When doctors wanted patients to die – When you are a doctor, you usually have to see some pretty awful things every day.
After all, being a doctor is all about seeing blood, wounds and even operating those who they don’t want to out of disgust. But as it’s their duty, they have to do every possible thing to save a patient. So, have you ever thought that doctors might think it’s better for a patient to die?
Well, there are some gruesome cases which doctors feel disgusting and they do wish that the patient was dead.
And to figure out just that, we noted out some honest confessions when doctors wanted patients to die.
When doctors wanted patients to die
- When someone with no scalp arrived.
“Dude laid down on the train tracks and was ran over. When the fire department arrived, the patient was fully conscious and was speaking to the firemen from underneath the train. One of his arms laid ~ 50 feet away. Both legs mangled. Scalp gone. Again, fully conscious and speaking. Stayed that way literally until EMS pulled into our ambulance bay and then he coded – too much blood loss. So we pumped him full of blood, got a pulse, and got him out of the ED ASAP.”
- When a knife was coming out of the chest.
“We had a patient with schizophrenia come in one night with Marine KBAR knife buried to the hilt and with the handle sticking out of his left chest.
He was a very sweet and gentle man, but ‘the devil’ had been telling him to stab himself in the heart, and one night he did. He went just little bit high, and the blade slipped perfectly between the large blood vessels coming out the top of his heart. A million to one shot.
After much discussion, x-rays, and more discussion, some brave soul (it wasn’t me) grabbed the knife by the handle and pulled it out. The patient apologized profusely throughout the ordeal for getting us all up in the middle of the night and how he wished he hadn’t listened to the devil.
He got his cut stitched up, some antibiotics, and (I realize this will open me to quite a bit of criticism) I have no idea what happened to him after that – I was doing critical care.”
- Body almost half cut.
“Was working late in the ER when we got a trauma patient. Came in with the title ‘vehicle vs man’ with one of those foil ambulance blankets. Totally alert, answering to his name and doesn’t seem to be in pain.
We take the foil off and the guy is completely cut in half with one leg missing and the other hanging on by the skin. In rectal examination the rectum was nowhere to be found but instead we found a mass there that turned out to be a testicle. NO bleeding whatsoever. Apparently the guy was pinned to the wall by a cement mixer while working construction. Made it out alive with a wheelchair and colostomy bag.”
- Someone cut his own neck with a saw.
“Had a patient who tried to cut his own head off using a table saw while on the phone with his sister. HEMS picked him up, intubated him via his completely transected trachea and held the tube in manually for the 60 min flight to the hospital. There was so much soft tissue damage to his neck, they couldn’t secure the tube anywhere. Just a big jumbled mesh of open flesh. He was awake and coughing when he arrived in the ED, his trachea rhythmically jumping out of the giant hole in his neck due to the irritation from the tube. We anesthetized him, he went to the OR and had no damage to any vessels. Got a trach and was awake post op.”
- 17 bullet holes in one body.
“Trauma ER in the murder capital of the world. A lady comes in in a wheelchair with several bullet wounds. I suit up to assist the surgeon and orthopedic surgeon. After 13 hours we counted 17 bullet holes and we removed 10 bullets from chest and abdomen. Spleen removed, half of liver removed, 40cm of small intestine removed, uterus removed, left leg removed, double thoracostomy tube. No bullets touched the heart, large vessels or bigger respiratory bronchi. She woke up after two days and we were able to communicate via eye movement. We lost her to sepsis in the tenth day.”
- Four overdoses in a week.
“I’m in PA school. Had a patient on my ER rotation in his 50s came in as a heroin overdose. A significant amount of the heroin during that summer in my area had been laced with fentanyl.
Per the patient’s chart, this was his fourth overdose…. this week.
I ended up having to tell him that the heroin he had at home ‘wasn’t the same as normal heroin’ and he looked very hurt that his ‘friend’ gave him dangerous heroin.”
- Harpoon in his neck.
“Saw a patient with a harpoon through his neck. Somehow it missed all major blood vessels and bones so he’s actually conscious and talking.”
These are the confessions when doctors wanted patients to die – Don’t you think it would have been too hard to handle for these doctors? Well, we can totally imagined when doctors wanted patients to die at that point of time.
