real life

[onionhead]

Maybe I shouldn't post this.  Perhaps I'll read through it and see how I feel.  Maybe I'll just delete it.  Anyway . . .
I work as a Respiratory Therapist at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup WA, have done so for over 16 years.  I know there are other Phorum readers out there in the medical profession, so what I'm about to put down will make sense to some of you at least, but I think the gist is universal.  par of my duties as an RT is to assist the pulmonary  docs in bronchoscopies--the doc slides a skinny probe through a patient's nose, down the back of the throat, down the trachea and into the lungs, directly visualizing the tissues and structures in the pulmonary tree.  Here he can obtain biopsies, retrieve foriegn objects, take pictures.  The client today was a 23 years old man who had a  mass in his mediastinum about the size of a baseball and had been complaining of shortness of breath and chest pressure for months.  Initial biopsies had been cancer-positive, and the lung doc was going down to assess pulmonary involvement of the mass.  
The man was wheeled into the Radiology department and prepped for the bronch--ECG leads, BP monitor, oxygen, IV access. He was joking with the bronch team--myself, a concious sedation RN, radiology tech, and Dr Nessan--when he first arrived.  He told us that he had celebrated his first Father's Day; his little boy was 9 months old, and his dad had sent him a Father's Day card,  his wife bought him a bathrobe.  
Frequently the masses are just tissue-filled, cells gone wild.  Sometimes, like this time, the bodies are quite vascularized, loaded with blood.  Dr Nessan had warned us of what might happen before the patient came down, though it was nothing that any of us didn't know already--the tumor was inoperable, the patient might bleed to death once the mass was excised depending upon arterial involvement.  The oncology doc wanted to know if any progress was evident after several rounds of chemotherapy.  
So the CS RN administered a sedative called Versed, and the patient drifted off to a drug induced sleep.  The scope was inserted into his right nare, and passed into the trachea without incident.  Dr Nessan then remarked upon looking through the bronchoscope viewfinder that the tumor was awfully inflamed, larger than before.  A good deal of secretions had to be suctioned out of the airway,  and it was here when the tip of the scope bumped into the tumor when the patient coughed.  Nessan's immediate reaction was "Oh, s**t."  The tumor had burst.  As well-supplied with blood as it was, the doctor could not suction fast enough to clear the airway.  The bronchoscope was removed and the patient was intubated orally through a sanguinous mess.  Blood was everywhere-  all over the paitent, the table,  the floor, the other healthcare members in the room. It took only twenty minutes for this new father to die.  
There are other stories I could relate, but why?  I'm not looking for a "Can You Top This" post, but I would like to know the worst thing you have seen, been a part of, your own real life horror story.
Just to know that real life is far worse than the movies . . .

[brawl67]

thanks for sharing that story, must have been awful to witness.. Real life is sometimes much more horrifying than anything movies could come up with..

[The Burgomaster]

I have never witnessed anything like what Onionhead described, but a close friend of mine committed suicide on Christmas Day in the mid 1980s. I was around 24 or 25 at the time. I didn't see anything, but his father told me about how he and my friend's mother came home from visiting their daughter, only to find their son lying on the living room floor, blood everywhere. He had shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber handgun while listening to a tape of Simon & Garfunkel singing "Homeward Bound."

While I didn't witness anything firsthand, my horror consisted of spending the next year visiting my friend's parents about 3 days a week. I would sit at the kitchen table with his father and we would reminisce for a couple of hours. Almost every time, he would break down and cry during the conversation. The whole ordeal took quite a toll on me. I didn't need to see the suicide . . . the aftermath of his parents' suffering was horrible enough.

[Ash]

Back in 1996 or '97 my friend Matt and his girlfriend Alicia & I were going across town to pick up something(I can't remember what it was).

It wasn't raining when we left but then while en route it started hammering down.

I mean so hard that the wipers are going full speed and you can't see more than 200 yards ahead of you.  It was bad!

We were on the interstate headed north and it was also rush hour so there were a s**tload of other cars on the 3 lane road with us.

Sitting in the back seat Alicia noticed that Matt & I weren't buckled in.

She said...."You guys should put your seatbelts on right now!"

Matt & I were like  "Oh s**t, you're right!"
And we buckled up.

About 30 seconds passed and then we hydroplaned into the back of an Oldsmobile at nearly 40 MPH!

