We’ve all had things go wrong at work. No matter what industry you work in or what title you have, we’ve all experienced our fair share of “oh crap” moments.
Luckily, most of us aren’t doing open heart surgery, so the stakes aren’t as high.
Although, that may make you wonder…do surgeons ever have those panic-inducing moments on the job?
Well, the answer is yes, and the evidence is right here in this Reddit thread. Dozens of medical professionals shared stories about their “oh crap moments,” and it might have you lost for words:
1.“I was doing a corneal transplant when I had the ‘oh shit’ moment. During surgery, I cut off the patient’s own cornea and replaced it with a new donor cornea. During that moment when the host cornea was off, but before I could get the new one on, there was literally nothing on the front of the eye except a tear film and aqueous humor. Anyway, the patient takes that moment to start vomiting.”
“The reason we tell everyone to skip food and drink is so they don’t aspirate in case they throw up. This patient lied about eating breakfast and started throwing up everything. The eye is still an ‘open sky’ at this time. Everything inside of the eye can now become outside of the eye. And she’s bucking and vomiting.
Those not in the know will say this is not good. Those really in the know will say, ‘Oh shit.’
Anyway, I had to grab the new cornea and start stitching as fast as I could on a patient actively throwing up. I use 10-0 nylon sutures which are thinner than an eyelash. It turned out okay but not great.
Don’t lie about eating breakfast before surgery, folks.”
2.“The oh shit I’ve seen was stuff during transplants.”
“There are these things called lifeports that are used for kidneys; they allow fluid to circulate during transport from the donor to the recipient. One surgeon I was working with dropped a kidney inside the lifeport on the ground and it cracked and skidded along the ground. The kidney was ok, though. Another surgeon just couldn’t get it to open and was getting frustrated and asked for a mallet: he was going to bash it to try to open it.”
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3.“When I was a new RN working the ICU in a large teaching hospital, I came into work one morning to a patient that was admitted that night, intubated (breathing tube in), sedated, Foley catheter (tube in pee pee hole) and all. Long story short, he was extubated (breathing tube out) that same shift and was completely alert and oriented.”
“Now, the catheter bag had been empty my whole shift, which is norma,l seeing as how he didn’t make urine anymore, and this hospital had a nurse-driven Foley removal policy, meaning while we needed a doctor’s order to insert one, we could remove one at our discretion unless a doctor specifically put in orders not to. This patient had no such doctor’s order, so I went to remove the catheter. They are held in the bladder by a balloon on the end that is inflated with 10ml of saline. I deinflated the balloon removing 10ml of saline, and pulled it out.
As soon as the catheter left his penis, blood started pouring out in a heavy stream. Turns out the nurse who placed it on admission hadn’t advanced it far enough since there was no urine production to indicate correct placement and had inflated the balloon while still in his urethra, causing trauma.
It would not stop bleeding. I had to hold this man’s penis ‘shut’ to put pressure on it while my coworker paged the resident who came and looked at me with pity as he told me to just keep holding this 30-something-year-old man’s penis In my hands to staunch the blood flow until urology could get there to assess. It just kept gushing blood every time I eased up to check. For over an hour total I held this mans penis and tried to make polite conversation until the urologist arrived.”
4.“Not a surgeon, but was working in obstetric theatre in the UK mid-heatwave last year. This is important as maternity wards are kept quite warm as newborn babies aren’t good at regulating their temperatures. Combine this with a heatwave and the fact that in Britain, we’re not exactly used to high temperatures, and we have the perfect storm.”
“Mid-emergency cesarean, the scrub nurse assisting the op starts feeling faint. This is unusual as this scrub nurse worked in these theatres full time so this was her bread and butter, so I can only conclude it was the heat. She has to step out, so the SHO takes her place, assisting the obs registrar with the section. This SHO looked extremely junior, as in the first C-section ever. And they were trying to assist with the instruments in the uterus when they fainted. I had to jump in and grab the back of their theatre gown to stop them from faceplanting the open uterus, and then sort of gently tug backward to let them fall into me when someone else took over assisting.
This SHO was not exactly small. Thank God the baby was already out.”
