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Very often, we see people working in the retail industry telling horror stories about clients who demand the most ridiculous things. How they cannot explain to people that things cannot be done as they wish and how they get yelled at for things that don't depend on a simple worker.

There are many other professions where workers have to deal with people, like the medicine field, and they also have some stories to tell. Twitter user zorn put out a thought into the world that nursing school didn't prepare him for the awful things he would be hearing while caring for his patients, and others were quick to share their own stories.

Image credits: Ministerio de Defensa del Peru

Image credits: zozagoon

And those stories aren't funny, but quite serious: they were told by elderly people with illnesses that might have had some effect on their brains, but you never know, and it's chilling how many people have pretty dark secrets.

More info: Twitter

It seems that Twitter user zorn really said what a lot of people were wondering about, or genuinely related to, as his tweet amassed 371k likes and got nearly 2k responses, which included just surprised-Pikachu-face reactions or people’s own stories of hearing or witnessing some awful things.

The user zorn whose tweet went viral has been a nurse for three years and worked on a med surg floor for the whole of his career. When Bored Panda reached out to him, he said that he loves working there. He said they "see patients of all ages with a huge variety of backgrounds and diagnoses." Some personal facts about zorn are that he lives with his wonderful girlfriend and they have "three perfect cats."

We asked if zorn was surprised to see how much attention his tweet received and his response was "Not at all! I talk about work fairly often on Twitter, and have definitely never had any response of close to this magnitude. I always do my best to avoid any patient identifiers and to maintain patient privacy and adhere to HIPAA."

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He puts out the tweets witjout having any malicious intents, "It's important to have somewhere to vent about work and kind of shout into the void. It's a hard job. And it's hard to talk to people in my real life about it."

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M O'Connell
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That's tragic. I cannot comprehend how abusive people don't realize that their horrible actions will absolutely have life-long effects.

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There were a lot of people responding to zorn's tweet with their own stories and the author of the original tweet says, "I think nurses are in a unique position. We are one of the most trusted professionals. And we build relationships with patients when we care for them multiple shifts. We're some of the only people they see while they're in the hospital, sometimes. And they're in a sort of vulnerable position that I feel like makes confessions more likely. Plus, nurses are more likely than a lot of professions to be around people when they're altered in some way or another-- delirious, or coming out of anesthesia, or suffering from dementia, or on certain medications."

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F. H.
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That's just one side of the story, though. You don't know how other people of his unit thought about it.

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Kona Pake
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Unfortunately, too many good people die because of ego and bad leadership.

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M O'Connell
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Especially in the First World War. So many officers came ill-prepared for the tactics and weapons of a modern war, trying to lead 19th Century infantry charges into 20th Century machine guns.

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Kay blue
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

A common phrase from that time was "lions being led by donkeys".

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Beatrice Multhaupt
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

My father was a German medic during WWII . He told me it was common to see officers with fatal gunshot wounds entering the back. Such injuries never occurred in enlisted soldiers: they were shot from the front by the enemy lines.

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Kathryn Baylis
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That’s part of the origin story for why we call abusive commanding officers “martinets”. (Google it.)

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Valerie Anne
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That is nothing to be ashamed about. Bravo to your grandfather for doing the right thing and saving people's lives.

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Anto Gamunev
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

He took out a cancer from this world, my respects to ur grandad

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AspieGirl88
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I think if the grandfather had shot his commanding officer out of nothing but malice, he would’ve confessed to it (because that’s a hard thing to live with & I'm sure he wouldn’t want to die with that on his conscience). This seems like a truthful post, though that’s just my opinion. I personally think if it was done with the best intentions (to save innocent lives), then there’s no real point in punishing him for it. Let him live the rest of his days in peace. If there’s anything to judge, it’ll happen on the other side of life... 🤷‍♀️

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Kyle Ann Hoekstra
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I have an uncle who has a similar story. They "removed" the commanding officers that were making bad decisions for everyone.

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Hugh Cookson
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

This happened more often than you'd think - probably still does.

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kjorn
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

a lot of officer should've been killed by their mens in ww1

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Pete Häkkinen
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

When I was done with military service I told my regiment commander that if called to duty I would kill couple of the officers first. Nothing good comes from letting assholes have near absolute authority over anyone.

