If you love — or hate to love — medical shows like Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs, then we found the thread for you. Reddit user u/TheFatDuck_YT asked surgeons to share "the most fucked-up thing" they've seen in someone's body, and these are some of the top-voted replies:
1. "A guy put a cucumber down his throat and it broke off, so he couldn’t pull it back out. He came in with his wife."
2. "We found a bezoar — giant hair ball — in the exact shape of a stomach. Turns out, the patient worked at a hair salon and was eating OTHER PEOPLE’S HAIR."
3. "Surgeon here. A trauma patient fell on a steel rebar and it went in one side of his chest and out the other side. It somehow missed his heart, esophagus, and major arteries. We removed it with no critical injuries."
4. "Cement. I work in dermatology and had a couple of women come with cement injected into their faces, and they didn’t know why they couldn’t feel their faces or do certain facial expressions. And yes, they wanted a discount dermatologist, so they went to Mexico."
5. "Neurosurgeon here. A guy came into the hospital with a three-day headache out of nowhere. Head CT showed a large nail through the anterior skull base — above the nose, between the forehead. When asked about it, he said he had been using a pneumatic nail gun a couple of days before. He remembered a moment when he didn’t brace the gun right and it rebounded, hitting him in the face. It must have fired a nail when the end hit him in the face and he didn’t realize it. He indeed did have a small wound in his cheek that fit with the story. Luckily, the nail avoided the large blood vessels and other critical structures in the brain. We had to take him to surgery in order to pull it out."
6. "A cherry pit from the sinus of a man who'd stuck it up his nose 40 years earlier. Surprisingly, his lifelong problem with the right side's sinus drainage was resolved."
7. "I'm a dental surgeon. We had two men come into reception, one of whom had a snooker ball in his mouth. The man who didn't explained that they'd been at the snooker club down the road and his friend bet someone £50 that he could fit a snooker ball in his mouth. He won the bet, then realized he couldn't get it out. We had to sedate him and dislocate his jaw to remove it."
8. "I'm a former ER tech. We had an older gentleman come in with a mayonnaise jar up his ass that he'd filled with water and a goldfish."
9. "Had a lad dropped off in the ER with a crossbow bolt stuck in his upper thigh. His story was that he was walking through a local park with his loaded crossbow and tripped, shooting himself in the thigh."
10. "I have a nurse friend who showed us an X-ray of a shampoo bottle up a dude's ass once, so that was cool."
11. "A man came into my clinic with really bad stomach pains, so I felt around his stomach and gave him an X-ray. What I found was two pool balls and key cars. I asked how this happened, but all I could get out of him was that he was super, blackout drunk."
12. "Saw a man who was 80-plus years old with a pill bottle up his ass. He swore he didn’t know how it got there."
13. "Worked in a children’s hospital years ago. The strangest incident I saw was a young girl who ate rocks. She ate so many that her bowels became backed up."
14. "Not a surgeon, but a paramedic. I took a roofer into the hospital after he fell off the roof on a hot day toward the end of the day. We heard a buzzing the entire time and had no idea what was going on. They took him straight to X-ray when we got there, and he had a massive vibrating butt plug inside him."
15. "I saw a dozen glass teardrop pendants from an antique chandelier in the stomach of a child."
Now I'm curious: Regardless of whether you're a doctor, nurse, tech, or patient, what is the strangest thing that ever happened to you in a hospital? Let us know in the comments.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.