We asked the doctors and nurses of the BuzzFeed Community for the worst thing they've ever witnessed in the emergency room. Here are the insane results.
1. This sliced butt cheek:
"I did surgery on a guy who, on his 21st birthday, got drunk and high and decided to sit on the edge of a large fish tank. The glass broke and SLICED OFF HIS ENTIRE BUTT CHEEK! It was bad. There was literally a whole flap of butt meat hanging on by a little bit of skin."
2. This freak accident:
"My mother was a nurse, and a guy came in with his foot SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE – I'm talking, like, between his toes to his ankle. He accidentally ran it over with a tractor."
3. This sex disaster:
"A husband and wife came in, both slightly drunk. The husband had a huge gash on his left butt cheek – we're talking five inches long, two inch wide, six inches deep. Apparently the wife and husband were having sex on their bed, with the husband on top. They rolled over to switch positions, and the he fell off and landed on the ear of a ceramic pig, with the wife falling on top of him."
4. This truly horrifying incident:
"One night a family came in with an eight-year-old boy. He had been at the laundromat with his grandmother and went to get clothes out of the dryer. You know how sometimes when you open the door, it keeps on spinning? When the little boy reached in to get the clothes, his arm got caught in the spinning mechanism and it literally just ripped his arm off. It was a horrifying sight. To this day, I always hesitate when I take clothes out of the dryer."
5. This nasty bug bite:
"A female patient was referred to us from a local hospital. She went camping and was bitten on the butt by an unknown bug. It became inflamed, then infected, and had to be cleaned out, which the ER did a horrible job doing. I assisted the doctor in removing the bandage from this poor woman's ass, only to find a gaping, open, festering wound. The smell was horrendous, and the wound was several inches deep. Now I refuse to go camping."
6. This eye-popping event:
"While working in the ER, a man casually walked in with a butcher knife in his eye socket. He was mugged and stabbed. Luckily it just missed his eyeball."
7. This hidden home:
"My aunt is a nurse and once had a guy come in with pain in his leg. They took him back and discovered a big, infected cut and a bunch of bumps around it. After trying to dig some junk out of it, they found living fly eggs and maggots living inside his infected cut."
8. This lucky frappe:
"A man comes to the ED after putting his scrotum in a blender. Yes, a blender. Why? He said, 'I was drunk, man, and my friend dared me.' He was very lucky and only suffered two minor lacerations."
9. This unfortunate happening:
"I was in the operating room, ready to prep the skin of a severely necrotic foot. As I went to pick up the foot, several toes came off and fell into my hands."
10. This archer's nightmare:
"A patient came in with an arrow through their skull. The arrow was inserted in the space near the upper eyelid and went several inches back into the skull. It was a typical case of 'hold my beer and watch this.' The patient lost vision in that eye but otherwise made a full recovery."
11. This alarming anecdote:
"I was a nursing student at the time when a huge commotion caught my eye. I asked a nurse if I could step behind the curtain to see what was going on. A man had a jet skiing accident and impaled himself on a wooden pole that was about six inches in diameter. The pole went through his groin and into his abdomen. The surgery team tried to form a plan to get it out of the poor guy. I never found out how it ended, but in the five years I've been a registered nurse, I've never seen anything like it!"
12. This cheesy night:
"My brother-in-law was a surgical nurse for 15 years. His favorite story was being involved in the surgical removal of a chunk of cheese out of someone's gastrointestinal tract. It weighed 18 ounces."
13. This frightening narrative:
"A man's fingers on his left hand got caught in a wood saw and were dangling by a few shreds of muscle and skin. The surgeon thought two of the fingers could be saved, however we had to get his wedding ring off his finger first. Since his ring was made of titanium and could not be cut off, this involved using a Q-tip to push bloody fragments of his finger back through the ring to remove it. The man had nerves of steel."
14. This insane story:
"My brother was an ER tech for quite some time, and one story that will always stay with me was about a man who fell in his workshop. He hit the corner of his eye with the workbench, and it popped out! The poor guy came into the ER with his eyeball in a cup!"
15. And this spine-tingling tale:
"A woman recently had her uterus removed and was cleared to resume normal activities. She had sex, felt a pop, and came in with her intestines falling out of her vagina."
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and clarity.