There's nothing quite like seeing the back of another car coming up and you can't do anything about it except yell "OHHHH  SHIIIIT!!!!!"  Which is what we all did when it happened.    When you hydroplane the only thing you can do is to let off the gas.  

The guy I hit was pretty cool about it since I had insurance to cover the damages which actually weren't too bad on his car

I had totalled my car.  
I remember standing outside on the interstate in the pouring rain looking at my wreck of a car with smoke coming out of what used to be the engine and Matt said...."You f**ked your car up man."
It went to the junkyard that day.

No one was seriously hurt thanks to Alicia.

Matt & I surely would have gone through the windshield had she not reminded us to buckle up.  We just ended up with bad seatbelt burns on our necks.  Alicia was thrown forward and banged her hip pretty bad on the back part of the center console but other than that she was ok.

To this day I credit her with saving our lives.



Post Edited (06-18-03 21:16)

[AndyC]

Working as a reporter, I've been out to some serious accidents. I don't see as many now that I don't sleep with the scanner, but I used to see a lot, including a few fatalities. Usually, the police keep the press out until after the coroner has been, but sometimes not. I've seen police give CPR to a teenage girl who was beyond saving. I've seen an air ambulance carry a 20-year-old guy, whose family is well-known locally, to Toronto after the car he was riding in crashed into a gravel truck. He didn't pull through. I once saw a husband arrive on the scene of his wife's fatal accident while she was laying out in a field under a blanket. The car rolled and she went throught the sunroof. She just had surgery, and was exempt from wearing a seatbelt. About a year ago, I showed up at a crash scene and found out it was somebody I used to work with. She wasn't killed, but was paralyzed. This is a partial list.

Funny, these happen far enough apart, that it never really occurred to me how much I've seen of other people's tragedy. I didn't include the fires because they were mostly property damage, but not all.

The strange thing is, at one of those accidents, I had a conversation with the guy from the local TV station who covers a bigger area and has been at it for 30 years. Listening to his stories, I felt like I hadn't seen anything yet. He's seen some pretty scary stuff.



Post Edited (06-19-03 07:10)

[JohnL]

I haven't seen anything too terrible myself. A few years, the same day my grandfather died in a nursing home, my mother started feeling sick. All she wanted to do was to lie on the couch, and later stay in bed. She had no appetite and only wanted to drink 7-Up. By the next day she seemed a lot worse and could barely get out of bed. By that night, my father couldn't wake her up and it was like she was panting. He called 911, the paramedics couldn't wake her up either, so she was taken to the hospital. Turns out that she had turned diabetic and her blood sugar had skyrocketed to 1500 (normal is 70-120).

She's fine now, but all she remembers is waking up in the hospital the next day with tubes sticking out of her. Looking back, there were warning signs, but she ignored them.

[Neon Noodle]

My sophmore year in college, I remember a friend of mine who came wandering out of his dorm room and fell on the floor next to me and a few mutual friends around 11:30pm. He was incoherent and kept putting his hand to his mouth and taking it away again.
We went into his room and found an empty bottle of aspirin - we then called campus police and they got him to a hospital with time to spare.
I still get the chills very now and again realizing that this friend of mine almost killed himself right in front of me.

Real life can be pretty harsh.

[Brother Ragnarok]

If you guys remember a few weeks back I put up a post about a good friend of mine, ASHTHECAT's cousin, whose boyfriend had hanged himself while they were talking on the phone.
Also, I think I mentioned this a couple of times, but imagine the 23 minute rape segment in I Spit On Your Grave drawn out over the space of about three years.  Reading that sentence seems so clean and clinical, but let the gravity and scope of that sink in.  Unless you've seen the effects of it firsthand, you can't even begin to imagine what that does to someone.

Brother R

[Mr_Vindictive]

I used to be a fireman in my area.  

I've seen some really bad stuff.

People thrown through windows of cars, loss of limbs, etc.

One of the worst things I've ever had to see was one morning while I was getting ready to go to college.

My pager went off, it was a 10-50 (car wreck) just a few blocks from my house.  I get to the scene only to see that some people that I had gone to high school with laying on the ground screaming.  One of them was screaming that he couldn't feel his legs.


It seemed that there were three people in a truck.  An ex girlfriend of the driver of the truck wanted to show off and tried to pass him on a curve.

A car was coming.  She ran into the side of the truck, the truck hit a light pole.

Everyone was thrown out.

Scott still can't feel his legs.