Stories you can't tell your mom...

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shiro1

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After having just killed 2 days perusing through the Emergency Medicine forums...especially the "What I learned from my patients" and "Medical Ebonics" thread, I'd like to put out this topic. Hoping to show that EyeMD's have just as many, sick, disgusting, depraved and utterly hilarious stories to share. Come on guys! We go to the ER too!

To kick it off I'll share one from my residency days....

Consults for ophtho for Children's Hospital can be pretty boring stuff, until I saw a young 17 y/o BM. At first glance you don't notice much about him, eyes aren't red, he isn't screaming in pain and generally looks comfortable. If you look closely though, you notice a small lac right above his orbital rim on his right eye.

Pt: "I was just hanging out... minding my own business when some dude that I'd never seen before in my life just came up to me and stabbed me in the eye with a pencil."

Me: ...........

Pt: "So I thought I'd come in."

Incredibly, this "dude" managed to miss this guy's globe, extra-ocular muscles, arteries and ONLY hit CN VI. CT scan verified... I always thought that "dude" had to be some viscious SOB to stab a guy in the eye socket with a pencil... would have loved to have seen it sticking out of him.... :laugh:

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I had a woman come in to the ER once with an itchy red eye & I wasn't very excited until I saw these unusual little red dots on the eyelid. On closer inspection, the red dots were the feces of the pubic lice clinging onto her lashes. :eek:
She swears that she must have got them at the place where she got her Brazilian waxing done. yeh right.....
 
Retinamark said:
I had a woman come in to the ER once with an itchy red eye & I wasn't very excited until I saw these unusual little red dots on the eyelid. On closer inspection, the red dots were the feces of the pubic lice clinging onto her lashes. :eek:
She swears that she must have got them at the place where she got her Brazilian waxing done. yeh right.....

I always enjoy threads like this one, so if you don't mind I'll chip in even though I'm only an optometrist.

I had a patient once who came in complaining of double vision but ONLY WHEN SHE LOOKS AT THE VIRGIN MARY. (Praise Jesus! A miracle!) Turned out she had V pattern exotropia and the statue of the Virgin Mary was above her priest's head, so every time she looked up at it, she got exotropia and saw two images if the Virgin Mary. Vision therapy cleared it up.

A friend also had a guy once who came in wearing an eye patch over one eye. He was about 70 and had never been to our office before. His vision in the non patched eye was 20/50 from a cataract. In the patched eye, it was 20/20 with an IOL. When he asked him why the patch, he said he had amblyopia. :confused: He then went on to tell me that he read in READERS DIGEST that amblyopia is when you have vision in one eye worse than the other and the treatment was to wear an eye patch over the good eye. So he was patching the good eye (with the IOL) hoping to improve the vision in the bad eye (with the cataract.)

He asked him how long he had been doing this and he said about 6 months. The funny part is that he swore up and down that the vision in the cataract eye was getting better because of the patching.
 
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shiro1 said:
After having just killed 2 days perusing through the Emergency Medicine forums...especially the "What I learned from my patients" and "Medical Ebonics" thread, I'd like to put out this topic. Hoping to show that EyeMD's have just as many, sick, disgusting, depraved and utterly hilarious stories to share. Come on guys! We go to the ER too!

:

We had a pt, I guess several weeks ago now, he claimed that he put is pocket knife on a shelf above his bed, and he woke up and the knife had fallen off the shelf while he was sleeping, opened up and punctured his globe. The knife fell into his eye.

Oh, and then there was the guy whose brother had put urine and some chemical in his visine bottle so that he could pass a urine drug screen. Of course the patient did not know that and used it on his eye.
 
I did my residency in Cincinnati and a few years back a young man was a little annoyed that his girlfriend broke up with him. So, to show his displeasure at his girlfriend, he snuck into her house and poured bleach over her ENTIRE family while they were sleeping. Seven people with facial, eyelid and cornea burns in one go.... Do you think anger management classes would work for him? :D
 
I got a letter back from a retinal surgeon stating that my patient X had "immaculate degeneration" ...didn't know she was Catholic

A patient who was getting clearance from a primary care doc had a note in her chart that she "was going to have cardiac extraction" by me... damn... went on to do cardiothoracic surgery without even knowing it!

And my personal favorite: breasts were equal round and reactive to light. (Not dictated by ophtho, I assure you...) :D
 
Urine in a Visine bottle? At least he was unwitting. I had a guy come in with end-stage glaucoma come in (HM or so in both eyes, I think) who believed in some "urine therapy" he had heard about. He was drinking urine and also putting it in his eyes. Uh, OK. . .
 
Along the same lines... I knew of a patient that used an "extract from his own blood" that a homeopathic "physician" distilled so he could treat his recurrent neuroretinitis. Before you guys jump on top of me, yes, recurrent. Our neuro-ophth was convinced he had recurrent cases and he had the million-dollar work-up that was all negative. I don't know if his own blood worked, but I always wondered how it tasted... :laugh:
 
I once sewed up a 45 mm open globe during residency. It started on the cornea and headed for the sclera, made a 90 degree turn a few mm posterior to the limbus, traveled to the other side of the eyeball and turned posterior again where it disappeared from sight. I used to joke that I was a macular surgeon that night, because I'm pretty sure that's where the lac ended.

So how does a lac like this occur. The guy woke up in the middle of the night and as he was getting out of bed, tripped and landed on his chainsaw. And to think I've been keeping mine in the garage.
 
I had one once on a child who approached a rooster. Evidently the rooster didn't like children and swiped at him with his beak. As we were taking the child up to surgery I asked the parent what happened to the rooster. "Oh, we killed him." Swift justice. :D
 
I love the fact that my patients who undergo cataract surgery can be so very unique. Once I had a young patient in his 40's with a traumatic cataract. White as can be and barely counting fingers vision. He often comes in smelling of alcohol and probably various other drugs and he wistfully asked my technician, when she told him he must not eat or drink anything after midnight the night before surgery if he could at least have a beer...

Right after the surgery, when he was sitting up, he mentioned to me that he was single and would I like to go out with him? I (while trying to keep a neutral expression behind my surgical mask) told him I was married.

On his first follow-up (20/20 without correction :D ) he was quite happy and on his way out of the clinic, stopped to mention to me that it wasn't his fault that he got arrested recently. After all, he wasn't driving the truck, and those drugs that were in there weren't his. All this was said in a busy hallway, in a loud voice, in earshot of several doctors, nurses and astonished patients passing in the busy hallway. I told him I'm glad his surgery turned out so well, and reminded him to use his eyedrops like I instructed and I'll see him in a week. I haven't seen him in awhile and I think I miss him! :laugh:
 
Had a busy call weekend. Late saturday I was called to see a patient who had an altercation with three men, had "something" jabbed into his eye which is now too swollen for the ED physician to open the eye. (Of course he was minding his own business, not in any way afraid of these three dudes... etc) When I got there he was still so inebriated he wasn't making much sense and obviously had two full thickness lid margin lacs... We had to sedate him to even pry open his eyes. My favorite comment from him was (prior to sedation) "I'm not afraid of those guys! If he'd had brought out a gun I wouldn't have taken it away from him!" (pause) Then, a few seconds later... "I want to go home with my mom!" Hard not to laugh at a tough guy (27 yo) wanting to go home with mommy. :laugh:
 
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