Recently, Reddit user Musikcookie took to the popular Ask Reddit page to ask doctors, “What was the wildest self-diagnoses a patient was actually right about?” Medical professionals of all types (and some patients, too) wrote in some truly wild answers. Here are some of the most fascinating:
1.“Patient here. I told my family GP (who I’d seen since I was a kid, and who worked with and saw both my parents as patients for years) that I thought I had reactive hypoglycemia.”
“He scoffed. ‘You don’t have that. Why would you think you have that?’
I told him my symptoms. He was doubtful, but told the nurse to get me a Coke, and made me chug it. Sent me to roam around the hospital for a little bit, then get bloodwork and come back.
I came back, and his first words were ‘This is so aggravating.’
‘Does…that mean I have it?’
‘YES THAT MEANS YOU HAVE IT.'”
Filmstudio / Getty Images
2.“A woman in her 40s came in and told me she was having seizures. I asked how she knew, and she said her right hand would periodically stiffen.”
“There was no loss of consciousness or other symptoms more associated with classic seizures, but I ordered tests anyway.
Turns out she had been having multiple focal seizures.”
3.“I work as a medical lab tech. We had a patient who came in insisting that her neighbor was poisoning her. Everyone dismissed her assuming she had some kind of paranoid psychosis.”
“She remained in the ER on a psych eval. I ran all the standard labs on her and they were normal, but this patient would not budge. She was admitted to psych on a hold.
At that point, one of the hospitalists said, ‘Why not?’ and ordered labs to test for several heavy metals and ethylene glycol. Her ethylene glycol level was 32. THIRTY TWO. I don’t know if she was legitimately being poisoned by her neighbor or if it was self-induced, but damn, that patient taught me a very important lesson that day.”
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4.“I’m a nurse, and just had a patient who came in for a colonoscopy due to constipation and pain with bowel movements. He told me prior to the test he felt like there was something ‘catching’ on the left side of his abdomen when he pooped.”
“He was like, ‘Maybe I have a big polyp there or something.’ Sure enough, he ended up having a 2.5 cm polyp that we removed from that exact area.
I’ll never get to find out if that catching sensation ever went away for him, but I thought it was interesting that he was right.”
Channel 4, BBC Two
5.“I knew my partner had leukemia about a week before I could convince him to go to the doctor. He was bleeding and bruising really easily and had petechiae. I wanted to go to urgent care where I knew the CBC was done quickly onsite, but he instead wanted to wait to go to his primary care doctor.”
“I took him to his primary and had a bag packed for the hospital in the trunk. The doctor told him it was likely a B-12 deficiency but that he’d do bloodwork to put my mind at ease anyway. I asked if the CBC was done onsite or not, and he said it was sent out.
I asked if he planned to rush the CBC. He got very angry and said, ‘There is nothing the CBC could show that would change my treatment plan.’ Then he told my partner he needed to stop me from googling.
We got a call that night from the lab that his white blood cell count was dangerously high and platelets were dangerously low, and I had to immediately take him to the ER. I did, and he was diagnosed with acute leukemia.”
Nemes Laszlo / Getty Images
6.“I had a patient who came into the emergency department with vague mild abdominal pain whose friend had recently died of colon cancer. She was convinced she must have it too.”
“I told her cancer wasn’t contagious like that, but she was so insistent that I ordered a CT scan in order to reassure her. Lo and behold, she had a huge colon mass. Very bizarre case.”
7.“I’m a phone triage RN for a family practice. We had a woman in her early 60s, who we talked to often, call one time in a near panic attack, convinced she had terminal cancer.”
“Super nice lady, but high anxiety. Really not in terrible health otherwise. She wasn’t even feeling unwell and had the vaguest set of symptoms.
I scheduled her the same day with her PCP, who ordered a CT of her abdomen to hopefully help alleviate her concerns… Nope. Metastatic pancreatic cancer. She was dead within 6 weeks. I’ll never forget taking her initial call and trying to calm her down.”
Dragos Condrea / Getty Images
8.“‘I’m going to die’ — a spot-on diagnosis from a woman right before she went into cardiac arrest. That was eerie.”
9.“[This is about me as a] patient, but I work in healthcare. I had pain in my right leg, specifically my glute. It progressed to lightning-like pain down my leg, pins and needles. I assumed I had fluid or a mass crushing my sciatic nerve, and after a week of rapidly increasing pain, assumed it was an abscess.”
“So I started feeling septic. Went to the ER, and they refused me and sent me up to the primary ward. They immediately sent me back down to the ER and ordered a CT —lo and behold, I had 500 mL abscess under my muscle crushing the nerves in my right leg.”
Nathan Devery / Getty Images
“Before my second surgery, my specialist refused to believe they drained that much from me, and I had to show photos as proof. He said and I quote, ‘If there had been that much you’d be in the Guinness Book of World Records.'”
Person with hair tied back wearing a button-up shirt is looking down, seated in a kitchen setting
Person drinking from a white cup in a kitchen, wearing a casual white shirt
E!
“He called in other doctors and nurses to review my photos and case afterward. 😑”
10.“Not the patient himself, but his mom. This child was 18 months old and was admitted due to constipation. We were giving him medicines for that and it was getting better but the mom started to insist we get an MRI of his brain.”
“We refused at first because we did not think there was any need for it and thought it was a waste of resources. Eventually, we gave in and it turned out that he had a massive brain tumor (medulloblastoma).”
