the supermarket for some variety.

She’s put on ~15kg in the last month or so and will definitely end up with diabetes soon.

But it got worse.

In exasperation, the doctor said to her (in her 3rd appointment that month) ‘You should count yourself lucky, there are people far worse than you that can’t even get out of bed.’

One day he was brought into the emergency department by his mom because he was dumping too much liquid stool into his bag.

He was adamant that it was not actually due to his uncontrolled diabetes, his enormous and continual sugar intake, his refusal to use insulin, or his refusal of treatment for the giant infected wounds on both feet.”

I looked at her trying hard not to laugh. She only took them right after the act, ‘So, like, maybe a couple of times a week…'”

The doctor sat the husband down, and they took a medical history.

No serious medical problems and she was very fit. In fact, she spent the morning cleaning her son’s bar, as she often did on a Sunday morning.

Considering her age, they took these symptoms seriously and started running tests to find the source of her ailments.

The son, the apple of his parents’ eye, had to then explain to his father and the doctor that the treats she had enjoyed were space cakes.

And apparently, she enjoyed them as she ate quite a few.

For six months, the patient must meet with a psychiatrist and a dietitian to understand what they’re getting into and if they can adjust their lifestyles and commit.

A goal weight loss target is usually set for the end of the six months to ensure the patient is serious.

So after all of this rigorous evaluation, a patient is deemed fit for the operation.

I checked her chart, BMI before surgery was 40, she was morbidly obese and now had come in for her first follow up to ascertain if she’d lost any weight.

Well, I put her on the scale, calculate, and what do I see? Her BMI was now 45. Perplexed, I asked her to explain her diet to me.

Sylvia: ‘Well I’ve been doing a liquid diet just like you all said.’

Sylvia: ‘I make smoothies and have them whenever I feel hungry.’

Me: ‘So what do you put in your smoothies?’

Sylvia: ‘Cake and ice cream.’

Yup. She was serious. Somehow it didn’t occur to her that this wouldn’t be healthy.

Anyway, he’d been told to take Nexium twice a day and cut back on the drinking, as well as follow up with a GI doctor, but he had done none of those things.

So, yeah, guy ignored the medical diagnoses and recommendations he was given and instead decided he had stomach cancer and treated himself by taking his mother’s chemotherapy pills.

He wasn’t sure what kind of cancer his mom had. I tried to explain that different cancers require different medications, that chemotherapies are the most toxic medications we made and might kill him.

‘…you’ve had 20 heart attacks??’

‘Yup’

‘Which doctor(s) did you see about them? Do you have a cardiologist?’

‘Nah, I never went to a doctor. My wife is a massage therapist, and whenever a heart attack hits, she starts to massage some pressure points and it stops.’

‘I don’t ever remember them. My wife tells me that I fall onto the floor and my arms and legs start jerking.

She says it takes about a minute of her massaging before it stops. I then get really confused and tired afterward, and I can’t remember much of anything that happens to me until I take a nice long nap.’

They normally stop on their own after a few minutes (at the most), and his wife thought that her massages were curing him.”

We quickly ruled that out through their med records and assured her that her baby didn’t contract AIDS randomly.

As we finished examining the baby it started to cry so we handed it to her mother. Lo and behold she pulls out a baby bottle to get the baby to stop crying…only this baby bottle is red and is filled with Kool-Aid.

She refused to believe what we said. ‘I was raised on Kool-Aid and look at me I’m fine.’

Man the south side of Chicago is a completely different world.”

It turns out it was a substance that contained sulfuric acid.

Its pH was less than 2.5… Shortly after he gets to the ICU he is in excruciating pain and vomiting blood.

The gastroenterologist took him to do an EGD (basically a procedure where they can look at the esophagus, stomach and duodenum with a camera attached to a flexible tube) and the pictures were horrendous.

He had to be sent off to another hospital where they had an esophageal surgeon who could repair the mess.

He, of course, needed multiple surgeries and had a very long hospital stay. I saw him a few months later when he was admitted for another issue.

He was down to 90 lbs (from about 150) and was getting fed through a PEG tube.

She was distraught.

I went into the examination room with her and she explained her situation to the doctor and showed him her arm.

The doctor just licked his thumb and rubbed her arm.

So, two guys are attempting to lay hardwood flooring. They have no clue what they are doing, but what the heck.

They rip up the old flooring, lay down some plywood and start to lay down their nice antique hardwood boards.

At this point, they have an issue. How does one find the studs in the floor when they are covered by the larger plywood panels?

There are so many issues at this stage that it is amazing. I have no clue why they thought this plan was a good idea.

So tempting to start smacking them around at this point… but had to be professional and just let them keep going.

They know the nail missed the beam (there is a hole to prove it) but can not locate the nail.

Oddly enough, the patient was fine.

The nail grazed his skull and entered the skin, then settled behind his ear. It was a very sore bump.

Great x rays, couldn’t keep them.”

He Swallowed A Spider To Catch A Fly

The doctors x-rayed his abdomen and found that there was no obstruction in his bowels at all. He had imagined the entire the entire thing, and there was never a pill bottle up his butt in the first place.

This man had used a screwdriver to remove an imaginary pill bottle from his butt, which caused rectal bleeding and a lot of other nonsense.

Also, his wife was sitting in the room the entire time.

They said that he was so casual about the entire thing, and his wife was just sitting there stonefaced.