31.
Friend of mine is a doctor. Had a christian couple come in and ask why they didn’t get a child. Both virgins untill married at 26 and 27. I mean, they did sleep with each other every night. Sleep.
Pirateviking
32.
I asked a patient complaining of dizziness if she had ever been diagnosed with “vertigo”. The daughter chimed in and said “no, no, she’s a Libra…” I then laughed hysterically at her awesome joke. She was dead serious.
tbmtonada
33.
A woman comes in after having a baby and tells us she’s having trouble breastfeeding. I book her an appointment at a breastfeeding clinic, give her some resources, etc. Her appointment was fine and she went on her merry way. A few weeks later, we get the fax that she went to the breastfeeding clinic and everything was fine. Awesome.
A year later she shows up for her doctor’s appointment, and she’s morbidly obese. She must have put 100lbs on an already obese frame. She’s developed many health problems related to her weight (that she refuses to acknowledge are due to her weight. Of course.) 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. We ask if she’s breastfeeding, she says yes. We ask how she’s getting the extra calories for the breastfeeding, and she tells us the Clinic told her to eat 1-2 bowls of plain oatmeal a day. It worked, so she’s still doing it.
We figure this is how she gained so much weight (she’s probably eating 2 large bowls of oatmeal on top of her meals, with milk, sugar, butter, etc), but the woman insists she’s eating 1-2 packets of plain oatmeal a day. Nothing on it, nothing added to it. It says plain on the package, it tastes plain, it’s plain.
We send the doctor in to see her after 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.
“You never asked what brand of oatmeal she’s eating”.
Yeah. Turns out she didn’t know plain rolled oats were a thing. She thought the breastfeeding clinic meant plain oatmeal cookies. She was eating an entire package of Dad’s 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.
waytoomanychoices
34.
When I bad a colonoscopy, my GI doctor said I said, “wow, now I know what a Muppet feels like!” He had to stop a minute to regain his composure.
SonicGal44
35.
Patient comes in at 2 am for insomnia, clearly tweaking her brains out, heart rate 200. Can’t sit still, bouncing off the walls. I suggest maybe easing up on the cocaine. “But doctor, I LOVE cocaine.” K.
tuki
36.
I had a patient in her 30s complain of monthly rectal bleeding that would last 4-6 days and stop on its own. It started when she was 11. She just thought she should get checked out. It did stop for a while when she was pregnant.
SaintKavorca
37.
I was a newly minted graduate with fresh and optimistic views on my life as a doctor. Second week in came this old lady and her very dysfunctional family.
They would argue and complain about everything, from the food, the nurses they didnt like and every single medical decision we made. She was very very sick so her management was just as complicated.
She had several children and they all didnt like one another and would not talk to one another. Each time we would have to explain a long update to every single one of them because they “are entitled to hear it from a doctor”.
One of these stories being sitting down and explaining why you don’t give gatorade as an IV drip. They did not understand why we were giving “salt water” to her.
Conversation with her son:
“Look she likes gatorade, she is drinking it so why cant you give it to her through her drip?”
We explain why.
Son frowns. “But its isotonic.”
We explain again.
“Yes but gatorade has more electrolytes.”
We explain again.
“Salt water just seems to be too cheap. Cant you give her something else closer to gatorade? That has electrolytes?”
Continues for two hours. Wash and repeat every day during her admission.
Afterwards I told my fiance. He opened up a scene from Idiocracy on youtube and I just sat there with my mouth open for a while.
bunbunmelon
38.
Not a doctor, but I’m a former Special Forces medic and I treated indigenous populations in Iraq, Afghanistan and several other Middle Eastern countries. Some of the patients and their families asked incredible things of me, such as putting brains back inside after an explosion took half the head off, but I have never been as incredulous as when I had to explain “wrong hole” to a very old tribal elder who was wondering why he couldn’t father any children.
FederalFarmerHM
39.
This happened in med school. I was taking the history of a guy in clinic and I asked about his past medical problems, including if he had had any heart attacks.
He responded, “oh yeah, I’ve had about 20 of those.”
“…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.”
“……Uhhhhh, ok……What does it feel like when you have a heart attack?”
“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 afterwards, and I can’t remember much of anything that happens to me until I take a nice long nap.”
The dude was having seizures, and thought that they were heart attacks. They normally stop on their own after a few minutes (at the most), and his wife thought that her massages were curing him.
Neuro_nerdo
40.
I admitted a guy for pneumonia, which was odd because he was young and strapping, no other medical issues, x-ray didn’t look quite right. The pieces just didn’t add up and so I started questioning him more closely.
Me: Do you use any drugs? Patient: Drugs! That’s disgusting. I’m no fucking druggie! I’ve never touched drugs in my life.
I move on to other questions and suddenly:
Patient “Look, doc, I just want you to know I may have used cocaine once or twice years and years ago. I just snorted it though. That wouldn’t cause this, right? Me: How long ago? Patient: Like ten years, maybe longer. Me: It shouldn’t be affecting you after this long. Patient: More like five. Me: Years? Patient: Uh, like five months ago.
This goes on forever, until he admits he just got off a massive crack binge the day before, where he spent the past three days in a hotel with some “loose women” smoking crack non-stop. He finishes with: “But I don’t want you to think I’m one of those dirty druggies.”
No, I think you’re the idiot who lied and was getting treated for pneumonia instead of getting the proper treatment for crack lung, which is what he had.
glumapple
