47 Shockingly Dumb Patients That Had Me Going "Doctors And Nurses Are NOT Paid Enough" - BuzzFeed

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“That’s right, folks. Instead of getting a vaccine, she just ate laundry detergent instead, because ‘ There’s not enough research. ’ ”

I'm a Senior Staff Writer based in New York City, where I've been covering classic BuzzFeed-style content since 2020.

Recently, we wrote about the dumbest patients medical professionals encountered, and now we're back with more from the BuzzFeed Community. Here are 47 more patients that were so, so, soooo misinformed.

We also used replies from the original Reddit threads along with these ones.

"My mom worked at a major hospital and heard the story of a guy who called the emergency line saying that he'd accidentally stabbed himself in the torso with a knife while cutting something. Their first piece of advice was to not remove the knife, to which he replied, 'What do I do if I DID remove it?' and they gave him instructions. When the ambulance arrived, they found the man with the knife in his torso...yep, he put it back in."

"When I worked as a medical assistant in an OB-GYN clinic, a patient called to make an appointment because she 'needed a fallopian tube.' I was so confused, I asked her if she meant that she wanted to get her tubes tied. 'No,' she said, 'I'm trying to get pregnant, so I need to get a fallopian tube.' Definitely booked a visit for pregnancy planning education session."

"ICU doc. I have had patients' families with massive strokes legitimately ask if they could receive a brain transplant."

"I was moonlighting in an ER at a big Army base. The corpsman woke me around 3 a.m. for a patient. I knew from the vital signs that this little 3-month-old baby was not sick, so I asked his mother what the problem was. Quote: 'He's laughing inappropriately.' I had to ask even though I knew the answer: 'Is this your first child?'"

"Radiology told me about handing orange earplugs to a patient for an MRI, and he popped them in his mouth and swallowed them."

"A patient had to be prescribed some pills before his eye surgery. He returned five minutes after his consultation, super concerned, as he didn't know how he was going to get the pills into his eyes. Our nurse suggested that he try swallowing them."

"My sister is a nurse in a children's hospital. She had a 15-year-old patient that had put those little magnetic beads inside his penis. He had something like 85 of them jammed in there, so much so that he had pushed them into his bladder, and they had gotten looped around in there and required surgery. He didn't realize (for some reason) that his bladder was attached to his urethra and 'just wanted to see what it'd feel like.' She also had another young patient who got a fidget spinner stuck on his penis."

"I work in an ER. I had a patient come in because there was a cockroach crawling on her ear. I assumed she was worried it had crawled inside, which we often see. Turns out she pushed it off her ear and saw it on the floor, so she knew it wasn’t inside. So she basically came to the ER because a bug was crawling on her."

—Anonymous, 40 Female, Midwest

"I'm a physical therapist and had a 60-something-year-old patient with a history of bilateral knee replacements 10+ years ago who said she may not be able to come to PT consistently since it was winter. I asked why, and she said she was told she couldn't go out in cold weather because her knee replacements would freeze and she would have to go to the ER to have them thawed out. I told her that's not a thing, and she was doubtful. I hope there are some thawing stations at the local hospital, 'just in case.'"

—Anonymous, 45, female, Pennsylvania

"Nurse here. We had a patient who'd had a severe stroke, resulting in no brain activity. We went to the waiting room to inform his rather large family of his condition, and to discuss the possibility of organ donation. They huddled together for a few minutes, and then his son came forward and, in a very serious and solemn voice, told us that he was volunteering to donate his brain. You can't make this shit up."

—Anonymous, 69 female, Irvine CA