# ER Horror Stories



## eveningsky339 (Sep 18, 2009)

I've spent quite some time in the local ER, both as a tech and as an EMT student begging for clinicals.  Our hospital is small (75 beds), but its the only one in this county.  So, even though we don't see as much action as a 400 bed inner-city hospital, we still see plenty.  

On that note, everyone loves a good horror story, and I have a couple from my experiences.

The first one didn't actually occur in our ER, but it was related to me by a surgeon who now lives in Maine.  He was working in the trauma center of a large Southern city (either Memphis or Birmingham).  Patient is rushed in with the subtle and complex diagnosis of "Screwdriver in the head".  The EMTs and nurses were smart enough to know that you NEVER remove an impaled object.  A resident, however, wasn't so smart.  He went ahead and removed the screwdriver (while the patient was stable, mind you).  Of course, the patient died, and the resident faced disciplinary action and a few years of lost sleep.

I have another similar story, but it didn't actually occur in the ER... let alone my ER... but it did happen at the hospital down the road from my former residence in Tennessee.  A patient is in the hospital for a few days and develops a minor infection.  No big deal; his hospitalist instructs a resident to right an order for 50 mg of a certain antibiotic and have it sent to the pharmacy.

The inexperienced resident writes a prescription for *500* mg.  He hands it off to an inexperienced nurse, who takes it to the pharmacy, where an inexperienced pharmacist fills the prescription.  The same inexperienced nurse puts it in the IV and goes about her day.  One hour later, the patient is dead.

And for my final story, I actually have an incident that I dealt with in my own ER!   

Teenage girl comes in complaining of an extremely severe earache and... well... do you guys know how often cockroaches crawl into peoples' ears at night?  I've heard that this is common to the point of obscenity, but I've only seen it a couple of times.  The ER doc had to pull quite a few tricks out of his sleeve to get it out.  I may actually run over to the scenario thread and see what you would do.


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## surname_levi (Sep 18, 2009)

during my hospital clinicals there was a day where we had 3 heart attacks. one of them was a local firefighter and was a regular to bringing pts into the ER, so all the staff was close to him. when he couldn't be resuscitated it was a gloomy night

there were 2 more after that. only 1 made it.


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## 281mustang (Sep 18, 2009)

When I was a student one of my shifts was at a small standalone ER with 20>* beds, it was by far the slowest ER in the area but I waited until the last minute to schedule my clinicals and it was the only shift that would work with my schedule. It was around 8 AM and we had a total of roughly 3-4 pt's in the ER that were just being monitored when all of the sudden we got an OD(a real OD) that actually coded right after they brought him in but we were able to bring him back.

About 15 minutes later some old woman who was watching the news coded, then about 30 seconds after that the OD coded again. I stayed with the old woman and started chest compressions. They were able to resuscitate the OD again but they called the other one about 20 minutes later. After the second code my preceptor said something to the extent that he didn't want to work with me anymore, I laughed and assumed he was joking but he actually avoided me for the rest of the day.:glare:


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