Pinkforest / Getty Images
11.“Rural paramedic here. Several years ago had a woman call with feelings of impending doom. No pain, no symptoms, just ‘I feel like I’m about to die.’ Vital signs were all normal, on scene exams all normal. But she wanted to go get checked out, so into the ambulance and away we go.”
“We went to the hospital, and she started getting really sweaty, but there were no other symptoms/exam changes/vital sign changes. We dropped her off, gave our report, and went back into service…
A couple hours later, we went back to the same hospital. I asked if they ever found anything with the previous patient, and I found out she passed away.
CT showed a ruptured aortic aneurysm, and they didn’t have enough time to transfer her or the resources to operate at that facility. The bizarre thing is, ruptured aortas usually (as in, every other case I’ve seen/heard about/read about) have other symptoms such as high heart rate, low blood pressure (or both), dizziness/lightheadedness, pain…this woman had none of those.”
12.“A woman came into maternity triage and said, ‘My baby is playing with my bowel.’ Your bowel doesn’t have somatic nerves, so… not really a thing.”
“Long story short, she ended up with an MRI showing she had an advanced abdominal pregnancy (i.e. her baby was not in her womb but just sitting in her abdomen). On the MRI images, the baby did indeed have its hand holding a piece of her transverse colon. That was wild.”
—u/Halmagha
Milorad Kravic / Getty Images
13.“Hansen’s disease. I saw a patient for the first time to establish care. [He was a] 52-year-old man from Brazil. He came in with his nephew, who was my patient already. He had contractures of the bilateral hands and feet, decreased sensation, and lesions with areas of what appeared to be necrosis.”
“He reported worsening mobility over the past six months. He had not had medical care in many years. I saw him, and to me, the lesions looked like a vascular issue; I suggested I would order testing but planned to send him urgently to a vascular specialist for an opinion. He said he believed it was leprosy.
I told him I thought it was not likely, and pulled up some photos just to show him how unlikely it was. I hesitated when I saw some photos of milder cases and saw that there was actually a close resemblance.
I asked if he had any contacts and he said no. I decided it was likely over-cautious, but I said I would be sending him to a dermatologist as well to ensure we were being thorough.
Well, a couple of weeks later he did in fact get a skin biopsy that was positive for leprosy. To this day it is one of the rarest and most unlikely diagnoses I have ever seen in 10 years of practice.”
Penpak Ngamsathain / Getty Images
14.“As a child, I didn’t have many friends so would read my great-grandma’s medical dictionary. My grandma developed a chronic cough that her doctor said was bronchitis. I was nine at the time and told [her it] sounded more like congestive heart failure because it primarily happened when she put stress on her heart, and her sputum was clear.”
“After the doctor wasted three weeks on antibiotics, he finally diagnosed her with congestive heart failure and started working on a treatment plan for her heart.”
Sopone Nawoot / Getty Images
15.“Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist here. I essentially self-diagnosed Lymphoma after realizing the association between consuming alcohol and having specific pain in my neck, shoulder, and arm.”
“I did some research and went to my PCP with my concerns. Hell, I didn’t even think I was right.
After the biopsy confirmed it, we were all shocked. Even my eventual oncologist said she had only read about this, and hadn’t seen it in practice yet as a presenting symptom.
Go me because it was my only symptom, and I caught it early by about 4-5 months. :)”
Bymuratdeniz / Getty Images
16.“When I was in med school, there was a guy in his early 60s, fairly healthy, who kept coming into the hospital with vague symptoms of feeling like ‘he’s dying.’ Tons of blood tests, imaging studies, etc. didn’t show any problems.”
“Thought he had some sort of trauma in his life and he internalized it and was going through a version of adjustment syndrome.
During the admission where I was involved, a MRI/MRCP of the pancreas found a small pancreatic cancer.
That’s when I learned a portion of patients with pancreatic cancer present with a vague ‘overwhelming sense of impending doom’ and not much else. That’s always stuck with me.”
Libre De Droit / Getty Images
17.“I had a brittle diabetic who felt like she was reinfected after an amputation which had already healed months before. Just said her bones hurt deep. Clinically, it was very benign looking.”
“But I got an MRI for her, and sure enough, there was osteomyelitis (bone infection). So now for any of my diabetics who think they have an infection, I just put them on antibiotics ’cause most often they’re right.
I do so many amputations, and it’s alarming how many people do not care about their health. So for those that give any concern, I’m on their side and will do what I can to help make us both sleep well at night.”
NBC
18.“I had a patient come in when he lost the strength in his right leg. He took baby aspirin for the heart. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I think I need more blood thinners.’ On his ECG, he had artial fibrilation, which usualy requires… more blood thinners.”
“I asked him if he felt his irregular heartbeats. ‘Nope.’
He then started with ten more theories, like: ‘I ate salmon yesterday, did that cause the artial fibrilation?”
But his first guess was spot on, he had a TIA (transient ischemic attack).”
Flavio Coelho / Getty Images
19.“This isn’t weird so much as impressive. I had a 15-year-old girl diagnose herself with Turner Syndrome. She was learning about it in science class and thought it described her pretty well, so she brought it up to her pediatrician, and sure enough, [she had it].”
20.And finally: “Working in toxicology I once had a patient who treated her anaphylaxis unknowingly (and sucessfully) with a line of cocaine.”
So, what do you think? If you’re a medical professional or a patient, I’d love to hear your stories about self-diagnoses that turned out to be real. Leave your comments down below!
Or, if you want to write in but prefer to stay anonymous, feel free to check out this anonymous Google form. Who knows — your answer may end up in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Please note: some comments may have been edited for length and/or clarity.
