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“Her Skin Was Everywhere”: 16 People Share The Most Bizarre Medical Cases They Witnessed
Article created by: Gabija Saveiskyte
Working as a doctor can be enormously stressful. According to the American Medical Association, 48.2% of physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout in 2023. It doesn't help that most doctors are buried in paperwork and often have to perform repetitive tasks day in and day out.
Outsiders are often convinced that being a doctor is like being Gregory House; you get to walk around hospital halls doing wacky pranks on your best friend and colleagues and are faced with weird and rare conditions every day.
And, although much of House is fantasy, sometimes life can be even stranger than fiction. Rare medical cases happen, and those who've seen them or experienced them are the best ones to ask. So, recently, one netizen did just that.
They posted a thread titled "Doctors of Reddit, what was a 'one in a million' case that you personally witnessed?" And we have to admit – some of them even would even have House stumped.
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#1
I am not a doctor, but my Nana was the patient. She defied the laws of reality and modern medicine SEVERAL times.
- got on dialysis at 79 for kidney failure. after 2 years of dialysis, her kidneys were fine and functioned normally, so they took her OFF DIALYSIS. that doesn’t happen. she lived for another ten years and her kidneys weren’t what took her out.
- age 80, she broke her leg up by her hip. she was asthmatic and diabetic and docs weren’t optimistic about the risks of anesthesia but they needed to fix her broken leg. they told us she probably wouldn’t walk again. 7 months later she walked my nephew down the aisle at his wedding without a cane or a walker to help her.
- self managed her diabetes for decades. didn’t take insulin. ate basically nothing but sugar. she was fine.
- got Covid at age 87. still asthmatic. it’s a mild case and she recovers flawlessly.
- shortly before she died, the doctors swore she couldn’t swallow and had her on a liquid only diet. turns out she just didn’t want to eat their nasty hospital food and was pretending very plausibly that she COULDN’T. doctors were floored when they came upon the two of us happily munching on del taco French fries.
- declared infertile after years of trying. adopts a baby. suddenly can’t stop getting pregnant. within 3 years she went from being infertile to having 4 children under the age of 4.
I miss my crazy medical miracle of a grandmother every single day. God bless her and her 9 lives.
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#3
Kid came in still unable to walk at 3 and with funny eye rolling movements that looked like they could be seizures but with normal EEG (this is called oculogyric crisis-basically the eyeballs keep getting 'stuck' in an upward position). Genetic testing showed she had a rare defect in the enzymes that make dopamine and serotonin. The thing is, we use L-Dopa, which is the last precursor to making dopamine, in patients with Parkinsons disease. Her defect was in an earlier step in the process and the enzyme that handles that last step was fine. We were able to treat her with L-DOPA and 5HTP, the final precursor to serotonin. 6 months later, she was running. She'll have to stay on medicine for the rest of her life, but with meds we could unlock her body for her.
#4
Literally saw this with my own eyes.
Am an ED nurse in Australia. Was in charge this particular evening when I was called to the trauma room.
Sitting calmly on the side of the bed was a middle aged Polynesian man, with a broken pool cue through his head.
On closer inspection- the tip had gone in through his right eye and pushed his eyeball up but eye was still intact.
You could feel the tip pressing against the skin in his occipital region but no broken skin.
Absolutely not a single drop of blood, and his GCS was 15. (Only thing he ‘couldn’t remember’ was how it actually happened…).
At the time I had a spare ambulance crew in the department so they got on the phone to their comms saying there was an imminent transfer up the road to a tertiary hospital. Honestly all we did was put an IVC in, gave him a shot of IVAB and bundled him out within about 15mins - all the time sitting upright 🤣.
His surgery took hours cuz the flattened cue tip was in danger of clipping a blood vessel as it was being removed (the reverse way it went in). So every movement needed to be checked.
His CT scans from there are apparently legendary. Turns out there is a one in a billion way of essentially pushing the brain upwards and missing every vessel 🤷🏻♀️
A couple of days in hospital for IVABs and he walked out with no adverse effects to brain or eyesight.
#5
Had a patient present to the ED after a bee sting and a pretty bad reaction. We found a softball sized tumor on workup sitting on her cervical spine. Would have been a quad within a year….. that bee sting truly saved her quality of life.
#6
Not a doctor, but my kid is the 1 in a million.
Routine annual wellness check up for my 11 year old, turned up a solid, immobile, mass in the left side in the supraclavicular area of the neck.
For those of you not in the know, with this finding, it's basically a 1 in 3 chance of it being cancer. The pediatrician did a whole run down to start - ultrasound, chest X-ray, loads of blood work, etc.
The only abnormality was an enlarged lymph node in the area found in ultrasound.
Because of the location of the lymph node, the size, density, and the inability to find another cause for it, our pediatrician referred us to a pediatric general surgeon to consult for a biopsy.
We meet with the general surgeon and after asking a few questions and doing an exam, he steps out to consult with a colleague. He comes back in a few minutes later, asked if we can wait 25 minutes because the hematologist (the /oncologist kind of doctor) wants to drive over to exam kid in person.
So, yeah, we wait about a half hour while he gets to the office. He does a quick exam and basically says, we're going to get more blood work and do a CT scan today. Luckily the office is on the same campus as the children's hospital so he calls radiology, orders a head, neck, and abdomen CT with and without contrast and we head to radiology.