5.“Fifth-year resident here. There are lots of bad ‘Oh shit’ moments throughout training, such as necrotizing soft tissue infections or takebacks for bad complications or deaths during cases. However, I’d like to share a recent positive ‘Oh shit’ moment.”
“15cm kidney tumor with thrombus into the vena cava. Big incision, great exposure of the vasculature and the tumor. My attending and I are dancing around the aorta and vena cava. We are able to feel the tumor thrombus in the IVC. I was expecting that we’d need to cut and clamp the vena cava to get all the cancer out. But my attending literally squeezes the tumor out of the vena cava back into the renal vein and then has me tie the renal vein off so the tumor doesn’t slip back into the vena cava.
Patient went home in like 4 days, margins were negative, and is still doing great.
The first time I felt like, ‘Oh shit. I’m a surgeon.'”
6.“Surgeon here. I’ve dealt with loads of morbid stuff, but one thing that made me stop and go ‘oh shit’ was a conversation with a young patient who had a perforated colon from diverticular disease, which is a common wear and tear of the colon.”
“He was one of youngest patients I had seen with this condition and certainly the youngest with a perforation so bad as to require an operation. When I was counseling him on the operation, which involves removing the perforated part of the colon and giving him a colostomy, he told me his biggest concern was how he was going to have anal sex with his same-sex partner. He would only have a small stump of rectum left inside, which would be at risk of perforation with any force applied to it.
It made me really think about the implications of the surgery we do. The operation is the easy part!”
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7.“I was the patient.”
“I had a liver transplant and was having an ERCP done to place a new bile duct stent. Well, apparently, my anatomy is different than normal, and my lungs go more down my sides. So he accidentally caused a nick, which caused a hemothorax. So when I woke up I couldn’t breathe, they did an x-ray and had to do a chest tube. Eventually, I was so exhausted I asked to be vented, so he vented me. Apparently, he cried. He felt so bad about it all.
But it wasn’t him being malicious or negligent; it was simply an accident.”—greffedufois
8.“Not a surgeon, thought I’d share this though.”
“Husband went in for a routine colonoscopy, and as they were prepping him, anesthetist asks him if he’s a ginger. My husband tells him yeah. When he was a kid growing up, he had fire-engine red hair, though it’s faded to a more strawberry blonde now. The anesthetist laughs and says, okay, I gotcha, we’ll give you the redhead dosage and winks.
Well, my husband thinks it’s funny until he wakes up at the tail end of the procedure (pun intended), and doctors are just chattin’ it up, and what have you. Turns out it’s not a joke and redheads have some type of natural block to anesthesia. The dude had given him the allowable dosage, and he still woke up.
Happened a couple of years later. They gave him ketamine and some other shit to knock him out to get wisdom teeth out when he told the dentist about the colonoscopy thing. He still woke up at the end of that one, too.”–Berty_Qwerty
9.“My grandfather told a story about a clamp coming off an artery while he was pulling a kidney in rural Wyoming in the early 50s.”
“The abdominal cavity was quickly filling with blood, and the nurse fainted. He was able to push down with his elbow on the descending aorta and got the clamp back on. The patient lived, but I think he chose his surgical assistants a little more carefully after that.”
10.“Not a surgeon. I’m a hospitalist physician. Happened at my hospital- a mentally ill young woman, who was pregnant at the time, was in denial, locked herself into her room when she realized the contractions were coming.”
“She basically didn’t push, and the baby didn’t come naturally. Her family called 911 because of the smell. The ER realized her baby had died inside her and was basically rotting due to the smell. She was taken to the OR to remove the baby, and apparently, all the nurses and surgeons were vomiting because once they opened her up, the smell was overpowering, and it was traumatizing to see a rotting baby.”
11.“I work in cardiovascular, and I can think of a couple. Over my 8-year career, I’ve had three patients start moving their arms in the middle of open heart surgery; one of them even tried to sit up (the surgeon was pushing the patients’ shoulders down and yelling to anesthesia to ‘give the patient something’).”