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Long White Mane
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Killing incompetent or bad officers has been going on since wars began. And it happens more than most would like to admit.

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If you’re not in the field, you wouldn’t think that people become so talkative and spill all their secrets that are really serious and you don’t even know if they are for real or just messing with you.

zorn guesses why nurses sometimes become confessors, "I do feel like there's a trust and intimacy in the patient/nurse relationship that makes confessions of one nature another more likely. In cases where patients are talking about relationships, or traumas they've experienced, it's a privilege to be able to help them carry that burden. Being trusted like that is an honor."

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May
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I used to work with cancer patients (now I teach others how to do that) but never once did anyone confess to a crime. Mind you we get like one unsolved murder per decade in Norway, so that wasn't likely to happen, but not even a confession of theft or embezzlement or anything.

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M O'Connell
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Dementia does strange things to a person. Near the end of my grandmother's life, she conveyed information that was probably a latent memory of a movie she had seen or a book she had read. As her mind was going, she could no longer differentiate between real experiential memories, and things she had read, or simply imagined. Like my father being in a major car wreck that never happened.

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Nurses working with elderly people shared how they confessed to them of love affairs and abuse, whether they were the abuser or were being abused, and surprisingly, a lot of people wanted to clear their conscience of murders.

Surely some of them will be just the brain playing tricks on older people as the mind becomes not as sharp as it used to be. Illnesses like dementia and Alzheimer’s damage memories to the point that people will not feel the distinction between reality and movies they’ve seen.

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NsG
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

What dreadful people. I wish she'd had the stubbornness to keep going, just to spite them! (Although not if she was in pain, obviously).

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Kyle D
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2 years ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That's a VERY specific scenario ... how many African children DID Finnish mercenaries kill?

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According to zorn, most of the confessions are not that serious, but "the confessions of a more violent nature are definitely more shocking, but at the same time, I kind of just have to carry on with my day, so these shocking things sort of fall in with everything else and get filed away in my brain. All of the patients that have talked about harm to another person either have dementia, or for one reason or another it's impossible to verify, or they already went to trial and were unable to be prosecuted for one reason or another. That sort of thing. If people ever confess to wanting to harm to themselves or others, I have to report that, and I have have report any suspected child or elder abuse."

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Mazer
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

The amount of women incarcerated for standing up to their abusers is staggering, as is the amount of abusers getting away with horrible acts of abuse is equally staggering

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The nurse couldn't say which story shocked him the most, but what he got from this exerience was feeling a sense of community. He remarked, "It was really cool while reading responses. I was glad I wasn't alone in this."

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The last thing that he would like to add was "I do want to say that vaccines are safe and effective, and COVID-19 has devastating short term and long term effects in people of all ages, so if more folks could get vaccinated, that would make me sleep easier."

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LH25
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

My grandma told stories about making bathtub gin during prohibition.

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What do you think of these stories? If you have any of your own, we and other pandas would be very interested to read them, so leave them in the comments. Also, show us which ones surprised you the most by upvoting them!

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Tweetysvoice
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I bet that some of them probably didn't have anybody to talk to, so they talked to whomever would listen.

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Marco Conti
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"registered sex offender" in some places is not a good indicator of a person's actual crimes. If I can't tell the difference between a rapist and someone that took a piss in an alley while drunk, that list is useless.

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F. H.
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Nursing school should prepare you for that. It's common that dementia patients lose their inhibitions.

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Laurie
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I think they did sparkle for right reasons. Perhaps a little bit of humanity in him...im glad she was kind. Karma hit him hard and then some....

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Zophra
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"Oh look, I missed the vein again." "I can't believe the catheter isn't going in..." I know it would never be done , but personally, I would be thinking it.

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Devil's Advocate
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Some people felt extreme guilt over this even when they weren't actually involved, they just felt that they should have stopped it even though that would have probably meant them joining the dead

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Kristin Ingersoll
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2 years ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Not sure what's funny enough to laugh one's own a$$ off over the misery of women forced, for any number of societal reasons, to remain in miserable marriages. Yes, yes. Hysterical.

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