18 Scary Moments Surgeons Had During An Operation

"A 45-year-old came in via private car (family drove him in, rather than an ambulance) after what was described as a 'head injury.' We realized how bad it was when someone noticed a plastic grocery bag lying on the patient's belly. It contained the brains that the family managed to scoop up, in the hopes that we could re-implant them."

BuzzFeed Staff

Warning: This post contains mentions of drug abuse, suicide, and graphic surgical details that may be unsettling.

"Luckily, there was no permanent damage done, the team reknit everything together, and rescheduled the surgery."

—u/Icnaredef

"I knew I had to deal with it. So, I just made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that's all I was going to give it. I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then, it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up, and she was fine."

—u/bugspotter

"But I definitively had the feeling that I used my wildcard there and that I will never be again so lucky in the future. Anyway, now I am super careful when doing this, and I keep telling this story to my residents to teach them."

—u/astral_slide

"The smell enveloped the room instantly, anesthesia was gagging, and I ran to grab the peppermint oil to rub on our masks. The surgeon looked at the abdomen for about 20 seconds and said, 'Well, anesthesia I think she’s about to crash. I imagine this pressure in the abdomen was the only thing giving her any blood pressure.'

She did crash, and she died there on the table. This young woman had been an extremely heavy meth user; her mom had started her out using meth with herself when the girl was a teenager. They figured she probably got a bloodstream infection from injections with dirty needles, and that just spread through her body like wildfire. I'm the OR nurse that was present for the case. I wasn’t in charge of any diagnostic testing or any preoperative/emergency care."

—u/mcnew

"So, they give him super strong clot busters, but they were concerned it might shrink enough to get jammed. A lot of experts turned up. All went well, and he had a triple bypass a few months later. That was 30 years ago; he's 87 now and can walk with ease up steep hills."

—u/monkeypowah

—u/pdxdaj

"Medicine is a lot of things. Sometimes it's just tragic."

—u/pdxdaj

"Reminded me of that famous scene from The Shining. We had to call the chief surgeon stat, even though he was on vacation, but he answered and was calm and told us what to do in a calm manner via the phone. I was so scared — really thought the patient was a goner when I saw that massive hemorrhage happen before my own eyes. We were able to control the bleeding by a combination of aggressive cautery and some pressure and suturing. Definitely something I won't forget. The patient was able to live, and I was able to talk to her a few days later as she recovered in the ICU bed, but man, that was a wild experience in the operating room. One of the more action-packed days as a medical student. (I'm now a graduate, planning to land a residency somewhere this cycle.)"

—u/ghost_haha

"This was really saddening as my father had believed he had the hernia for several years, but waited until it started hurting before doing anything about it."

—u/whalefromabove

"Fortunately, for me, the biggest surgical mistake is probably a suture slipping when removing an organ resulting in minor internal bleeding — it's fairly easy to find the bleeder and get things stopped rather quickly. Or, having a small bone break when repairing another fracture. Things happen. We address it and learn from it for all future patients."

—u/WildlifeDoc

"The guy's major blood vessel basically just exploded. This happens to men in their 70s with a long smoking history and high blood pressure. This healthy 23-year-old had absolutely zero risk factors for this (no evidence of Marfan syndrome or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome for the med people reading this). Still makes no sense to me."

—u/crazycarl1

"Then, when the attending called the sister of the patient to let her know the results and any precautions they had to take, the sister asks the doctor 'if her sister could smoke again.' Because the phone was on speaker, the entire room just facepalmed."

—u/sirmaddox1312

"This was a vet office in Alabama. We didn't use PPE, except I desperately need PPE at that moment. We cleaned up the dog, got the ruptured bladder repaired, and stitched him back up. I'm pretty sure that was the moment when I decided my childhood dream of being a vet wasn't quite as glamorous as I thought."

—u/BigCrawley

"It’s hard as a medical student to know your place and when to speak up; you’re surrounded by professionals, and when you see something like a full therapeutic dose of anticoagulants on the patients drug list, you don’t want to question it because surely everyone above you knows what they are doing? The consultant I was working with told me there have been stories of medical students not speaking up when surgeons have started operating on the wrong side, giving drugs where it is contraindicated, etc., and they have known."

—u/yagokoros

"Despite time-outs (everyone verbally agreeing to the demographics, operation, allergies, laterality, etc.) before starting, double counting instruments and surgical sponges, and even RFID-embedded instruments and surgical sponges, surgeon marking of the site, and patient marking of the site, objects get left behind, and wrong sides get operated on, still. The field has not figured out how to get that number to zero. As you can imagine, ORs can be extremely busy and complicated places. I'm super paranoid about these types of errors since I’ve done research and litigation work in them, but the mistakes that haunt me are the ones regarding decision-making — particularly waiting too long to operate on someone because you're trying to decide if they truly have the diagnosis that you suspect, or even if they do, if it can be better managed non-operatively because they are a poor surgical candidate and might die from the operation anyway. But it’s tough because you can’t just make a personal policy — like, in 'X' situation, I’m always going to operate!' just to avoid the mistake of waiting. Because you will have performed morbid procedures on more patients that required it. This is also why pure algorithms or objective data from labs and imaging studies, even with machine learning, can’t always make the right decision. There are subtle, nuanced factors that experience, instinct, feeling out what the patient wants, and guessing what will cause more damage (operating or not operating) that play into it."

—Anonymous

"Another guy got stabbed in the neck and had low pressure when he arrived. As we give him blood, he starts pouring it out of his neck. I am holding pressure hard as we run to the OR. Transected his jugular vein. He lived.

Another guy got shot in the chest. Initially, he was OK, but then he starts dying in front of us. We crack open both sides of his chest and clamp his lung where the blood was leaking from. He was talking to me a day later; he went home to see his newborn two weeks later."

—u/brawnkowskyy

"Meanwhile, his friends were having a pizza party in the waiting room, laughing and having a good ol' time when we had to tell them he died. All hell broke loose, and they stormed the ER by force. Security and police were called, and punches were thrown. His brother got a glimpse of him and yelled, 'You killed him! He came in, walking, whistling like nothing, and you guys murdered him for his organs!' Punches were thrown, and people were tased. Good times…"

—u/Yellow_filletofish

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.