12.“Not me, but my uncle—he’s a respirologist and was supervising/sitting in on lung surgery to remove a tumor. Turns out the tumor was a rootball—some type of seed had gotten into the patient’s lungs and started to grow.”
13.“I had an ingrown toenail. It was supposed to be a quick fix. I was 14 and had my mom with me. They let an apprentice do the surgery, and he goes, ‘Oh shit.’ The doctor in charge just laughed and said, ‘No risk, No fun.’ Turns out they fucked up my toe, and I had to have four more surgeries to correct it. I cried.”
14.“During my third year of medical school, I was stitching up the wound after breast cancer surgery, and the anesthesiology nurse woke the patient too early as I was making my last stitch, and I felt the patient moving her arm and trying to sit up. The patient was still covered in surgery draping and cables and still intubated. Luckily most people do not remember much from the first moments after waking up but I got quite nervous from the patient starting to move.”
15.“Just an RN here. I was working in the ER and had a patient brought in by her husband.”
“Apparently the woman had a fall a week prior and injured her face but refused medical care. Her husband finally forced her to come in. As soon as I see the wound on her face (from across the room) I think, ‘that does not look like any wound I’ve seen.’ I approached her and realized maggots had infested the wound and were eating the rotting skin. A really simple and quick fix but I cant imagine her living conditions.”
16.“Not a surgeon but when I was in nursing school I was observing a tonsillectomy when the power went out.”
“Everything switched over to the backup generators except for the suction which is incredibly important for any surgery but particularly in the throat (aspiration risk). They ended up having to connect a giant syringe to a length of suction tubing to suction manually while someone went to the other side of the building to find portable suction. Luckily ours was the only theatre that had started operating that morning!”
17.“Not mine, but my father’s. He told me this back when I was 10, so I’m sorry if it doesn’t fully make sense. He had a 21-year-old patient who needed to have a penectomy. He had cancer of the penis.”
“There were two ‘Oh Shit’ Moments for this. The first is a common thing. He wasn’t fully asleep. The second, however, is funny and humiliating. They are about to start the surgery.
Suddenly, one of the nurses that was there suddenly threw up and left. A test later, and boom! She got knocked up! Halfway through the surgery, the other nurse leaves for a call about her father. My dad’s [nurse] was just standing there, a half-gone penis in his hand. He calls for help and is standing there, a guy’s penis in his hand for thirty minutes.”
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18.“We operated on the carotids of a patient, like a gaping hole in his neck, when the patient woke up. The easy fix was shouting at the anesthesiologist… who wasn’t there. Had to hold down the head with my elbow so he wouldn’t move too much and hurt/kill himself.”
19.“When I was a nursing student, I was on theatre prac. We had a guy in who needed humerus and elbow repair.”
“I was pretty useless in everything but emotional support (as I wasn’t qualified), so was chatting to him before he went under. He admitted to having a (un)healthy meth habit. I informed the surgeon, who shrugged it off. Apparently, I should have told the anesthetist because this dude woke up mid-surgery and was trying to reach for his open arm that the surgeon was working on. Super ‘Oh shit’ moment as we scramble to contain this guy’s arm and stop it from touching anything sterile.”—NecessaryFlamingo
20.“Not a surgeon but a biomedical scientist.”
“My office mate had his MD and was working on his PhD. He did an appendectomy and cut into this person’s abdomen, only to find no appendix, and he started freaking out. The support nurses in the room started snickering at him because they knew right away what it was. Occasionally, they see someone with a rare genetic disorder in which all their left-right asymmetries are reversed. The appendix was on the other side.”
21.“Orthopedic surgeon here. Mostly do joint replacements.”
“Having a unit of blood run down my leg while doing CPR on a patient in the trauma bay. The connector between the blood bag and the patient’s IV came loose, and no one noticed until it had basically emptied all down my leg. Mostly just felt cold. But I had to walk through the main lobby of the hospital, covered in blood, past patients, and families to get to my call room. Threw away my underwear and socks and did the rest of the 24 hr shift commando.”
Do you work in the medical field? If so, tell us your wildest stories in the comments!
Note: Some responses have been edited for clarity/length.