Based on the urgency of the tests, and some private conversations, this was basically trying to find out how extensive and grade the cancer. At this point both doctors were ready to diagnose based on physical exam and previous imaging and tests, but they were being absolutely responsible in confirming their suspicions first.
After the CT scan, we go back to the office and meet with the two doctors.
Who are absolutely GIDDY! First thing out of their mouths is that, it's not cancer. (YAY!)
Kid has cervical ribs. Kid has rib bones in their NECK! Not just on one side, but bilateral (both sides!). And, not only do they have bilateral cervical ribs, they have a bone spur on the left side in the supraclavicular region!
Less than 1% of the population of the world has cervical ribs, even fewer have bilateral ribs.
And my kid, my kid! My kid has bilateral ribs with a bone spur in the exact location to mimic cancer! The pediatric specialists believe that the ultrasound misdiagnosed an enlarged lymph node because there was nothing to indicate it on the CT scan.
#7
Not a doctor, but a former legal guardian. In the mid-90s I was assigned to a guy with aids, last stadium, melanoms and all. He was in a hospital at the time, the doctors gave him three months max. So I found a special hospice, excellent place, and drove him there some five hours away. On arrival the director said it’s a matter of weeks, maybe a month.
The guy fully recovered, the guardianship was lifted and he lived a happy and crazy life for years to come.
#8
My ENT walked into the room on my first appointment and told me I had "the weirdest CT scan" he's ever seen, does that count?
My sinus cavity is like 85% fungus, apparently. He was genuinely surprised I could even breathe through my nose. The CT is kind of horrifying. He thinks it's been like that since I had jaw surgery 15 years ago; once I have surgery to clean it out I'm probably going to OD on oxygen.
#9
Not a dr but I shocked the delivery ward.
I was 18 and pretty healthy when I got pregnant the first time. Had placenta previa, which isn't rare but isn't ideal (its where the placenta sits over the cervix, making natural birth near impossible).
What was shocking was the 6 weeks of bleeding from 23-29 weeks, pretty much constantly soaking pads. They couldn't figure out the cause. And then there was a massive bleed that triggered 'labour' at 29 weeks that led to an emergency c section.
I didnt see the placenta (I lost nearly 2L of blood) but half the hospital did. Apparently it was super discolored, almost black, and had chunks missing. They sent it away for testing and I never did find out the cause but went on to have two pretty normal, full term pregnancies. I did have cholestatis the third time, thats rare but not unheard of.
And my son survived, perfectly healthy and somehow huge for his gestation at 3 pounds 12 onces. He turns 10 on Monday.
#10
I’m a dentist, not a physician. I had an assistant years ago whose daughter kept breaking out in ulcers in her genital region. She was 3 at the time. Doctors kept accusing the mom of exposing her daughter to sexual predators, had CPS investigate multiple times. She would break down in tears at the office completely exhausted and hopeless thinking her daughter was going to be removed from her care. All she wanted was answers.
She shared her doctors’ findings with me. I told her the symptoms were congruent with Bachets. She went back to her daughter’s docs and asked them to eval for this. They refused saying she was too young to exhibit symptoms of Bachets. She FINALLY found someone to listen to her, and BOOM, kid had it. One of the youngest cases of pediatric Bachets.
#11
I was the doctor’s assistant at the time. I worked for an optometrist who mostly just did general stuff- eyeglass prescriptions, pink eye treatment, nothing too crazy. The weirdest one was the young man who went swimming in a lake with his contacts in and they trapped an amoeba between the contact and his eye, so the amoeba burrowed into the inner part of his eye. He came in thinking he just had a nasty infection and wow, that was an upsetting diagnosis. We immediately sent him to a specialist in Denver.
#12
Not a doctor, my Mom was the patient. She had breast cancer that metastasized into her bones. One night she was in immense pain and was taken by ambulance to the ER. Turns out the cancer had eaten away a section of her spine, basically disintegrating a part of it. She was told that she likely would only survive a few more weeks.
Instead, she survived another year and learned to walk again. Mind you, she was now hunched and at least 6 inches shorter because her spine was basically compressed down, but she was able to be mobile, walk and live a fairly normally life for a bit until the cancer spread to her brain.
#13
Not a doctor but I do have a pretty weird super rare skin condition called linear atrophoderma of moulin. It just kinda showed up one day, looks like a spiraling line of bruises.
There are less than 50 documented cases of it in reported literature!
#14
Obligatory not a doctor but my cousin’s baby is one of only a handful of recorded cases ever (around 25?) of having a fully developed third nostril at birth.
#15
My husband's gallbladder exploded and the surgeon was wildly excited to discover that he had an extra bile duct. The words "one in more than a million" were used.
#16
Not a doctor/RN: One of my first cases a woman with full body skin disease, cancer, head to toe, her hair was gone, her eyelids gone, she looked like a burn victim, but it wasn't burns. it was so bad they had to keep a air control going at all times so her skin would stay in the room, it was flaking off and flying about and her skin was everywhere, in the halls, on clothing. She was miserable and she finally died, which was a blessing. (I think she should have been in the burn unit) but who am I to second guess that? She had some rare skin disease.
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