One Redditor decided to ask the community’s doctors and medical professionals what the biggest mistake they ever made on the job was, and the responses will certainly make you wary about your next visit to the hospital. Here are 25 stories of doctors and medical professionals confessing the biggest errors they’ve made or seen that will make you glad you weren’t the patient.
1. What the hell just happened?
I’m a nurse, but I was working in the ER when a guy came in for a scratch on his neck and “feeling drowsy”. We start the usual workups and this dude’s blood pressure TANKED. We scrambled, but he was dead within 10 minutes of walking through the door.
Turns out the “scratch” was an exit wound of a .22 caliber rifle round. The guy didn’t even know he’d been shot. When the coroner’s report came back, we found that he’d been shot in the leg and the bullet tracked through his torso shredding everything in between. There was really nothing we could’ve done, but that was a serious “what the hell just happened” moment.
2. I can’t read doctor
Once as a tired medical resident I was called to the ER to admit someone at like 3am. This bonehead had gall bladder removal a week ago and now had a surgical-site wound infection. I asked if they’d taken their post-op antibiotics they were prescribed, and they weren’t sure.
I was getting more and more frustrated with this bonehead preventing my sleep so I decided to use a “pregnant pause” interview technique, and just shut up. This usually results in either awkward silence and the patient saying “uhh what happened doctor” or awkward silence followed by some useful deep revelation.
In this case the guy hung his head low, looked at his feet through unfocused eyes, started to sniffle while his halting voice cracked “I can’t read. Never could. Didn’t know the instructions they wrote down for me and didn’t know I had medicine to buy. I didn’t ask them because I was embarrassed.”
Illiteracy haunts rural and urban places in most countries. Those folks aren’t reading this, they depend on our patience and understanding to detect and bridge that vast communication gap.
This incident has always stuck with me.
3. HIV positive dead body
I am a pathologist.
Now there is not an exact answer for how long the HIV virus can survive inside a dead body. Probably a matter of days. But at any rate, the patient should of course always be considered infectious at the time of autopsy.
The biggest mistake I ever made was cutting myself while performing a postmortem examination of an HIV infected body.
Lucky for me I did not acquire the virus even though I easily could have.
Anonymous
4. Coronary bypass gone wrong
I am doctor myself, but I am speaking here for a fellow doctor who messed up a coronary bypass.
The average non-medical person just doesn’t understand how certain things happen, and it seems unbelievable that a doctor could do a coronary bypass to the wrong artery unintentionally, by mistake. Like what happened in Dana Carvey’s case. It’s beyond a non-medical person to understand that it’s pretty hard to find a specific vessel at a specific location on the heart with the given time constrains.
I’m impressed this isn’t a more common situation.
Then, after an incident like that, people just think that the doctor should “lose their license for that!” Who cares if that physician has spent 15 years in extremely rigorous training, went hundreds of thousands into debt, and has committed his life to the profession.
My entire identity is partly wrapped into being a physician. That’s like saying a parent who makes a serious parenting mistake should simply lose their children forever (and yes, I am a parent as well). Plus, there are patient privacy laws, non-disclosure arrangements from lawsuits, and a lot of other things. I think malpractice is a wholly flawed concept. A surgeon in the following specialties has a 99% chance of being sued in his career.
5. Crap
My mom just retired from obstetrics and gynaecology, and told me about a time early on in her career when, while not a real medical mistake, she still almost ruined the operation.
She was performing a c-section I think, and she dropped her scalpel on the floor. Before she could think, she blurted out “oh crap!” as a reaction. The mother being operated, thinking something was wrong with the baby, started panicking out of her mind.
It took a team of nurses, the husband, and the mother of the patient to calm her down. Even small mistakes like this can prove punishable for a doctor.
6. Death by pizza
I know of a case on a special ward for immunosuppressed people. In this case, it was someone who had a bone marrow replacement for a rare hematological disease. She was recovering quite well. The ward had positive pressure, airlocks and other safety measures. However, that did not prevent family from sneaking in a pizza from the hospital restaurant without staff knowledge. Now pizza is not the cleanest food there is.
The patient eventually died from an opportunistic infection, because she at that time had no immune system to speak of.
Safety protocols have been updated since.
7. Sorry, wrong tooth.
Hi, a dentist here. I was performing a simple extraction and preparing for the case when I didn’t realize that I had the x-ray flipped the wrong way the whole time. I was viewing the film backwards, and pulled out the wrong tooth. When I realized my mistake I started freaking out, only to find out that by some dumb luck, the tooth I extracted had to go as well.
For the record, this happened in dental school, so safe to say it was a learning experience. It was my first and very last time to make that mistake.
8. I saved the day
I didn’t cause this one but kind of “saved the day” as a resident that was surgically assisting. We were doing a C-section and everything was going well until it was time to take the cord blood. I am to fill up the test tube with blood and the surgeon looks at it in shock, saying the tube has one very large chunk of glass broken off of the rim.
The glass piece is nowhere to be seen. Now there is an open abdomen in front of us with blood clots everywhere, and we’re not sure but there is high probability that the glass piece is somewhere in there. So as safely as possible we are sticking our hands around to try and find this glass. If it is inside the abdomen the chance of even seeing it on Xray is minimal and the glass piece will soon dice up this patients bowels/blood vessels and God knows what else.
After around 3-4 minutes (felt like eternity) I feel an edge of something firm just inside the edge of the incision. I pull up a blood clot with the glass piece inside. It didn’t go into the cavity and all is well.
Surgeon said she’d buy me a drink but never did get it. But that’s okay.
9. I poisoned a guest on my first day of work.
On my first day as a camp nurse for people with intellectual disabilities I gave 9 pills to the wrong guest.
I didn’t know who I was looking for and asked my friend to send out the guest. This guest’s hypochondriac roommate walks out instead, and tells me he is the person I’m looking for. I ask my friend for confirmation. She THOUGHT the correct person had come to me and confirmed from afar that it was, and I administered the meds.
My stomach dropped when the actual person I was looking for came out 12 seconds later! On top of that the hypochondriac roommate had a LOT of drug allergies. Wrong pills are literally poison for such person.
We called poison control and luckily he everything was okay, apart from the fact that he still continued to ask for everyone else’s pills at all times.
I worked there two summers and thankfully had no other disasters like this one.
10.Worst mix up ever
My brother is a surgeon, and during part of his residency, he had to work in the paediatric unit. He was working with two newborns. One was getting much better and fighting for life. He was going to make it just fine. The other baby was hours from death. He wasn’t going to make it. My brother was in charge of informing the families.
My brother realized about 15 minutes later that he had mixed up the families. He told the family with the healthy baby that their baby wasn’t going to make it, and he told the family with the dying baby that their baby was going to be just fine.
He then had to go back out to the families and explain the situation to them. How devastating, I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to in any of the parent or even my brother’s shoes. Worst for the family who lost their baby – to be given a glimmer of hope and have it ripped away from you not even an hour later.
That was most upset I’ve heard my brother. He felt destroyed.
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