Doctors Are Sharing The Most "Rare" And "Bizarre" Medical Cases They've Ever Had, And It's Fascinating
by Ajani Bazile-Dutes · BuzzFeedWe recently asked medical professionals of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us the most bizarre cases they've ever encountered, and their stories left me speechless. Here are the most surprising ones:
Note: Some submissions come from this Reddit thread.
1. "I'm a family nurse practitioner in a primary care practice in greater Boston. We had a 72-year-old woman who had been experiencing headaches for several months and some blurry vision that was getting worse. She'd been in the US for over 10 years and arrived from Haiti with little prior health history. She was worked up for all kinds of things, and we ruled out all kinds of things. She saw specialists and was given treatments for migraines and blood pressure, you name it. She'd nearly lost all vision in one of her eyes by the time the specialist identified her ocular syphilis."
—Anonymous
2. "A man came to the ER with flu-like symptoms lasting more than a week. Turned out he had untreated Strep A, which turned into toxic shock syndrome. His flesh literally started sloughing off and was becoming necrotic. They ended up amputating all four of his limbs."
—Anonymous
3. "I’m a dietitian. A child and her parents came to see me about a possible food allergy. They’d seen doctors, and one of them finally said, 'Let’s have them ask the food professional to see if she has any ideas.' I was as flummoxed as everyone else because it seemed very clear that this child was allergic to red. Not just artificial colors but anything that was red or could ripen to red. Radishes, watermelon, strawberries, red Kool-Aid, red candy. The only commonality among the foods that affected this child was that they were all red in some way."
—Anonymous
4. "Megacolon. The person was severely impacted for weeks. They went in and surgically removed most of the colon and feces. A lot of feces. A whole tall-sized kitchen garbage bag of feces. I guess they were impacted for so long that their colon stretched to accommodate, hence the term 'megacolon.'"
—Anonymous
5. "The rarest I can think of is startle epilepsy. This adolescent male would have generalized tonic-clonic seizures in response to any sudden physical stimulation, like pushing from behind. It was so scary. He would have 10 to 12 episodes per day."
6. "We had a guy come in with his wife. His wife said there was blood in his underwear, which she noticed while washing his clothes. He insisted he was fine. After separating the two and hearing the stories, this is what the guy said. 'Don't tell my wife. I've been having an affair, and I have a toy with an approximate 12-inch wingspan all the way in my bum. We tried getting it out, but we only snapped off one of the wings.' Still to this day, don't know how he fit a 12-inch plus shape up his bum, but it did end in a divorce, and the guy had to wear a colostomy bag the rest of his life."
7. "I remember a friend from my teenage years showing me an X-ray of his mother’s womb with a pair of sharp scissors in there. Apparently, when he was born, the doctors had to do a C-section, and the surgeon accidentally left some scissors in there and sewed her up. I don’t remember how long it took for them to realize it was still in there, but she obviously had to have surgery to get it out."
8. "Pseudocyesis or hysterical pregnancy, in a woman who was an inmate in the psych wing of a prison I rotated through. She thought she was pregnant with Jesus's triplets and had grown a massive pregnant-looking belly, and she was actually producing milk."
9. "Gorham’s disease, aka vanishing skull syndrome. A softball-sized area of my patient's skull disappeared and left behind a soft spot. She ended up with a plastic plate to protect her brain."
10. "Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP). A disease that calcifies soft tissue and turns it into bone. When I was a medical student, our group’s cadaver had this disease. During dissections we sometimes would get poked by spiky pieces of bone in random areas of her body. It also had a spine that resembled a small turtle shell."
11. "Walking corpse syndrome. 17 years in mental health, and I’ve seen it once. It's the belief that some or all of you are dead. The guy was so certain he was dead he believed he was a zombie."
12. "Dermatologist here. One interesting one is chromhidrosis, where sweat comes out in different colors. My patient’s was blue."
13. "I had a patient with aquagenic urticaria, an allergy to contact with water."
14. "On my OB rotation during ER residency, I helped deliver a baby who had spots all over. Further blood testing revealed the baby had developed leukemia while in the mother. I didn't know that was really possible prior to that day. Incredibly rare."
15. "Actual scurvy. Poor old man didn't know how to cook after his wife died and ate nothing but biscuits."
16. "Persistent genital arousal disorder. That means having multiple orgasms a day, at any time, without any stimulation. It becomes quite bothersome and uncomfortable and limits your daily activities and your sleep. Over time, patients can become very hopeless."
17. "I once saw mold growing from brain tissue. The patient was immunocompromised. He eventually died. Pretty much every piece of tissue submitted for culture grew fungus. The type of mold growing was common environmental flora: Alternaria species."
18. "OB nurse! We had a patient back when I first started who had two separate uteruses and cervixes and somehow (with the help of IVF) managed to get pregnant with one baby in each!"
19. "I was on an EMS run. We showed up to a perfectly calm 6-year-old...who'd been impaled by a pitchfork. It missed every vital organ somehow. Her size, we figure, saved her, so her organs were small enough to fit between the tines. We cut the handle off and carefully drove to the hospital. She only missed school for, like, a few days."
20. "Many years ago, I was an X-ray tech. I had a lady come in with pain in her heel. When I took the X-rays, I assumed it was a heel spur like I'd seen many times. I tossed the films on the lightbox, and there was a freaking sewing needle deeply embedded. And it wasn't a small one either, as it was 2-3 inches long. She claimed to have no recollection of ever stepping on it."
21. "My sister-in-law always tells the story of a construction worker who swallowed several long nails. The remarkable part was that he ended up being totally fine, never had any symptoms, and ended up pooping them out."
22. "During nursing school, I saw a 3-year-old with Sirenomelia, aka 'mermaid syndrome.' Everything below the navel was fused, and she had no external genitalia, giving the appearance of a mermaid. Surgeons rerouted her urethra to right below the navel, and she had an ostomy bag for solid waste. She was a very happy kid, and her family took great care of her."
23. And finally, "Anesthesiologist here. A colleague recently showed me a video laryngoscope image of a patient with TWO SETS OF VOCAL CORDS. Side by side. Bizarre."
Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.