18 One In A Million Medical Cases That Made My Jaw Drop

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a day ago

Recently, Redditor u/WALLSTREETBRIDE asked, "Doctors of Reddit, what was a 'one in a million' case that you personally witnessed?" I, of course, got sucked into the thread, and I am both in awe of the human body and absolutely horrified by how many ways things can go so, so wrong. Here are 18 jaw-dropping stories people shared:
"During my summer break, as a medical student, I had to do something called 'summer practice' in my country. Keep in mind, I chose to do it in my small town hospital, not in the hospital where my University was. One evening, the doctor I was with decided to do a CT for a patient, and it turned out he had situs inversus. Basically, all his organs were in the opposite place than they were supposed to be — his liver to the left, heart to the right, etc. One in every 10,000 people has this condition!"
"My friend was the one-in-a-million case I was there for. We were in high school at the time, and she had been suffering from chronic back pain for years, but they couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally, they discovered that she had a little cyst pressing up against her spine, so they were going to go in and drain it with a needle and see if that helped with the pain. Well, one MRI later, and they discovered that her little spine-adjacent cyst was actually an ovarian cyst. The anatomically astute among you will note that the ovaries are nowhere near the spine. Usually."
"Literally saw this with my own eyes. I am an ED nurse in Australia. I 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 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 his eye was still intact. You could feel the tip pressing against the skin in his occipital region, but there was no broken skin."
"I have a pretty weird, super rare skin condition called Linear atrophoderma of Moulin. It just kinda showed up one day and looks like a spiraling line of bruises. There are less than 50 documented cases of it in reported literature!"
"I'm the patient in this story. I went to the hospital for a kidney stone blocking the left side. While there, I got a kidney stone blocking the right side. Doctors thought I was pill seeking because I kept changing where the pain was, but I pushed for another scan that confirmed I had stones in both kidneys at the same time, and both kidneys were now blocked off. That's pretty rare, but not unheard of. That night, because clearly I pissed off some ancient deity or something, I had ovarian cysts explode ON BOTH OVARIES as well."
"I am one of those cases. I had a hysterectomy, and seven weeks later, a random artery burst open through my newly sewed up vagina. I had started spotting out of nowhere, and my OBGYN just happened to be in the office that day, so she told me to come in. As soon as I got to the office, the spotting turned into gushing and pumping. I lost two liters of blood on the office floor."
"My Dad was the patient. He had stage 4 non-small cell lung adenocarcinoma. We knew he had a short time (5-year survival is about 10%, but he had had bladder cancer in the past and also post-polio syndrome, so it was probably a couple of years at best), but he wanted treatment while there was some hope for it to work a bit. He and my mom had just bought a house in New Zealand, and he wanted to live there and enjoy the scenery for a bit before he died. So, he started chemo. He got the usual chemo side effects, one of which is an itchy rash. 'Chemo rash' is one of the things they warn you about, so it didn't bother him too much. He just put cream on it and didn't complain."
"I'm not a doctor, but I work in an ER/trauma center doing patient registration, which puts me up close and personal with a lot of gnarly shit. We had a patient come in once with a frozen leg. They were pissed off that their doctor wouldn't amputate a perfectly healthy leg, and so they submerged their entire right leg in dry ice for close to 7 hours to force a medical team to remove it. The leg was so solid that it made a noise when the doctor knocked on it. I can't even imagine the pain this person withstood in order to get the leg cut off."
"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, and CPS investigated 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."
"A little while ago, I started having pain that I couldn't pinpoint the origin of. It felt like really bad acid reflux and back pain, and it went around my whole torso in the diaphragm area. One day, I was doing sit-ups and I felt like there was a golf ball moving under my ribs, so I went to the doctor. She examined me and didn't find anything unusual, so she told me to see a physio since I only felt it during movement."
"Backstory: Dad ran a NICU, is very well respected in neonatology, and currently runs it for the state as well as a related charity. As a result, growing up, I was in there a lot if I had to stay home from school or if they couldn't get childcare, so all the staff knew me. On the occasional times there was some sort of media involvement, I got dragged along.
"The patient was my dad. He had been having sinus infections that would not go away for about three months — sinus pressure/headache, eye pain, runny nose, cough. He would be put on a steroid and his symptoms would improve for 3-7 days, but then he'd be right back where he started. All lab results were normal. So he went to the dentist, who was a long-time family friend, for a regular cleaning/check-up, during which they do the typical X-rays. He said after the X-rays, he did not see a staff member for at least 20 minutes, and that's when he knew something was up."
"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."
"At 3 years old, my kid had a total personality change. It was somewhat justifiably blown off by doctors, because 'threenager' is a term for a reason, lol. But I knew it was different. I kept saying, 'No, this isn't that.' For the next several years, random AF symptoms would pop up, then go away after several months. I must have taken my kid to every specialist in a 500-mile radius. The doctors started treating me like I had Munchausen by proxy. I also felt totally 'insane' because symptoms would go away only for new ones to emerge. It's like when you bring a car to a mechanic, and now suddenly the engine isn't making that weird sound anymore. I begged for tests and CTs, and MRIs over and over! I was always told no, why would I want to expose my kid to radiation?!?"
"My ENT (ear, nose, and throat doctor) walked into the room at 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."
"Had a patient with Creutzfeldt-Jakobs disease almost a decade ago. There was nothing we could do. Within two weeks of entering the emergency department, the patient died. His spouse said the patient was kind and gentle, always joking and sharp up until a few months prior. Everything suddenly changed, a full 180. Very sad. The patient's history included one episode of money brain ingestion years and years prior while they were on vacation."
"A kid came in still unable to walk at 3 years old and had strange eye rolling movements that looked like they could be seizures, but with normal EEG (electrical brain activity). This rare condition 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."
Finally, "I was 15 and a cheerleader, and I woke up feeling kind of 'off' one day, but nothing terrible. I got through the day with mild random symptoms like feeling slightly woozy and with a distinct 'definitely don't want to eat' feeling, which was unusual but welcome because I was ALWAYS hungry. I didn't think much of it. Even when my muscles, especially my legs, started feeling stiff. I thought that was all the more reason to work out, right?"
Have you had a one-in-a-million medical experience like these? If you feel comfortable, tell us about your case in the comments or anonymous form below: